Baghdad ? Samir Shaba sits in a restaurant, nervously describing gay life in Iraq. He speaks in a low voice, occasionally glancing over his shoulder.

Before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the heavyset, clean-shaven Christian says he frequented the city’s gay blogs, online chat rooms and dance clubs, where he wore flashy tight clothes, his hair long and loose to his shoulders.

After the invasion, he and other gays and lesbians were driven underground by sectarian violence and religious extremists. Shaba, 25, started wearing baseball caps and baggy T-shirts, stopped visiting clubs and chat rooms, packed his flashy clothes away. But he couldn’t bear to cut his hair.

“I cannot change everything immediately,” he says, fingering his black ponytail. “I suffered because I didn’t cut it.”

Recently, Shaba says, police commandos spotted his hair as he was riding in a taxi through a checkpoint in central Baghdad. Suspecting he was gay, the four commandos dragged him out of the taxi by his hair, and forced him into an armored car. They demanded his cell phone, cash and sex.

When he refused, they beat him with a baton and gang-raped him. He rubs the back of his shirt, feeling for the scars.

“They got what they wanted because I thought otherwise I would lose my life,” Shaba says, and he begins to weep. “They threatened me that if I told anyone, they would kill me.”

Human rights groups say that Iraqi gays increasingly are targeted by militias and police. The United Nations and State Department have issued reports documenting some of the more recent killings. A U.N. report in January cited attacks on gays by militants, as well as the existence of “religious courts, supervised by clerics, where homosexuals allegedly would be tried, sentenced to death and then executed.”

Iraqi leaders dismiss those claims, and Middle East experts say it’s difficult to tell whether the attacks are state-sanctioned.

“Nobody’s paying attention to this issue,” said Ali Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “It is not the custom of the people of Iraq. Not only Iraq, but the whole region.”

In October 2005, Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a “fatwa,” or religious order, on his Web site calling homosexuality “forbidden” and declaring that gays and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way.”

The fatwa against gay men was removed from al-Sistani’s Web site last year, but it was not revoked, according to Ali Hili, an Iraqi gay rights activist living in London who petitioned Sistani’s office to remove it.

Hili compiles details of the killings, including photographs of gay victims, and posts them online.

Shaba says his cousin Alan, 26, who also was gay, was shot in the head one day when he went to answer the door while the two were having lunch. Although Alan might have been targeted because he was working as a translator with U.S. forces in the Green Zone, Shaba thinks his cousin was killed because he was openly gay.

“There are other translators in our neighborhood, and nobody killed them,” he says.

Given the pervasiveness of sectarian violence in Iraq, it’s hard tell whether such men are targeted for being gay, says filmmaker Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim based in New York. Sharma just finished shooting a documentary called “A Jihad for Love,” set in Iraq and a dozen other Middle Eastern countries. It is due out in fall.

“It’s very difficult to tell whether there is a pogrom of any sort to kill gay men,” he says, but the environment for gays in Iraq has clearly soured.

In the 1980s, Baghdad and Cairo, Egypt, were gay social centers, Sharma says. Iraq’s gays settled into straight marriages and had families, but many continued to have homosexual relationships on the side.

Although Saddam Hussein shut down many of Baghdad’s gay bars in the 1990s and passed a law against sodomy in 2001, Iraqi gays and lesbians still socialized.