Anfal – The Black Stain on Iraqi History Spreads

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Anfal – The black stain on Iraqi history spreads – Anfal victims largely unidentified and unnamed

Of the re-estimated 75,000 dead Anfal (anfalakan) victims – only some 3,000 remains have so far been repatriated to Kurdistan – unidentified

Background on the causes and the statistics

The Ba’ath government of Saddam Hussein exacted unprecedented revenge on the Kurdish villagers living in areas where the Kurdistan Democratic party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan enlisted support. The two parties became Iran’s proxies during the Iran-Iraq war. They engaged with the Shi’a militias and IRGC Quds forces against their own country at a cost of what is now estimated as around 250,000 Iraq lives by August 20, 1988, before the final phases of the Anfal operation, the true number of which victims remains unknown:

But postwar censuses in Iran and Iraq suggest that the war’s death toll may not be nearly as high as is commonly thought…if we believe the census figures, the death toll from the Iran-Iraq war was far less than the scholarly estimates of 600,000 or 1,250,000. It may even have been lower than the government figures of 250,000 Iraqi fatalities and 155,000 Iranian fatalities…The Iran-Iraq war was, by any measure, a terribly bloody cataclysm. But it may not have been so bloody as we imagined…1

In continuation of the war on the home front inside Iraq after the agreement reached with Iran, the embittered Iraqi government pursued deadly revenge against Iran’s Kurdish proxies and the general Kurdish civilian population living in their areas of support.

Based on interviews and pre-existing data, Joost Hiltermann in his book, A Poisonous Affair – America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja addressed the locations and the numbers as well as the motivation behind Anfal.2 Hiltermann had been the Executive Director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), and subsequently, the Deputy Program Director for the International Crisis Group’s MENA region, and is very well-known in the field.

The tally of fatalities is now thought to number some 70,000 people – not the PUK’s “mythical figure” of 126,000 dead as Hiltermann noted. Back in the 1990s HRW had claimed that the figure was between 50,000-80,000 killed.

When chemical weapons were used with US knowledge, followed by village clearances and the forced migration of the ‘disloyal’ Kurds to the south, the wider objectives of the Ba’ath government still took precedence. Joost Hiltermann noted in his retrospective book:

“It is not known how many Kurds died during Anfal, but it is possible to make an educated guess. Early on, the PUK claimed 182,000 dead, a figure that has assumed mythical status among Kurds but is based on an extrapolation of assumed average village size in 1988 and has no relation to actual disappearances or killings…

In Sulaimaniyeh, the Committee for the Defense of Anfal Victims’ Rights, proposed a death toll of “at least fifty thousand and possibly as many as a hundred thousand persons.” The committee documented only 63,000 ‘disappeared’ (mafqoudin) but did not include Badinan (Anfal VIII, estimated at seven or eight thousand (more). Its estimate of no more than 70,000 dead, published in Kurdistan in 1995, proved highly controversial and forced its director to leave the country…” 3

Veteran NY Times and Washington Post correspondent, Jonathan C. Randal’s 1997 book, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan focused on the post 1991 uprising and the negotiations between the Kurdish parties and Baghdad, during which, Anfal perpetrator, Ali Hassan al-Majid reportedly said there could not have been more than 100,000 victims. 4

HRW in its early seminal research publication of 1993, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, had concluded that the death toll was rounded off to 80,000, which goes back to the extrapolation based on estimated numbers of village households. 5 But there were and remain – sufficient surviving documents to establish who died and where. Oddly, neither the Shi’a Iraqi or Kurdish authorities have collated the information nor published details of it.

Research

The most detailed research into the use of gas, the deportations and executions as part of the eight-month long Anfal campaign (February to September 1988) was carried out after the 1991 Kurdish uprising. Western media and international researchers then first gained access to the Kurdistan region in significant numbers, among these visitors being staffers from HRW. They were reliant on Kurdish sources primarily under the control of the PUK and KDP – who were still on official ceasefire with Baghdad.

