The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army

The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army   (Front group, Propaganda, Militia?)
Formation	24 July 2017
Extinction	24 September 2018
Headquarters	Raqqa, Syria
Interests	A Gay Girl In Damascus
Improbable militia presumably a propaganda exercise to create support for war in the Western liberal opinion.

The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA, pronounced Tequila) was an alleged militia during the Western war in Syria. With a lifespan of little more than a year, it is unknown to what extent it actually existed outside a few propaganda pictures in Western corporate media, but the story contributed to create support for war from the liberal-left section of public opinion.

TQILA showed up in media at the same time US forces was conquering Raqqa, the capital of the so-called Islamic Caliphate. Using over 30,000 artillery rounds and 20,000 air bombs, they destroyed between 70 and 80 percent of buildings and killed thousands of civilians.

Official narrative

TQILA was a queer anarchist armed group and subunit of the International Revolutionary People's Guerrilla Forces formed on 24 July 2017 by LGBT members of the IRPGF. Its formation was announced from Raqqa City along with a statement explaining the purposes of its formation; the systematic persecution of LGBT people by ISIL was highlighted as a significant motivation for the creation of the group. TQILA is reported to be the first LGBT unit to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and apparently the first LGBT militia in the Middle East. The unit, like the rest of the IRPGF, is a member of the International Freedom Battalion.

Its members had as a stated aim "to smash the gender binary and advance the women’s revolution as well as the broader gender and sexual revolution.” Newsweek pointed out that it "remains unknown how many personnel will be involved in the unit, and how many are members of the LGBT community" (as opposed to spooks), but the story helped place the Western obsession with identity politics at the center of the conversation around the battle against ISIS, rather than the actual sacrifices of the thousands Syrians and Iraqis who lost their lives fighting them.

Coverage

The testimonial image of its formation, in which fighters posed alongside a sign with the motto "These faggots kill fascists" and two flags — the flag of the group and an LGBT flag — went viral. Western media reported on the unit extensively. Newsweek, The Independent, the New York Post, Euronews

The militia follows the pattern of the romanticization of the Kurdish YPG-militia and the Rojava revolution by certain sections of the Western "left", even though the area is highly conservative. A reporter talking to Alex Rubinstein pointed out how “The Syrian war isn’t for a bunch of foreign leftists to turn into a romantic ballad to identity issues. Kurds are super traditional, no way is even the YPG into this gender fluidity stuff.” Also Newsweek was skeptical: "it is unclear how deeply entrenched the LGBT unit is in the battle for Raqqa."

The group brings to mind older CIA front groups like the Popular Revolutionary Liberal Party exposed by Philip Agee. An example closer in time is the A Gay Girl In Damascus hoax, a blog allegedly by a lesbian woman being persecuted by the Syrian government. The story received a large response on social and in corporate media, but turned out have been written by Tom MacMaster, an American postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

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