'Our people will never accept the language of violence and crime': President Barzani

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - Our people will never accept the language of violence and crime, said Masoud Barzani, President of Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), on Thursday.

“The Iraqi state must compensate for all the crimes and oppressions committed against our nation,” read a statement by President Masoud Barzani on the 34th anniversary of the Badian Anfal.

President Barzani stated that “the regime's aim in this chauvinist behavior and this great crime was to change the demographics of Kurdistan and break the will of the Kurdish people through weapons, violence, and oppression.”

“But the will of the Kurdish people to survive and seek freedom succeeded, and the enemies, opponents, and criminals fell into the dustbin of history,” said Barzani.

Barzani pointed out that “from August 25 to September 6, 1988, as part of the Iraqi regime's series of crimes against the Kurdish people, many areas and villages of the Badinan region were subjected to inhuman campaigns of chemical attacks, arrests, killings, deportations and Anfal of innocent civilians by the forces of the then Iraqi regime.”

“As a result of these inhuman crimes, thousands of Kurdish citizens were martyred, disappeared and displaced, and hundreds of villages were destroyed,” read the statement.

On the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Anfal crime in Badinan, Barzani saluted the souls of the martyrs of the massacre of the Failis Kurds, the Anfal of Badinan, Garmian, and Barzan, and all the martyrs of the Kurdistan freedom movement.

It is estimated that 180,000 Kurdish people were killed in the eight stages of the brutal genocidal Anfal campaign committed by the former Iraqi regime in the 1980s.

In late July the exhumed bodies of 100 victims of the 1983 Genocide of Barzanis were brought back from the southern deserts of Iraq, where they were killed and reburied in the Kurdistan Region.

During an emotional ceremony in Barzan area, President Barzani said that “while nothing is more valuable than a piece of a martyr's bone, Baghdad still has a moral and legal responsibility to compensate the victims' families.”

Participated in the burial of 100 Barzani martyrs as part of the 1983 Genocide by the former Iraqi regime which resulted in the murder of 8,000 innocent people. Their "crime" was that they were born Barzanis. I pray to His Almighty that their souls are in better places. pic.twitter.com/I88R2RCMYo

— Masoud Barzani (@masoud_barzani) July 31, 2022