Barzani genocide victims commemorated in Kazakhstan

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The 40th anniversary of the Barzanis’ genocide was commemorated in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The President of the Kazakh Kurds Organization along with Ghafoor Ahmad, Governor of Mergasor, and Sheikh Ramazan, President of the Federation of the International Association of Kurds of the Former Soviet Union, attended the event.

In two separate speeches, Ahmad and Ramazan memorialized the victims of the atrocities committed by the Ba'athist regime.

Later during the event, the film My Mothers was screened, and poet Kinyaze Majid presented several poems on the Kurdish struggle for human rights.

As of 2009, there were over 38,000 Kurds living in Kazakhstan, according to the country’s last national census.

The majority of Kurds in Kazakhstan are descendants of tens of thousands of Soviet Union authority exiles from Caucasian countries to Central Asia.

The Barzani genocide preceded the Anfal campaign mounted by the Saddam regime against the Kurdish people in the late 1980s.

It is believed that at least 182,000 Kurdish civilians were massacred in the Anfal campaign, and thousands of villages were destroyed.

In July 2022, at least 100 human remains were recovered from the southern desert region in Iraq, and the remains were later buried in the Barzan area in northern Erbil Province.