Shafaq News- Erbil

Forty-three years after the Barzani genocide, key facts about the crime have emerged, but justice and accountability remain incomplete.

On May 3, 2011, the Iraqi High Criminal Court classified the killing of Barzanis as genocide and a crime against humanity. Yet the legal recognition did not close the file of accountability. In December 2025, the court sentenced former officer Shaker Taha Yahya Ghafour al‑Douri to death after convicting him of participating in executions of Barzanis in mass graves near Saqlawiya, al-Anbar province. However, al‑Douri died in May 2026 before the ruling could be carried out, according to the case lawyer.

On this year’s anniversary, Kurdistan Region leaders renewed calls on the federal government to provide material and moral compensation to victims’ families. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al‑Zaidi described the crime as genocide committed by the Baath regime against the Kurdish national movement.

Article 132 of the Iraqi Constitution stipulates that the state guarantees care for the families of martyrs, political prisoners, and victims of the former dictatorship’s abuses. Yet repeated demands for compensation after 43 years show that the transition from symbolic recognition to comprehensive reparations remains incomplete.

Reparations are not limited to financial compensation. They include opening mass graves, identifying victims, releasing security documents, compiling a national registry of names, teaching the crime in modern Iraqi history, prosecuting surviving perpetrators, and protecting burial sites from neglect.

Barzani Genocide Unfolded

The Barzani Anfal did not begin only on the morning of July 31, 1983. It was preceded by years of uprooting and collective punishment. After the Kurdish revolution collapsed in 1975 following the Algiers Agreement and the end of support for Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s movement, Iraqi authorities displaced tens of thousands of Barzani residents. Villages were demolished, families relocated to desert areas in central and southern Iraq, and later transferred to tightly monitored complexes in Qushtapa, Diana, Harir, Bahirka, and other areas near Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region. Officially presented as modern housing, these complexes functioned as instruments of control and isolation.

When the regime decided to retaliate in 1983, the targeted population was already concentrated in places easy to encircle. Victims were not arrested on battlefields or tried individually; they were chosen based on family and ethnic affiliation and presumed ties to regime opponents.

Middle East Watch reported that Iraqi troops abducted between 5,000 and 8,000 Barzani males aged 12 or older during coordinated raids on the complexes housing the displaced Barzanis. None were seen again, and researchers concluded they were likely executed after months in detention.

Detainees were loaded onto buses. Families were told the men were going to work and would return. Women waited years, clinging to photographs as their only defense against the idea that those who left that morning had vanished without trace.

Weeks later, Saddam Hussein declared in a recorded video that the Barzanis had “received strict punishment” and “gone to hell.”

Captured Iraqi government documents and survivor testimony indicate that many detainees were held for months before being killed.

Read more: Public opinion is absent from the Anfal crimes anniversary

From Barzani to Anfal

The crime occurred five years before the regime’s broader military campaign known as “Anfal,” carried out in eight stages across the Kurdistan Region in 1988. Middle East Watch concluded that the 1983 Barzani operation foreshadowed the methods later used during the 1988 Anfal campaign.

The pattern was nearly identical: isolating populations in complexes, encircling areas, separating men and boys from women and children, transporting detainees to unknown destinations, executing them in desert sites, and leaving families without information for years.

Human Rights Watch noted that the absence of serious international response to the disappearance of thousands of Barzanis may have emboldened the regime to believe it could conduct a larger operation without real consequences.

Read more: Kurdistan remains a steadfast haven for the persecuted

The victims’ fate remained largely unknown until the regime’s fall in 2003. Documents and local testimonies led search teams to Basiya desert in al-Muthanna province near the Saudi and Kuwaiti borders. Three mass graves were uncovered, containing remains of about 500 Barzani men, along with clothing and personal items that helped identify some victims. To date, remains of 696 victims have been returned to the Kurdistan Region in stages, while thousands remain missing more than four decades later.

Searching for mass graves is not only a technical or forensic process but a race against time. Witnesses age, sites change, documents deteriorate, and DNA matching becomes harder the longer recovery is delayed.

The targeting of males was so extensive that entire complexes awoke without fathers, sons, or brothers. Thousands of women were left to raise families under poverty and surveillance, haunted by uncertainty that husbands or sons might still be alive in prisons. Without death certificates or burial sites, women remained legally and emotionally suspended between widowhood and hope. Many kept clothes and photos for decades, some avoiding social events lest the missing return to find no one waiting.

Thus, the return of remains did not erase pain but gave some families the certainty absent for decades. A grave does not restore the missing, but it partially ends the torment of wondering whether they are still alive, imprisoned, or tortured somewhere.

Read more: Iraq's mass graves: A record of violence across five decades

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.