Erbil-Baghdad relations hinder Anfal exhumations in southern Iraq

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Exhuming mass grave sites believed to contain Anfal victims has resumed in southern Iraq despite disagreement between people and officials from the Kurdistan Region and Iraqi federal government.

“[T]oday the committee which has been appointed to uncover those mass graves has restarted exhuming ... now 60 mass graves have been exhumed and the same number is expected to be exhumed further from the Samawa mass graves,” MP Hadar Barzani, the deputy head of Martyrs and Political Prisoners Committee in the Iraqi Parliament, told Rudaw English on Monday.

“The Samawa mass grave that belongs to Kurds from Garmiyan, had been stopped due to an official request from Teimour Abdullah,” she added.

The process was paused over the weekend after Iraqi authorities took into consideration his grievances, the lone survivor of a mass murder in Samawa in 1988. He was disturbed by the process while seeing the exhumations first-hand. 

Abdulla was 12 years old when Iraqi soldiers rounded up most of his family and other villagers in the Garmiyan region, south of Sulaimani, and transported them more than 600 kilometers south to the deserts.

Ziya Karim, the head of the Department of the Affairs and Protection of Mass Graves in the Iraqi Martyrs Foundation, announced the halt on Sunday.

Ayad Kakei, the lawyer in charge of the Barzani Anfal victims' case, told Rudaw English on Monday that poor relations between Erbil and Baghdad is the primary cause.

"Relations between the KRG Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs and the Iraqi government have been negative for a long time; therefore, uncovering of mass graves have been slow post-US invasion to Iraq,” he said.

“The KRG doesn't have the authority to uncover any mass grave in Iraq, the Iraqi government is the only authority that can uncover or exhume any mass graves in Iraq,” he added.

There are around 76 mass grave sites in Iraq; however, according to Kakei each place may contain 3-6 individual mass grave sites.

The exhumation of three mass grave sites in Shaikiya, around 80 kilometers southwest of Samawa the capital city of the Muthana Province near the Saudi Arabian border, began on Tuesday. 

The graves contain the remains of hundreds of Kurdish civilians, including women and children, killed during Saddam Hussein’s campaign of extermination in the late 1980s known as the Anfal, launched to punish Kurds for rebelling against his regime.