ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The remains of 50 Kurdish women and children massacred by the former Iraqi regime decades ago have been exhumed in a recently discovered mass grave in Iraq’s southern province of Muthanna, revealed a federal official on Sunday.
The mass grave, discovered in May via satellite images, is in Tal Sheikh near Samawah, 130 kilometers from the provincial capital. Last week the exhumation process began on the site.
“Until today, [the remains of] 50 martyrs as well as evidence have been unearthed,” Dhia’ Karim, head of the mass graves protection affairs at the Iraqi state-affiliated Martyrs Foundation, told Rudaw’s Shahyan Tahseen.
Karim said that all the victims were "women and children, and they were wearing Kurdish clothing."
The remains were discovered tightly packed into a grave measuring two meters by sixteen meters, with a depth of 1.25 meters southeast of Muthanna, according to Karim who noted that the remains of 150 people are believed to be in the mass grave.
“The remains are very densely packed, as they are children and women holding their babies,” he said, describing the difficulties of working with mass graves.
Many Kurdish figures, including Iraq’s first lady and lawmakers, were present when the exhumation process began.
The first grave in the area was exhumed in July 2019, Karim said, adding that "new sites containing victims, all of whom were women and children, were discovered" during the review and analysis of aerial images.
The Anfal campaign began in 1986. Then-president Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime killed more than 182,000 Kurds in two years of slaughter and around 4,500 villages in the Kurdistan Region were demolished.
Iraq’s Supreme Court recognized Anfal as a crime against humanity in 2008. Years later, however, very little has been done for the survivors or the families of victims of Anfal.
