Mass Grave Sites in iraq

Mass graves in Iraq are characterized as unmarked sites containing at least six bodies,Most of the graves discovered to date correspond to one of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime,about 85% of the mass graves in Iraq contain Iraqi Kurds, who were killed in a genocidal act just because of their ethnicity.

 Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal affairs

Red label: the mass graves of Kurds
Mark Green: Mass Graves of the Arabs
Blue Label: mass graves mixed


View Mass grave sites in iraq in a larger map

Kurdistan President Barzani’s feeling in Anfal Ceremony

Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani wrote in his Facebook about Anfal Ceremony:I would like to express my feeling when I carried the perished body of an Anfal’s martyr.

I didn’t know the name of the martyr, whether it was a man or a woman, young or old, but I knew that it was an oppressed, innocent martyr. His only crime was that he was a Kurd.

Then I felt that the martyr was among the closest people to me; if it was a man he was my brother, if it was a woman, she was my sister, if it was young, it was my son or daughter.

I was certain that the soul of that martyr and those of all martyrs of Kurdistan were in peace since today Kurdistan is free because of them.

It is unfortunate that today there are still some people in Baghdad who possess that Anfal mindset, and if they could, they would continue the same criminal mentality. Following all these sacrifices, it is imperative that Kurdistan remains free.

It was the greatest honor for me to see a martyr’s mother or father approach me and cry on my chest and tell me that they feel the souls of the martyrs are born again.

He also added :Is there any medal on the face of this earth that is more holy and more important?

Remains of 29 Kurds found in mass graves in central Iraq

ERBIL, March 13 (AKnews) - The remains of 29 Kurds killed in a military campaign in the 1980s by the former Iraqi regime have been found in two mass graves in central Iraq, said the country's Ministry of Human Rights in a statement today.

The remains were discovered and exhumed in two mass graves in the Hamrin Mountain area in Salahaddin province, north of Baghdad.

There are four more mass graves in the same area waiting to be unearthed, according to the announcement.

“In the first mass grave nine remains were discovered, in the second 20... and the search process is ongoing,” the statement read.

The remains were identified as Kurds by their traditional Kurdish clothes.

Anfal, which literally means "spoils of war", refers to Saddam Hussein's genocide efforts to eradicate Kurds from Iraq in 1988. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were taken from northern Iraq to the central and southern parts of the country, where they were executed and buried in mass graves.

It is now believed that at least 350 were buried alive in these mass graves.

chemical bomb was found in Halabja

A chemical bomb was found today in a house in Halabja where ‘The Bloody Friday’ took place in 1988.

The bomb belongs to chemical attack bombardment time in the second half of 1980s by former Saddam Hussain’s regime.

“A chemical bomb hit a property of a civilian in 1988 in Halabja,” Halabja mayor Goran Adham spoke to PUKmedia, “it destroyed the house but didn’t explode so that it remained there.”

“The owner builds another house on the destroyed ground after he came back home from the 1991’s uprising. He put the bomb beneath the new house’s foundation,” Adham continued.

The owner informed the local authorities just few days ago after he intends to rebuild the house, he added.

He also stated that they have visited the house and invited a special team of bomb disposal experts to get rid of the bomb.

The Halabja poison gas attack was a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people, and injured around 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians. Thousands more died of complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack. The incident, which has been officially defined as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people in Iraq, was and still remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history.

PUKmedia   2012-08-01

KURDISTAN

KURDISTAN

The Halabja Monument as a Top-down Chosen Trauma

The Halabja Monument as a Top-down Chosen Trauma

The Kurds

The Kurds

Beginners Guide to Ftp for Wordpress

Beginners Guide to Ftp for Wordpress

Mass Grave Map

The anti-Kurdish "Anfal" campaign, mounted between February and September 1988 by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, was both genocidal and gendercidal in nature. "Battle-age" men were the primary targets of Anfal, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East (hereafter, HRW/ME). The organization writes in its book Iraq's Crime of Genocide: "Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, although women and children vanished in certain clearly defined areas, adult males who were captured disappeared en masse. ... It is apparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate all adult males of military service age captured in rural Iraqi Kurdistan" (pp. 96, 170). Only a handful survived the execution squads.

survivor

An Interview with the Anfal survivor, Taimour
Preamble: Kanan Makiya's Account of His Meeting With Taimour.

As far as anyone knows, Taimour 'Abdallah, from the village of Qulatcho, is the only human being to have experienced firsthand the innermost workings of the Anfal campaign and to have lived to tell of it. This much I already knew in London, although I did not really know what the Anfal campaign was about, or if the boy's account could be believed; it had been such a wooden and stilted interview. The Anfal was at that point just a name for me, one that kept on cropping up in the copies of the secret police documents which I had been given and which maybe had something to do with large numbers of Kurds disappearing in 1988. Many survivors had witnessed the attacks on their villages or other rounding up operations inside northern Iraq. But only one person 'disappeared' and by a miracle 'reappeared' to tell us what had happened to him.
Our meeting took place in an abandoned army barracks a half-hours' drive into the mountains that surround Sulaimaniyya. Bombed out buildings with blackened windows perched on a mountain with unobstructed visibility in every direction. The setting was as remarkable as the base was awful--surrounded by walls, barbed wire and security checkpoints. Taimour's life since the March uprising had been organized around the fact that he was and still is a prime target for assassination by Saddam's agents. It became obvious the boy had been turned into a symbol, the servant of a cause, a living monument to the suffering of the Kurdish people.

Anfal victims returned and laid to rest in Suleimaniah

730 Anfal victims returned and laid to rest in Suleimaniah

Suleimaniah, Kurdistan Region – Iraq (KRG.org) – The remains of 730 Kurdish people shot through the head or buried alive as part of the former regime’s Anfal genocide campaign were returned to their homeland on Monday for a ceremony in Suleimaniah and reburial the following day.

Chemical attacks

Chemical attacks

“Of all the crimes committed against the Kurdish people through history, Halabja has come to symbolize the worst repression of the Kurdish People. Halabja was a town of 70,000 people located in Southern Kurdistan (Iraqi Kurdistan) about 8-10 miles from the Iranian border. In 16 of March 1988 the town became a target of a chemical bomb attack over three days. During these three days, the Iraqi regime brutally attacked the town and the surrounding district with bombs, artillery and chemical bombs. The chemical weapons were the most destructive of them all. At least 5,000 of the town’s inhabitants died immediately as the result of the chemical bombings and up to 12,000 people died during the course of those three days. The chemicals used involved mustard gas, nerve agent and possibly cyanide.

The town of Halabja was bombarded more than twenty times by warplanes of the Iraqi regime with both cluster and chemical bombs. In the streets and alleys of Halabja there were dead bodies piled up over one another. (…)
The world should not forget this day and especially not the Kurdish people. We shall learn from the genocides committed to any people living on this planet and prevent anything that could lead to another mass murder or genocide. Today Turkey and Iran are bombing villages in Southern Kurdistan and keep doing so with the silence nor any condemnation of the world leading powers. (…)”

http://kurdgenocide.blogspot.com/p/chemical-attacks.html

After Anfa

This report includes archive filmed in 1989 of Saddam Hussein visiting a village which had been targeted. It shows him being presented with petitions by desperate Kurds, many of whom had swum across a river to reach him. It also includes interviews with relatives of victims describing what happened.