Remains of Anfal victims. File photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A group of genocide activists on Saturday called for the urgent excavation of a cemetery in southern Kirkuk originally used for burying unidentified bodies, claiming it may contain the remains of dozens of Kurdish victims massacred during the Baathist-led Anfal campaign in the 1980s.
“We are not saying all the graves belong to our relatives, but according to our investigations, there were fewer than 100 bodies in this cemetery before 1988. Now it contains more than a thousand,” Hemin Hasib, an activist specializing in genocide cases, said at a press conference.
The cemetery, established in 1988, saw a rapid increase in burials over a short period. Activists are urging immediate excavation, citing strong evidence that many of the graves may hold the remains of Anfal victims.
The Anfal campaign, carried out in eight stages across the Kurdistan Region, resulted in the massacre of more than 182,000 Kurds and the destruction of over 4,500 villages. Victims were often taken to the Topzawa military camp near Kirkuk, where they were separated by age and gender and taken to several locations to be massacred.
Speaking to Rudaw after the press conference, Hasib explained that many of those buried in the cemetery “were people from the [Topzawa] camp who died from illness, starvation, or torture.”
The cemetery, located in a remote area near the village of Topzawa, spans approximately 100 dunams and contains over a thousand unmarked graves, according to Hasib. The graves are not mass graves but individual ones, and he estimates that around 80 percent are those of Kurdish victims of the Anfal campaign.
Salih Nasih, an Anfal activist, told Rudaw that due to the high daily death toll during the campaign, morgues at Kirkuk's hospital became overwhelmed. “The hospital director sent a written request to the governor at the time, asking for a solution. The response was: ‘Give the bodies to the municipality to bury them.’”
Eyewitness Tajr Majid described the site as a former large military camp. “They brought people and lined them up in this plain. I’m not saying there were 200,000 Anfal victims here - maybe 150,000 - but those working in the field of genocide should come and investigate. We are certain Topzawa is not free of mass graves.”
Thirty-seven years after the end of the Anfal campaign, dozens of mass graves remain undiscovered and unexcavated. Efforts to locate them are ongoing, with the most recent discovery occurring on December 22, when satellite imagery revealed several mass graves in the city of Samawa in Muthanna province. It was estimated that around 150 Kurdish women and children were killed at the site.
In 2008, Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court officially recognized the Anfal campaign as a crime against humanity. However, over 15 years later, survivors and victims' families say they have seen little support or justice.
Anfal was only one chapter in a decades-long campaign of genocide and discrimination against the Kurds. This broader history includes forced demographic changes in Kirkuk in the 1960s, the disappearance of Faili Kurds in the 1970s, and the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988.
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