Shafaq News/ Iraq has begun processing the cases of 22,000 Faili Kurds who went missing under the former Baath regime, a senior official at the Martyrs’ Foundation said on Monday.

Tariq al-Mandlawi, head of the foundation's Legal Department and chair of the Committee for Faili Kurds Affairs, told Shafaq News that the agency had contacted the Prime Minister's Office about the missing Faili Kurds, prompting the office to involve the Supreme Judicial Council.

“The council has formed a specialized court to investigate their fate, especially since most of them are still officially listed as alive in civil records,” al-Mandlawi said.

He noted that the foundation had expedited the process of issuing death certificates through the court, with 70 certificates issued so far. “The personal status court has reviewed their cases, recognized them as martyrs, and included them under the provisions of the Martyrs’ Foundation Law No. 2 of 2016,” al-Mandlawi added.

“Statistics show that 22,000 Faili Kurds were detained, most of them held in prisons such as Nugrat al-Salman, Prison No. 1, Fifth Division Prison, Abu Ghraib, and other facilities,” he said. “These martyrs were buried in mass graves, yet they remain listed as alive in civil registries.”

Decades of Persecution

The Baath regime launched a large-scale campaign against Feyli Kurds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, revoking their Iraqi citizenship and seizing their properties. They were subjected to deportation, forced displacement, imprisonment, and execution during the rule of former President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in 1970 and 1975, and later under Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1980.

Historians attribute the persecution to the Faili Kurds’ ethnic and sectarian identity as Shiite Kurds.

In 2010, Iraq’s High Criminal Court ruled that the mass deportation and disappearance of Faili Kurds constituted “genocide.”

Later that year, the Iraqi government pledged to address the consequences of these crimes, and parliament officially recognized the forced displacement and disappearance of Faili Kurds as acts of genocide.