A vast haul of Ba’ath Government documents from inside the Kurdish Autonomous Zone (KAZ) by then largely protected under No Flight restrictions had soon made its way to the United States. These were not always complete records because during the uprising the rebels that had sacked government buildings, destroyed and threw out numerous files in anger with no disciplined endeavour made in time to preserve them. Despite this given the Ba’ath government’s propensity for record keeping there were often copies and overlapping documentation between departments to draw upon and close the gaps.

I also witnessed this calamity in failing to preserve records being among the first reporters to access Kurdistan. I had also visited a year after the end of Anfal in a government-sponsored trip in September 1989. I had been writing on Kurdish affairs since 1983 so was no stranger to the issues around the so-called Kurdish Question.

The Ba’ath era official given primary responsibility for the Northern Command during the Iran-Iraq war, Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Ali Kimya’ who had come up with a retaliation-based “solution” to the collaboration of the KDP and PUK with the Islamic Republic of Iran against their own country coined as Anfal, cited a passage in the Koran in an attempted justification.

Before the rebellion of March 1991 collapsed (owing to then US President George W. Bush allowing Iraq to use helicopters but not jet fighter planes) the KDP and PUK (and smaller groups like Sami Abdurrahman’s splinter from the KDP, the KPDP, the KSP, Islamists of the IMUK and Communists ) that had seized power carried out brutal acts of revenge against Ba’athists and former Kurdish collaborators, throwing them from the rooftops in Sulaimaniya, rounding up suspects for torture kept in inhumane conditions of detention and carrying out on the spot executions once the mass exodus of the civilian population began.

We were filming in the Dohuk governorate 6 but fled with the mass flight of the Kurdish people, first to Amadiya, then back to Zakho, Batoufa and finally joined the exodus on the long march via Shiranish to the mountain borders with Turkey. Having entered Kurdistan via Syria over the river at Faysh Khabur there was no way back by that route: the Iraqi army had already regained control by this time and the bridges into Turkey had been blown up. See the documentary news film, The Fall of Duhok and opening chapters in my 1991-1996 period book, Martyrs, Traitors and Patriots – Kurdistan after the Gulf War. 7

Documenting Anfal

An unbiased Western source for the Anfal data is methodical historian, David McDowall. In his large Modern History of the Kurds first published in 1996 and updated in 2004, David who had been working for the Minority Rights Group in the years before the book was published had also been based in Baghdad during the 1970s.

He had been able to gauge the relations between Saddam and the Kurds at first hand. 8 He also writes that the ballpark figure of 80,000 Anfal deaths was based on an estimated number of inhabitants per household from the mainly border villages that were destroyed. The figure arose from an assumption that there were around 10 people per household, so the tally did not emerge from precise data.

Unlike what the world has witnessed in the besieging of Gaza by the Israelis, no Kurdish cities were bombed by the government, no infrastructure obliterated because this was still Iraq, although under a degree of Kurdish self-rule. Hospitals functioned and medical personnel were not attacked from the air. The government intended to restore order and resume control via the Kurds loyal to the state. It was the ‘disloyal’ Kurds and their support base that became the target of Anfal.

The loyal Kurds including the Zebaris, Surchis, Sindis, Bradostis, Dolamaris and part of the Jaf tribe numbered over 150,000 men under arms. The KDP boasted the support of 146,000 civilians – these civilians became part of the target group of the Anfal operations in Badinan and some 100,000 that survived the gas attacks safely fled to Turkey in September 1988.

The Kurdish families that had been deported to the Topzawa base between Erbil and Kirkuk9, the Dibs military base, Salamiyeh near Mosul and Feyli Kurdish survivors from Nugrat al-Salman prison10 west of Samawa, were released in an Amnesty of September 6, 1988, marking the end of Anfal. Witnesses from the time recall seeing members of the Barzani tribe and Anfal deportees also taken there. 11

The turquoise, split onion dome, Al Shaheed monument to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war has been taken over by the Shi’a dominated Iraqi government and Hashd al-Shabi militias (PMF) who have devoted a corner inside the memorial to the Feyli Kurds largely because they are Shi’a. The memorial to the Sunni dead in the army has been partly covered over with large cardboard screens showing instead the Shi’a (mainly loyal to Iran) with anti-Saddam propaganda likening him to ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, although it was Saddam Hussein who built the monument in tribute to the war dead.

