Anfal nightmares still haunt survivors of Kurdish genocide
Fatma lost 53 members of her extended family in Anfal– the Baathist regime’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds.
She survived, but is left with hellish memories.
"I think about the tragedy day and night. Even when I sleep, I wake up to my screams calling for my late brother. I scream for all my lost relatives,” she said.
Ahmad, another survivor, lost 153 relatives in the genocide.
“I don't know if they are buried in this graveyard or not,” he said in a cemetery in Kalar. “I do not know to this day whether this one is the grave of my brother Khalid, or that one."
Some 182,000 Kurds were killed in the Anfal genocidal campaigns of the regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. Most victims were taken to killing fields in southern Iraq and executed by the truckload.
The former Iraqi regime destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages. Thousands of Kurdish families were also forcibly displaced, and their lands given to Arab families, a process Kurds call Arabization.
April 14 marks Anfal memorial day in the Kurdistan Region, where it is recognized as a genocide.
Anfal, the eighth sura in the Quran, was the codename used by the Baathist regime for the slaughter.
She survived, but is left with hellish memories.
"I think about the tragedy day and night. Even when I sleep, I wake up to my screams calling for my late brother. I scream for all my lost relatives,” she said.
Ahmad, another survivor, lost 153 relatives in the genocide.
“I don't know if they are buried in this graveyard or not,” he said in a cemetery in Kalar. “I do not know to this day whether this one is the grave of my brother Khalid, or that one."
Some 182,000 Kurds were killed in the Anfal genocidal campaigns of the regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. Most victims were taken to killing fields in southern Iraq and executed by the truckload.
The former Iraqi regime destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages. Thousands of Kurdish families were also forcibly displaced, and their lands given to Arab families, a process Kurds call Arabization.
April 14 marks Anfal memorial day in the Kurdistan Region, where it is recognized as a genocide.
Anfal, the eighth sura in the Quran, was the codename used by the Baathist regime for the slaughter.