Remains of Barzani Anfal victims to be reburied in Erbil's Barzan

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The bodies of dozens of Kurdish victims of the former Saddam Hussein regime's atrocities have been exhumed from Iraq's southern desert and will be reburied in the Kurdistan Region's Erbil province on Saturday. 

The 100 corpses, the identities of whom were determined through DNA testing, will be buried in Erbil's Barzan region. Top officials from the Kurdistan Region will attend the burial. 

Barzani civilians, all male, were rounded up in camps by the former Saddam Hussein regime on July 31, 1983, in Erbil. Eight thousand of them were murdered that year. A number of their bodies were found in Iraq's southern desert after that regime was deposed in 2003. 

In 2005, a Kurdish team led by the former Kurdistan Region Minister of Human Rights visited remote areas close to Iraq's borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They were able to uncover the remains of 500 Barzani victims. Those bodies were brought back to Barzan in 2007 and, in the first funeral procession of its kind, reburied in graves there.

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

At least 182,000 Kurdish civilians were killed in the Anfal, and thousands of villages were leveled.