“Culturally, Islam always related homosexuality to pedophilia,” said Nahas, now an activist with the Organization For Refuge, Asylum & Migration (ORAM). “No distinction is drawn between the two. If somebody raped a boy they called him a homosexual not a pedophile. Maybe this commander had a kind of waiver given to him by his peers. They think, ‘He does great things for people. We cannot kill him, but we need a scapegoat, the boy.’

“They don’t call this relationship or [these] men ‘gay,’” said Nahas. “If a man has sex with another man, the two parties are the receptive one and the ‘inserter.’ If you’re the receptive party, you’re doomed. You’re seen as sodomized, someone has done this to you, you’re the abomination. If you’re the inserter, you are in control, you’re functional, you can reproduce.”

Nahas said the case was also puzzling: he had heard that while ISIS was sparing effeminate gay men “for the pleasure of older men,” the “masculine” men suspected of being gay were being killed.