"Why are the US and UK governments failing to take Iraq's gay pogrom seriously? Both countries deny any Iraqi state involvement in anti-gay militias, but LGBT supporters suggest otherwise," writes Paul Canning. "Last week, 12 Iraqi police officers burst into a house in Karbala, beat up and blindfolded the six occupants and bundled them off in three vans, taking the computers they found with them. The house was then burned down by unknown people. The six were two gay men, one lesbian and two transgender people, and the house was a new emergency shelter run by the Iraqi LGBT organisation. Two days later, one of the men turned up in hospital with a throat wound saying he'd been tortured. Iraqi LGBT has ordered those in its other two safe houses to move immediately. The foreign office knows about the Karbala raid. Why is someone not sent out immediately to investigate and then, once the truth is known, the foreign office can condemn it? Why are we standing up for some LGBT people in the rest of the world and not others? Can this pogrom carry on happening and not a finger be lifted to try and stop it?" READ MORE