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.