Human Rights Campaign, ‘Helping LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in the age of ISIL’, 2016

While lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Iraq and Syria have long faced extraordinarily difficult challenges, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has in recent years produced particularly horrific images and accounts of violence and bloodshed targeting LGBTQ people and other minorities. Even before ISIL’s rise, LGBTQ people in those countries, as well as other countries in the Middle East, were subjected to violence, persecution and discrimination that continues largely unabated. ISIL’s anti-LGBTQ violence is in many ways an outgrowth of pre-existing negative attitudes and violence towards LGBTQ people.

This paper seeks to provide background information about the situation facing LGBTQ people in ISIL-occupied areas of Iraq and Syria and offer some solutions to help LGBTQ people who are fleeing violence and persecution in those countries and surrounding regions. The ideas in this paper were developed during a series of discussions with human rights groups, refugees and refugee agencies that were conducted over the course of several months, as well as from documents, articles and papers focused on the issue, which are referenced and linked to throughout the paper below.