[2][11] In February 2012, the Baghdad Morality Police published a statement on the Iraqi Interior Ministry website criticizing emo teens for wearing "strange, tight clothes with pictures of skulls on them," and "rings in their noses and tongues."
The statement condemned emo as Satanic, and quoted Colonel Mushtaq Taleb al-Mahemdawi as saying the Morality Police had been given official approval by the Interior Ministry "to eliminate [the phenomenon] as soon as possible since it's detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger.
[17] A person who told the Beirut-based newspaper Al Akhbar that he had escaped an attack said that, "first they throw concrete blocks at the boy's arms, then at his legs, then the final blow is to his head, and if he is not dead then, they start all over again.
[17] Iraqi television network Al Sumaria reported that Sadr denied responsibility for the deaths, calling the emo teens fools and unnatural but saying they should be dealt with through legal means.
[22] Israeli intelligence analyst Daniel Brode claims the murders are part of an overall shift inside the Iraqi Shiite-Arab population towards becoming "more religious, more conservative and more assertive," with the goal of consolidating its own power by creating a "fundamentalist Shiite government.
Witnesses told Human Rights Watch the killers break into houses and pick up people in the street, interrogating them to extract the names of other victims, and then kill them and mutilate their bodies.
[26] In The Guardian newspaper, American human rights activist Scott Long described Iraq as "a devastated society with a broken political process and a fractured public" and said "it's not just wrong, it's counterproductive to call these murders "gay killings.""