Survivors from various sites were relocated to the compound villages, including New Halabja south of Sulaimaniya where I saw families building new homes during a government-sponsored trip in September 1989.

In Badinan where between 2,600-8,000 KDP peshmergas12 were operating it had been easy for the government to defeat them. The 1993 HRW report noted:

“While the KDP inspired a devoted partisan following, historically centered on the Barzan Valley, it had also made powerful enemies among other tribal leaders. These schisms in turn meant that the final stage of Anfal had some characteristics that set it apart from the rest of the operation. Some of the tribal groups who had made a separate peace with Baghdad managed to avoid the worst of Anfal. A considerable number of villages survived in Badinan and on its fringes, at least for a time–especially those of the Surchi, the Zebari, the Bradost and the Dolamari. And Kurdish villagers who might otherwise have died were spared if the local mustashar could convince Baghdad that they were not contaminated by peshmerga sympathies.”

The price of disloyalty

As the Ba’ath government had invested in building Mujamma’at (collective) towns based on theories current at the time of modernisation and linking centres of population to utilities, the overriding intention was not an overall annihilation of the Kurds of Iraq but separating the loyal from the imputed traitors. Forced migration became a formal component of the village clearance programme part of Anfal based on eradicating popular Kurdish support for the KDP and PUK (and other militant forces). Throughout the period, the Ba’ath government was supporting Iranian Kurds under Abdurrahman Ghassemlou’s KDPI leadership and Komala against its primary enemy, Iran.13

The following analysis in its wider temporal context long after the conflict is also worthy of consideration on the issue of the building of collective settlements:

“However, if we look at the landscape of the Kurdistan Region, we see that in recent years Collective Towns have become among the main triggers of contemporary urbanisation. What was conceived as a device of social control has been turned by political will, economic investment, use and time into a source of urban development. The expansion of the mujamma’at – which are now either absorbed by larger urban centres or turning into independent administrative and urban cores – is one of the factors that drive urbanisation in Kurdistan, attracting real estate investments and economic activities.

Interesting examples in this respect are the mujamma’at of Daratoo and Kaznazan, in the outskirts of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Due to the investment of the Kurdish Democratic Party, they have acquired administrative independence and are administratively recognised as local sub-districts. They are easily accessible from the city centre and, following the rapid sprawling of Erbil, will potentially become residential neighbourhoods of the city. In terms of the physical architectural design, in Kaznazan the two-storey modular concrete housing is still the main feature. 14

HRW in Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, stated:

“In the spring of 1987, Ali Hassan al-Majid instructed that “no house was to be left standing” in the Kurdish villages of the Erbil plain. Only Arab villages would be spared. [5] The total of Kurdish villages that were destroyed during the 1987–1989 Al-Anfal Campaign is estimated to be 2,000. 15

HRW’s focused publication also detailed the last phase of the operations including:

On the spot mass executions

…Hundreds of women and young children perished, too, as a result of the Final Anfal campaign. But the causes of their death were different–gassing, starvation, exposure and wilful neglect, rather than bullets fired from an AK-47. In the first seven Anfal operations, the mass disappearance of women and children frequently mirrored the pattern of peshmerga resistance. In the Final Anfal, there was no resistance to speak of. The KDP was simply routed, and this may help explain why the women and children of Badinan were spared. As for their menfolk, the standing orders could not have been clearer:

“We received orders to kill all peshmerga, even those who surrendered,” Middle East Watch was told by a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi Army. “Even civilian farmers were regarded as peshmerga if they were working within a prohibited area. All men in the prohibited areas, aged from 15-60 [sic], were to be considered saboteurs and killed. The prohibited areas were shown in red on the army maps, and they covered everything except the paved highways.”

