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The killings have drawn so much attention that even hardline Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr weighed in Saturday, calling Emos "crazy fools" and a "lesion on the Muslim community" in a statement on his website.
However, al-Sadr did not condone the violence, telling his followers "to end the scourge of Emo within the law."
Iraq's government has been wary about the Emo allure among its youth for months.
An August 2011 letter from the Education Ministry urges schools to crack down on what it considered abhorrent behavior, including allowing camera phones in school "because students would use it for dirty movies," says the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
Similarly, it prohibited students from leaving their classes during school hours "for any reason, because they might gather in the nearby cafes or coffee shops to practice dirty activities."
The letter attributed the social atrocities to "Emo, which is an infiltrated phenomenon in our society began to appear in some of our schools."
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