PM Barzani commemorates 39th anniversary of Barzani genocide

Shafaq News / The Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, Masour Barzani, issued a statement on the 39th anniversary of Barzani genocide.

The Prime Minister said, "The Barzani genocide is part of a series of cruel crimes committed against this region and the Kurdistan Region. It marked the beginning of the Anfal campaigns and chemical attacks on Kurdistan."

Barzani stressed the need for the Federal government to compensate the families of the genocide and the Anfal campaigns' victims based on the constitution, noting that Baghdad chose to "ignore" this duty for years.

"The Kurdistan Region must always remember the crimes committed against it, and not sacrifice its freedom and autonomy for any reason", he added.

Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were executed during a systematic attempt to exterminate the Kurdish population in Iraq in the Anfal operations in the late 1980s.

They were tied together and shot so they fell into mass graves. Their towns and villages were attacked by chemical weapons, and many women and children were sent to camps where they lived in appalling conditions.

The Kurdish genocide began decades before the Anfal and has claimed countless victims. The genocide perpetrated over decades began with the arabisation of villages around Kirkuk in 1963.

It involved the deportation and disappearances of Fayli Kurds in the 1970s-80s, the murder of 8,000 male Barzanis in 1983, the use of chemical weapons in the late 1980s, most notably against Halabja, and finally the Anfal campaign of 1988. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people perished, families were torn apart, many still live with severe health problems.

At the same time, 4,500 villages were razed to the ground between 1976 and 1988 undermining the potential of Iraqi Kurdistan's agricultural resources and destroying Kurdistan’s rural way of life and heritage.