Al-Sulaymaniyah honors 172 Anfal victims

Shafaq News/ The remains of about 172 Anfal victims were buried in a large public ceremony in Chamchamal, al-Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region, on Wednesday. The remains had been in Baghdad's Medicolegal Directorate for four and a half years.

Iraq's First Lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, who attended the ceremony, said in a speech: "We honor our martyrs who gave their lives for Kurdistan's freedom and who were only guilty of being Kurds."

The national campaign to collect blood samples and information from the Anfal victims' relatives started in Chamchamal by a team from the medicolegal directorate in Baghdad and the Martyrs Foundation in coordination with the First Lady's office and the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), to identify the martyrs.

In 1983, the Kurds revolted against Saddam Hussein's rule, prompting him to launch the Anfal campaign against them. In 2011, the Iraqi Supreme Criminal Court declared the campaign as "a crime against humanity and genocide."

Moreover, Saddam assigned the campaign to Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti, the secretary of the north of the Baath Party, who bombed Halabja and nearby villages with chemical weapons on March 16, 1988, in a genocidal attack.

Notably, The Anfal campaign killed thousands of Kurds. It displaced tens of thousands from their homes in Kurdistan and banished many of them to the southern desert in al-Diwaniyah and Muthanna governorates.

After 2003, the former regime's leaders were arrested and tried, including Saddam Hussein in the Anfal case. Some of them, such as al-Majid, were executed.