“These orders, the officer explained, were conveyed in writing to the divisional level (tahriri) and then passed on orally to the lower-ranking officers. The reference is clearly to Northern Bureau directives 3650 and 4008 of June 1987, which contained the standing orders for the two- year period including Anfal. The lieutenant-colonel went on to explain that women and children in his own local area of operations, were to be rounded up, trucked to the army’s divisional headquarters at Begova where he was stationed and then later resettled in a government complex. 45 “Ali Hassan al-Majid’s orders were clear,” agreed another former officer who had served in the Istikhbarat. “They were to kill all men aged from 15-60. He did not want to see them again; they must be killed off.” However, “people were killed according to the mood of the officer in charge. Some were good-hearted and let people go, while others killed them.”

Identification Deficiency – The Samawa desert graves in al-Muthanna Governorate

A mass grave exhumed on July 27, 2019, in the Samawa desert at Tal al-Sheikh in the al-Salman district 130 kilometres from Samawa revealed the bodies of more than one hundred Kurdish women and their children, including infants. This grave was one of several found in the area since 2019 containing victims executed by firing squad 16 and without a single person since having reportedly yet been identified.

The human remains from communal burial graves exhumed from forced migration locations in central and southern parts of Iraq have not been DNA identified – costs and expertise are both being given as excuses. Four smallish sites containing over one hundred clothed bodies were unearthed in 2019 in Samawa after heavy rains and satellite imagery revealed the shapes and key triggers to their existence. Peregraf’s Haval Zangana reported in an article dated 16.02.2020:

Anfal victims massacred in exile are now being buried without identification

…Several months have passed since the remains of Kurdish Anfal victims have been kept in boxes on shelves at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Baghdad and their relatives have not been recognized yet.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) intends to return the remains of the Anfal victims in order to rebury them in prepared graves in Chamchamal Province on Anfal Remembrance Day on April 14, 2020, without any identification process taking place.

The relatives of the victims cannot bear the fact that, after having waited for three decades, they are still unable to acknowledge the remains of their loved ones and have been deprived of the privilege to kiss their tombstones as no one knows which grave belongs to whom.

“I am saying this based on evidence, DNA tests are not being performed on the remains, and the Ministry of Martyr and Anfal Affairs is negligent. An agreement with the Martyrs Foundation in Baghdad was reached to exhume and return the graves in discreet”, said Taimour Abdulla…… “the Ministry of Martyrs of KRG even doubts whether I am an Anfal survivor….17

Taimour is not only complaining about the absence of DNA tests but also claims that the graves are not being scientifically exhumed and “were unearthed with shovels and excavators, distorting the shape of the crime.”…He had been to the site 20 days following the exhumation, and says: “several things like bones, hair, wallets and bullets had been left behind, I picked them up at the site and I had them recorded. But an officer from the Martyrs Ministry had said that Taimour had picked them up in a Kuwaiti mass grave. What on earth would a Kuwaiti soldier have wanted a baby feeding bottle for?!”

According to Fuad Osman (spokesperson for the Ministry) these corpses are remains of 170 victims belonging to Samawah mass graves, and 2800 corpses have been previously returned.”…

The reason for not taking the tests for the time being is that “the process is too long, the expenses are high and it needs special teams and specific tools.”…18

In January 2024, Shanaz Xan received the remains of the 172 people from one of the three grave sites found and recently returned to Kurdistan in January 2024 after a four-and-a-half-year delay. The return followed an ostentatious, quasi-military ceremony that she presided over. Her husband, Latif Rashid, still heading the PUK presidency of Iraq, published a photograph and video on the presidency website of his tearful wife posed in the Islamic prayer position headed 172 Anfal Victims Returned to Kurdistan Region for Burial – clearly meaning ‘reburial.’

It read: “The First Lady was entrusted with the file to oversee the return of the 172 martyrs whose remains were discovered four and a half years ago in mass graves in Tal Al-Sheikha, southwest of Samawa, the capital of al-Muthanna. …20

What has taken so long? Historic Arab-Kurd tensions and Shi’a governors of al-Muthanna

Exhumations have often been carried out in a careless fashion and Baghdad does not recognise KRG DNA testing yet has not undertaken it itself.

