Media Coverage

Armed groups in Iraq abduct, rape, torture, and kill lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, with impunity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today with IraQueer. The 86-page report, “‘Everyone Wants Me Dead’: Killings, Abductions, Torture, and Sexual Violence Against LGBT...

Protests have erupted in Iraq’s impoverished south over a rise in food prices that officials attributed to the conflict in Ukraine. For about a week, the price of cooking oils and flour have skyrocketed in local markets as government officials have sought to address growing anger with various...

The Islamic State (IS) group unleashed its biggest attack in Syria since the fall of its “caliphate” three years ago. More than 100 militants assaulted the main prison holding suspected extremists, sparking a battle with U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters that continued 24 hours later and left dozens dead...

The threat of worsening violence looms over Baghdad again this week, underscoring the challenges faced by influential Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of parliament’s biggest bloc, in his stated efforts to form a majority government, following October’s contested election. In the latest of a...

The head of a United Nations team investigating ISIL's atrocities in Iraq has said the armed group's fighters committed crimes against humanity and war crimes at a prison in the northern city of Mosul, where at least 1,000 mostly Shi Muslim prisoners were systematically killed seven years ago...

A German court jailed a former member of the ISIL (ISIS) group, Taha al-Jumailly, for life after he was convicted of committing genocide against Iraq’s minority Yazidi community. The case involved the death of a five-year-old girl he bought as a slave and then chained up in the hot sun to die. Al...

Protests against the results of Iraq's recent parliamentary election have turned violent in Baghdad, with demonstrators denouncing "fraud" clashing with security forces outside the capital's high-security Green Zone. "So many people in the streets say that they do not believe in this electoral...

A Munich court convicted Jennifer Wenisch, a German citizen married to an Islamic State fighter, for “crimes against humanity and attempted war crimes” in the aiding and abetting of the murder of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl, sentencing her to 10 years in prison. The conviction is believed to be the...

Based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, German courts and investigators are taking on criminal cases that occurred outside German borders including the genocide of Iraq’s Yazidi minority and torture in Syria’s prisons. According to a Syrian lawyer in Germany Joumana Seif, Syrians have...