another anniversary of the Anfal operations against the Barzani Kurds arrives, carrying with it the heavy weight of history and the pain of a memory that refuses to fade. On the morning of July 31, 1983, it was not merely a routine military operation by the abhorrent Ba’ath regime; it was the brutal inauguration of a “genocidal” project targeting the very core of Kurdish existence. On that day, the “Qushtapa” forced camp turned into the scene of one of the most heinous crimes against humanity, as thousands of defenseless civilians were besieged. Eight thousand human beings were uprooted—not for any crime they had committed, but simply because they bore the name “Barzani,” a name that had tormented tyrants for decades.
The tragedy began with a grand deception. Buses were brought under the pretext of taking men to attend a meeting, but the truth was hidden in the intentions of the regime’s leaders who personally supervised the operation on the ground, led by Barzan al-Tikriti and Adnan Khairallah. Men and boys, some no older than ten years old, were snatched from their mothers’ arms to begin a journey of enforced disappearance. From Kirkuk to the Tikrit camps, all the way to the dark cells of Abu Ghraib prison, the regime’s brutality manifested in its most hideous forms. Historical sources indicate that detainees were used as a source for forced blood extraction to supply those wounded in the Iran-Iraq War, in flagrant violation of all human norms.
The regime did not stop at arrests; it turned the bodies of the Barzanis into laboratories for chemical weapons testing in Wadi Akashat near the Syrian border, where hundreds were transferred to test the lethality of toxic gases on humans. As for the rest, their fate was the bullets of treachery deep in the deserts of Samawah and Busaiya. Those souls remained wandering in limbo for decades until the earth began to reveal its secrets after 2003, when mass graves uncovered the remains of hundreds of victims buried in their clothes—witnesses to the moment of betrayal that took them from life.
The Ba’athist regime’s choice to kill the men and spare the women was not random; it was a calculated “Pharaonic” policy aimed at drying up the human source of the Barzanis and breaking their social willpower. They wanted to turn their camps into open-air prisons lacking the most basic necessities of life, such as water, electricity, and employment, even barring children from schools. Yet amid that darkness, the greatness of the Barzani woman shone through as she bore the burden of supporting orphans, even having to dig graves and bury the dead with her own hands in the absence of men. She was supported by the nobility of the people of Erbil, who risked their lives to break the siege and deliver supplies to those afflicted families.
The Barzan region was not just a geographic location; it was the symbolic heart of the Kurdish liberation movement led by the immortal Mulla Mustafa Barzani. The regime delusionally believed that annihilating the harboring environment of this symbol would bury the entire Kurdish cause. Thus, the 1983 Anfal was the bloody rehearsal preceding the major Anfal campaigns in 1988 and the Halabja chemical attack. The tyrant wanted to send a message of terror to all Kurds, but he failed to realize that the victims’ blood would turn into fuel igniting the fires of freedom later on.
Despite the rulings issued by the Iraqi Supreme Criminal Tribunal that recognized what occurred as genocide and a crime against humanity, justice remains incomplete. The swift execution of the tyrants obscured much information regarding the fate of thousands of missing persons, whose families still await news or their remains to lay them to rest in their homeland. Remembering this tragedy is not merely weeping over ruins; it is a national duty to consolidate democratic values and prevent the recurrence of such atrocities against any Iraqi component.
In conclusion, the Barzani Anfal will remain a black page in the Ba’ath record and a white page in the history of Kurdish resilience. The executioners have perished while Barzan remains, and the souls of the eight thousand martyrs remain a beacon reminding the world that the will of the people is stronger than cannons, and that a right fought for never dies, no matter how long the absence or how deeply the desert sands cover the bodies of the victims. It is the commemoration of pain that forged hope, and a wound that transformed into a symbol of existence and dignity.
Note: This text is translated from the original Arabic version… Read the Arabic version:Click here