The area where the mass graves have most recently been excavated comes under the control of Shi’a Arab tribes. The governor in charge at the time of the deportations and subsequent executions after the end of the Iran-Iraq war was Mosul-born Mohammad Yunis al-Ahmad, AKA Khadr al-Sabahi, responsible during Anfal until the 1990 Gulf War – but said to be of Shi’a Arab origin.

For his service there, the UN Security Council claimed he was later promoted to the north with responsibility for the governorates of Salah Ad Din, al-Tamim (Kirkuk) and the Kurdish majority governorate of Sulaimaniya. He remained in this post until regime change and manged to flee to Syria. He had been appointed as second in command to Izzet Ibrahim al-Douri. After De-Ba’athification under the CPA he became Deputy of the reconstituted Ba’ath Party running the political wing while al-Douri took over the military wing. 21 Interestingly, al-Ahmed headed the al-Awda resistance to the US invasion and al-Maliki government that also attracted many southern Iraqi Shi’a Arabs and former Shi’a Ba’athists. 22

Al-Muthanna borders Saudi Arabia and was named after the 7th century Arab General, Al Muthanna Ibn Haritha. Samawa is its capital. It became the location of one of the greatest tank battles between the Republican Guard and Coalition Forces of the United States and UK in February 1991 dubbed the Battle of Norfolk. 23 Iraq suffered heavy losses, and many fallen soldiers were hastily buried hastily there in communal graves out of decency.

Little love was lost at the best of times between the Arabs and the Kurds. Despite the collaboration of the Shi’a militias with the KDP and PUK under the aegis of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Forces and Qasem Soleimani’s leadership during the Iran-Iraq war popular enmity ran strong.

The former Shi’a Arab Ba’ath governor assumedly exercised no compunction in executing Sunni Kurdish women with their children because they were linked with the rebel strongholds in the north from whence he originated in Mosul and was reposted thereafter, as above. After regime change, he eluded capture to become highly active between Syria, the UAE and Iraq. He argued with al-Douri and the Party split into two separate wings.

Al-Douri’s supporters sought to denigrate him by claiming he was of Shi’a origin in coming from a Shi’a neighbourhood of Mosul, al-Mowall, hence his final name ending al-Muwali. He led the anti-US resistance in al-Awda and had Shi’a and Sunni support against the pro-Iran Shi’as installed through the US war on Iraq. This can have caused complications over the ongoing issue of the Kurdish mass graves.

He may still have a support base there in quiet. Recently, when the flag of Kurdistan was draped over the shoulders of Anfal families visiting the grave sites Iraqi security service officials objected to the presence of the flag: “This is Iraq and only Iraqi flag is allowed,” one member shouted, sparking the incident… The Iraqi security officials at the scene were asked to apologize to the Kurdish families, but they refused according to Hassan Ali Haji Faraj, an Anfal survivor from Garmiyan, who was one of the Kurdish visitors carrying the Flag of Kurdistan. …“I had the Kurdistan flag proudly on my shoulder believing that the new regime in Iraq would give me the right to raise it,” Faraj told Rudaw. “But it seems that the new regime has the same mentality as the old regime toward Kurds.”…24

Records were kept at the time of the deportations with accompanying orders to wherever Kurds were deported in central or southern areas of Iraq along with details of the menfolk from whom they were separated. The families were exterminated to terminate the family line and weaken the tribe as well as to undercut the popular support for the Kurdish rebels through fear.

The Shi’a Arabs in al-Muthanna governorate were also organised along tribal lines and represent the majority of the population with only 2 percent Sunni. It has been the centre of heated protests against the pro-Iran Shi’a dominated Baghdad government. An EU country report noted: Since 2015, protests spurred by economic opportunity and the lack of service provision as well as the killing of protesters and activists erupted repeatedly in Muthanna. Causes of tribal conflict in Muthanna were control of land, oil revenues and water scarcity.

