The 32nd Anniversary of the Badinan Anfal

Today marks the 32nd Anniversary of the Badinan Anfal, in which more than 2,000 people were rounded up by the former regime of Saddam Hussein and were taken to the fortress of Nizarke in Duhok. The majority of them were killed and their remains were never found. In the operation, 700 villages were looted or destroyed and more than 40,000 people fled to Turkey.

The Badinan Anfal was only one part of a wider and brutal campaign of genocide infamously known as al- Anfal (spoils of war) in which more than 180,000 civilians were killed. The name of the campaign was taken from Sura 8 (al-Anfal) in Qur’an which was used as a code name by the Ba’athist regime for a serious of genocidal attacks against the Kurds. The genocide was a carefully planned and an orchestrated eight-staged campaign between the 23rd February and the 6th of September 1988. During the Anfal operations thousands of men, women, children and elderly were killed, some buried alive in mass graves in the deserts of Southern Iraq.

The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court convicted five of the six defendants on the 24th of July 2007 for charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Ali Hassan Al-Majid (Chemical Ali) and two military commanders were sentenced to death by hanging and the other two were sentenced to life imprisonment.

President Nechirvan Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in a message to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the Anfal operation in Badinan called on the Federal Government to implement the decision of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court and compensate the victims. President Barzani said on Tuesday, “Today we remember with respect the victims of Anfal Badinan and salute the souls of the martyrs as we send our greetings to their dear families,” adding “on this memory, we reiterate our assertion that the Iraqi Federal Government must fulfill its legal duties and implement the decision of the Iraqi Supreme Court that considered the Anfal Campaign a genocide and a crime against humanity, and that the victims of Anfal and their families must be compensated.”