BARZAN, Kurdistan Region — July 31 marks the 35th anniversary of the genocidal campaign of the Baath regime against the Barzanis, and the families of victims and survivors shared their ongoing emotional pain and a clear memory of the atrocities their Kurdish kin faced.

Samira Hassan was still very young when her father was taken by Iraq’s Baath regime forces in 1983 as part of the Anfal campaign. She has not seen him since.

“The absence of my father has destroyed our lives. It is very unpleasant to be without a father. We did not have anyone except my father. My brothers were kids and my mother was young,” she told Rudaw, while staring at victims' belongings at a museum.


The regime targeted Kurdish women, the elderly, and children and the elderly; however, primarily the men were executed.

The mass killing, forced disappearances, and relocations of the Barzanis were conducted in an organized way in a bid to rid them, mainly because they actively resisted Saddam Hussein’s regime in several uprisings.


In Yahya Salih’s immediate and extended family, 70 relatives were among the 8,000 Barzani victims.

“I was one of those who survived like a miracle. They even took away those people who were my age. When a child or an elderly woman died, there was no man to bury her, women would go to cemeteries instead,” he told Rudaw, pointing to the example of the concentration camp they were taken to in Qushtapa, a town in southern Erbil.

The remains of only 600 of the victims have been returned to the Kurdistan Region. They are buried in a special cemetery in Barzan. The Kurdistan Regional Government is building a monument in Barzan where the personal belongings of the victims will be displayed.

A wreath-laying ceremony was held in the Barzanis’ ancestral home of Barzan on Tuesday. It was attended by local and foreign officials.

Former Iraqi successive regimes have carried out other atrocities against Kurds like the disappearance of Fayli Kurds, the Garmiyan Anfal, the Halabja genocide, and the process of Arabization, among others.

In total, some 182,000 Kurds were massacred by the previous Iraqi regime in the 1980s under the name of Anfal — which is a Surah in the Quran.

More recently, on Friday the Yezidi community will mark four years since they faced genocide at the hands of ISIS on August 3, 2014.

Genocide Watch issued a warning for Kurds being "at risk for a large-scale genocide" at the hands of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria in April.

Rudaw