Man identifies brother’s clothing in Anfal mass grave

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A glimpse of a familiar sweater lying crumpled and dirtied in a mass grave has finally ended one man’s nearly four-decade search for his family.

Ahmed Hamid pointed out his family in an old photograph, naming them one by one.

“This photo is of four Anfal victims. Three of them are my family. Two of my sisters and one brother,” he told Rudaw on Thursday.

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 demolished around 4,500 villages in the Kurdistan Region.

Many of the victims were brought to prisons in the south of the country, where they were killed and their bodies buried in mass graves.

Hamid is from the village of Bakrashal in the Kifri district of southern Sulaimani province. When their village was attacked, he and his three sisters were away from home and were able to escape. However, his mother, brothers, and sisters, about 30 of their fellow villagers were captured.

On December 22, several mass graves were discovered via satellite images in the Tal Sheikhiya area of Samawa city in Muthana province, where it is estimated that about 150 Kurdish women and children were killed.

Watching Rudaw’s coverage of the grave, Hamid spotted the outfit his 12-year-old brother was wearing at the time he was killed. He said that he had bought the clothes for his brother.

Hamid visited the Baghdad forensic department.

“I went there and showed them photographs. They were moved by it. I said I had come for the files of Omar, Galawezh, and my mother,” said Hamid.

About 60 bodies have been recovered from the mass grave in Samawa. The exhumation has been slow because of the small size of the grave and the fact that many of the children were in the embrace of their mothers, according to the Iraqi mass graves directorate.

The remains were discovered tightly packed into a grave measuring two meters by sixteen meters, and a depth of 1.25 meters.

Many well-known Kurdish figures, including Iraq’s first lady and members of parliament, were present when the exhumation process began.

“Their graves have been missing for 38 years, since 1988, so our main demand is to bring the bodies of the victims back to their ancestral homeland or the Kurdistan Region,” said Anwar Hamlaw, a member of an Anfal rights advocacy association.

This is not the first mass grave discovered in the area. The first was exhumed in July 2019, according to Dhia’ Karim, head of mass graves protection affairs at the Iraqi state-affiliated Martyrs Foundation, who said that "new sites containing victims, all of whom were women and children, were discovered" during analysis of aerial images.

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 the victims.

So far, 2,551 bodies have been returned to the Kurdistan Region.

Hunar Hamid contributed to this article.