Politics

Kurdistan Region aims to 'internationalize' perception of Anfal

As Kurdistan Region officials marked the 32nd anniversary on Tuesday of the final phase of the former Iraqi regime's deadly Anfal campaign against Kurds in the 1980s, they announced their intention to raise international awareness of the event. Although it is now widely recognized as an act of genocide, many nations have yet to officially declare it as such.

Mustafa Shilani 2020/08/25 17:30

kurdistan Kurdistan Iraq Anfal

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – As Kurdistan Region officials marked the 32nd anniversary on Tuesday of the final phase of the former Iraqi regime's deadly Anfal campaign against Kurds in the 1980s, they announced their intention to raise international awareness of the event. Although it is now widely recognized as an act of genocide, many nations have yet to officially declare it as such.

Minister of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs Abdullah Mahmood said in a speech during a ceremony honoring those who perished that "efforts to define the Anfal as a genocide" are ongoing and that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) "has decided to expand the Anfal mass killing file."

At the end of Iraq’s eight-year-long war with Iran in the 1980s, the government of Saddam Hussien launched a series of comprehensive ethnic cleansing operations. Anfal is the Arabic term used in the Quran for “spoils of war.”

It was a multi-phase political, military, economic, cultural, and social process of annihilation that resulted in the deaths of as many as 182,000 Kurds and the eradication of some 5,000 villages.

A large number of people, including women and children, were forcefully displaced and transferred to camps in southern Iraq, where the government eventually killed some of them and consigned them to mass graves, burying others alive in the desert.

"Thirty-two years ago today, members of the former Iraqi regime executed the final phase of its Anfal campaign against the Kurdish nation in Badinan, in which thousands of people were martyred, thousands more went missing, and hundreds of villages were flattened," said Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani in a statement earlier on Tuesday.

He added, "It is a legal and constitutional right of the families of the victims of the Anfal campaign to be compensated."

At the ceremony, Mahmood pointed out that "some files were resolved in the Iraqi courts, but our ambition is not limited to that only because we are working to compensate the affected population of the Kurdistan Region."

"We want to give the Anfal issue an international dimension abroad and to obtain more protection for the rights of Kurdish people," the minister concluded.

Editing by John J. Catherine