The Independent newspaper in London carried a story this week...

"According to a neighbor, who witnessed Ahmed's execution from his bedroom window, four uniformed police officers arrived at Ahmed's house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck…The neighbor saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range, pumping two bullets into his head and several more bullets into the rest of his body."

So reports Ali Hili, an exiled Iraqi, based on recorded eyewitness testimony of neighbors in the al-Dura district of Baghdad.

Who was Ahmed Khalil? A 14 year old boy, the oldest son of a family overcome with poverty in occupied Iraq, a gay teen who, apparently, began sleeping with men for money to feed his family. His killers? The Badr Corps, the military arm of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—the country's most powerful Shiite Muslim group, funded in part by Iran and a key source of police officers in Iraq.

Who is Ali Hili? The Middle East affairs spokesman for London-based gay rights group OutRage. He is also the unofficial leader of a group of over 30 Baghdadi glbt white-collar professionals quietly welcomed into Great Britain by the British government in the face of rampant anti-gay persecution and violence since Iraqis began assuming policing and security responsibilities in their former hometown.

It is no secret that traditionalist Islam opposes homosexuality on religious grounds, but since October, when Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued an anti-gay fatwa, attacks on (and killings of) Iraqi gays have become so common-place and clearly directed by those in power, civil rights groups across Europe have begun calling them a pogrom.

I know that we are almost desperate as a nation to justify what we have done in “liberating” Iraq, and I don’t deny that Saddam Hussein was/is an evil despot, but is the society we are building there any better—in human terms—than the one we overthrew?