The government launched campaigns to seize unlicensed weaponry in areas characterised by armed tribal conflicts in an attempt to curb the outbreaks of tribal violence. In 2020 and 2021 plans for economic cooperation between Iraq and the neighbouring Saudi Arabia were torpedoed by pro-Iran groups, who accused the Iraqi government of ‘normalization with Iraq’s eternal enemy’. Widespread corruption, mismanagement and the poor level of services spurred protests in 2020 and 2021.” The character of the governorate explains why it was chosen as the location for Kurdish deportations and later executions and also why there are issues over exhumations and revealing the documentation that still exists. 25

Throughout history Iraqi tribes of all sects have annihilated their enemies in cold blooding killing sprees. Often it is heard said of the Arabs that they dislike the Kurds and regarded them as troublemakers. Even now, forty years after Anfal, and regime change in 2003, they may sit in the rooms of the palaces built by Saddam on their gilded chairs with barely veiled dislike. Their mentor, Iran, makes use of the Anfal propaganda against Sunni Arabs parroting the Kurdish mythical figures to keep up the blame on Saddam while never admitting any joint liability.

Significant obstacles have arisen over unearthing the suspected Anfal grave sites in these Shi’a Arab lands. Public disclosure has largely been shaped by the conventional discourse with inflated statistics lacking adequate breakdown by region such as on the Kurdistan Memory website.

The victims taken from the areas where the PUK operated were shown no mercy because the PUK had withdrawn from the 18-month long ceasefire agreement with Saddam before Anfal and returned to the clasp of Iran. The talks had been convivial as their group photo sessions show.

Once the PUK was seen to embrace Iran anew it was too much for the Iraqi government to condone. Their civilian support base and affiliated families were punished with displacement or death to teach the PUK (and KDP, also supporting Iran) a harsh lesson about betrayal – a lesson that went unheeded despite the horrific sacrifices imposed upon the people.

The double standard over femicide

Killing women and their children in time of war has ever been a general phenomenon. In Kurdish tribal traditions that prevail today, the male dominated hierarchy includes many party, and peshmerga officials linked to the murders of their female relatives – wives, daughters, sisters, cousins and nieces – in order to uphold the patriarchy and patriarchal values.

These Kurdish women and their children, and sometimes, lovers and husbands that the male heads of household disapproved of as marriage material lie in unmarked or unnamed graves in Kurdistan. The crime of ‘honour’ killing is just as abhorrent as killing women in time of war. Human cruelty apparently knows no bounds.

The perpetrators fall back on various pretexts for their actions including religious justification, as in the Spanish Civil War, where the Nationalists painted the Republicans as godless communists and allowed the Moroccan forces brought into Spain by General Franco to seize the Republican women and female prisoners, and encourage them to indulge in gang rape before killing them.

The massacre of some 3,500 women and their children in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut by the (Christian right Phalangists linked with Israel) Lebanese Forces during the Lebanese Civil War between 16-18 September 1982, included mass rape and cutting the throats of the victims. People were decapitated and had their limbs hacked off akin to the brutality displayed by ISIS. 27

The Koran was adduced in the Anfal by Ali Hassan al-Majid and for the disturbing excesses of ISIS in its self-declared Caliphate across Iraq and Syria.

Fully cognisant of tribal culture, Ba’ath era Baghdad attacked and killed members of the ‘disloyal’ tribes en masse and its sons in particular to limit the expansion of the enemy tribes, as in the vendettas against the Barzanis. The Barzanis resorted to blood feuds with several government ‘loyal’ tribes and old enmities still remain.

