KDP’s Barzani: Genocide against Kurds began with Feylis and ended with Yazidis
Shafaq News – Duhok
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Masoud Barzani said on Tuesday that the genocidal campaigns against the Kurdish people began in the final decades of the last century, starting with the Feyli Kurds and culminating in the atrocities committed by ISIS against the Yazidis.
Speaking at the opening of the Fifth International Scientific Conference on Genocide Against the Kurds in Duhok, Barzani said that successive Iraqi regimes carried out “systematic and organized genocidal campaigns between 1975 and 1988,” beginning with the Feyli Kurds by “stripping them of their identity documents, deporting thousands of families who had lived in Iraq for centuries, and confiscating their properties.”
He noted that around 12,000 Feyli Kurdish youths remain missing and that many of them—along with members of the Barzani tribe—were subjected to chemical experiments in the Akashat area.
Read more: Decades after Halabja chemical attack, fate of 400 Iraqi children remains unclear
Regarding the operations against the Kurds between 1983 and 1988, and the chemical attack on Halabja in March 1988, the KDP leader described these acts as the regime’s most “heinous crime and the height of its genocidal campaign.”
One of the largest and most horrifying genocides, he recalled, came later, in 2014, when ISIS committed atrocities against the Yazidis in Sinjar—a tragedy that, in his words, “shook the conscience of humanity.”
Barzani stressed that these crimes “will never be forgotten,” emphasizing that when the people of Kurdistan gained power after the 1991 uprising, they did not seek revenge. “Two Iraqi army corps surrendered, yet not a single Iraqi soldier was killed in retaliation.”
“The scale of atrocities committed against the Kurdish people was unprecedented in the modern world. No government has ever bombed its own citizens with chemical weapons or executed them by firing squads, except the former Iraqi regime, which did so against the people of Kurdistan,” Barzani concluded.
Read more: Post-Anfal Justice: Rights group urges reparations for victims
