GARMIYAN, Kurdistan Region— The Kurdistan region this week remembers the Anfal genocide in which the Baathist army killed an estimated 180,000 people in the late 1980s. Many of the victims were also Turkmen and Christians, but the majority of the sufferers were Kurdish families, according to Iraqi and Kurdish official investigations. Both the Iraqi government and parliament have recognized Anfal as genocide perpetrated by Iraq’s former ruler, Saddam Hussein, against the Kurdish people. The Anfal Campaign was a genocidal crusade against the Kurdish resistance movement in northern Iraq, led by the Iraqi government in the final stages of Iran-Iraq war. The campaign took its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Quran which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi government for a series of systematic attacks against its Kurdish population, conducted between 1986 and 1989 and culminating in 1988. According to the Human Rights Watch, during the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi government systematically killed nearly 100,000 non-combatant civilians including women and children, but Kurdish and Iraqi investigations have put the death toll considerably higher, at over 180,000 deaths. The investigations also reveal that nearly 3,000 Kurdish villages were demolished as a result of the Anfal campaign, which also displaced thousands of Kurdish families across Iraq.