Identify them whatever the financial cost

The Kurdistan Memory Programme and the keepers of the Ba’ath Party documents still held in copy form for research in the United States should undertake a full listing of the names of known victims and where they lost their lives or are believed to be buried just as is happening with the victims of the Spanish Civil War. Of the half million Spanish fatalities, 150,000 people are said to have died in systematic killings, violence and under torture and in reprisals:

“After decades of avoiding the investigation of war crimes due to the “Pact of Forgetting,” where Spain’s parties agreed to forgo probing crimes related to the civil war or dictatorship, Spain now seeks to provide families with answers, leveraging new forensic tools to bring long- awaited information to those affected… Among the initiatives is the creation of a national DNA databank to help identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who were killed either during the war, or afterward for opposing the Franco regime. Their remains still lie in unmarked graves around the country… In the 1930s, Spain was polarized between left- and right-wing factions. In July 1936, the assassination of right-wing politician José Calvo Sotelo prompted a military coup led by General Francisco Franco, sparking the Spanish Civil War….Franco’s Nationalists clashed with the Republican government, with both sides persecuting perceived enemies through executions, imprisonment, and forced labor. After the Nationalist victory with Franco in power, former adversaries were targeted by confiscating property, revoking qualifications, imprisoning many and executing tens of thousands. Of the estimated 300,000 to 500,000 lives lost in the war, roughly 150,000 were civilians. ” 28

The KRG is obliged to undertake this moral duty properly – it has the oil money. So obsessed with power the leaders of the two main parties that allied with Iran never acknowledged their own role in Anfal coming to pass. They do not apologise for shooting live rounds of Kurdish protestors, killing critics or allowing ‘honour’ killing perpetrators to go free even where man, woman and child are murdered. These are double standards that dishonour the nation and lead to the exodus of thousands of disaffected Iraqi Kurds fed up with corruption and the power-sharing system (muhasasa).

According to HRW in a recent report: Iraq: Exhume Mass Grave Sites to Ensure Justice (which includes references to the mass graves of those killed by ISIS (and unreferenced, those killed by and under the US occupation and the various Shi’a militias and the Iraqi Ministry of Interior):

“Iraq has just one laboratory authorized to conduct DNA identification of remains exhumed from mass graves, the Medico-Legal Directorate’s forensic DNA laboratory in Baghdad, Taama told Human Rights Watch. …In preparation for its departure, UNITAD has been supporting the Medico-Legal Directorate’s forensic DNA laboratory to obtain accreditation from the International Organization for Standards, ISO/IEC 17025. Accreditation would mean that determinations made by the laboratory in Baghdad would be internationally recognized, allowing its findings to be accepted as evidence in courts globally.

Khabat Abdullah, an adviser at the Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), told Human Rights Watch that the KRG Ministry of Interior’s criminal forensics department runs a lab with the capacity to do DNA identification of five to seven remains per day. But under Iraq’s Law on Protection of Mass Graves (Law No. 5 of 2006), only the lab in Baghdad is authorized to analyze DNA samples taken from mass graves…

To date, approximately 2,50029 remains of Kurds killed between 1980 and 1988 have been recovered from mass graves and returned to the Kurdistan region, Abdullah told Human Rights Watch. 30

According to KDP media organ, Rudaw, “a US team uncovered the first mass grave shortly after the (sic) liberation. It was found to contain 114 bodies. A second mass grave was found on (the) Iraq-Saudi border in 2005, where the bodies of 93 Barzanis were uncovered.” 31

The total of dead found and returned to the north to date is still around only 3000 victims – very few of the total reported fatalities or missing now believed to number at most 80,000 people – not 182, 000, as party propaganda still chooses to perpetuate in self-deception.

Every victim and their family deserve the dignity of identification and a final resting place

April 14 has been designated as Anfal Memorial Day, but the victims it is to commemorate are being reburied in a mass memorial in Chamchamal usually far from their homes and families. Chamchamal lay on the old ceasefire line with the Iraqi government forces holding Kirkuk nearby – a situation restored after the 16 October 2017 take-over of Kirkuk and the disputed territories by the Shi’a dominated current government. The move came in adverse reaction to the successful, now frozen, Kurdistan Independence Referendum of 25 September 2017.

The inherent antagonism between the Shi’a blocs and the Kurds over the Anfal legacy, oil and Kurdish rights is likely to intensify as the October 2025 parliamentary elections draw nearer. Their relations are based on expedience.

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