Kurdistan
Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region Masrour Barzani (Left) and President Nechirvan Barzani (Right). Graphic: Rudaw
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Kurdistan Region’s top officials on Thursday commemorated the 34th anniversary of the last stage of the Baath regime’s notorious Anfal campaign in Badinan, reiterating calls on the Iraqi government to compensate the families of the victims.
“The Iraqi government must compensate the families of the victims as soon as possible. In the Kurdistan Region, more services should be provided to the families of the victims and every effort should be made to document the crime and make it internationally recognized as genocide,” President of the Kurdistan Region Nechirvan Barzani said in his statement.
Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region Masrour Barzani joined President Barzani in his call on the Iraqi government.
“On the 34th anniversary of this tragedy, we honor the victims of this horrendous atrocity and reiterate our calls to the Iraqi Federal Government to compensate families of the victims, both as dictated by the Constitution and as it is a right of the people of the Kurdistan Region,” read a statement from PM Barzani.
The Anfal campaign began in 1986, and was named after the eighth surah in the Quran. More than 182,000 Kurds died in two years of slaughter by then president Saddam Hussein’s regime. April 14, 1988 was when the campaign started in the Garmiyan area in the south of the Kurdistan Region, and ended with Badinan.
Anfal was recognised as a crime against humanity and a war crime by Iraq’s Supreme Court in 2008, but little has been done for Anfal’s survivors or the victims of families.
More than 4,500 villages were destroyed during the Anfal campaign according to a Kurdistan Parliament report obtained by Rudaw English.
Bodies of many victims still remain missing as the Baath regime put dozens of people into mass graves in Iraq’s southern deserts.
The remains of 100 Barzani victims of the Anfal campaign were found in mass graves in southern Iraq in July and were returned home to the Barzan area where they were buried in unmarked graves without being identified through DNA testing.
By Klawdia Martani
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