ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Award-winning British photographer Derek Hudson has spoken to Rudaw about his experience covering the 1991 Kurdish exodus, describing it as one of “the most tragic things” he has ever seen.

Hudson travelled to the Kurdistan Region when the exodus started, after spending six months in Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait. Going back home to England after the Gulf War, he heard the news of the exodus on television and decided to return.

“It just struck me as one of the most tragic things I’ve seen. I’ve been as you know, to many conflicts, but this is different, this is something totally different,” he told Rudaw’s Bestoon Khalid on Sunday. 

“When you go to an armed conflict, there’s two sides and it’s a war so you know that there’s going to be shooting…but this is just people pushed out of their homes, out of vengeance by Saddam Hussein. I don’t think anybody expected this to happen.”

Hudson and a colleague attempted to travel back to the Kurdistan Region via Ankara. He eventually found "many thousands of Kurdish people camping under the stars" in the town of Isikveren in Batman province, where the photographers would stay for ten days.

Thirty years on, he remembers “all the people who could hardly walk, all the tiny children freezing cold, leaving with nothing. This whole image for me is horrifying.”

“Amongst the images that I made, there’s an image of a man probably in his 60s, carrying in his arms a little white bundle, which turned out to be his daughter that he was about to bury. This image has always stayed with me…it almost tells the whole story of this Kurdish exodus, because of the number of people that died crossing the mountains, which were covered in snow and ice at the time.”

To get out his photos, Hudson says he had to travel back to Paris to develop and distribute his material.

“We had to shoot what we could and then leave and we could not even take the chance to send any of the material form Ankara or from Istanbul because I was scared that the Turkish authorities would stop it.”