UNPO - Iraqi Kurdistan: Mass Grave Discovered with 500 Dead

Below is an article published by the Society for Threatened People:

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has been informed that a new mass grave with 500 dead has been discovered in Iraq. It is not far from Tallafa, about 60 km west of Mossul. The first investigations have shown that the victims were Kurds. They were either murdered during the so-called Anfal offensive under Saddam Hussein in 1987/88 or they were victims of the Barzan massacre of 1983, stated the head of the exhumation committee in Iraqi Kurdistan to the GfbV by telephone. The remains are now to be exhumed and together with representatives of the government in Baghdad identified by experts from Kurdistan with the aid of DNA tests.

"Unfortunately the exhumations have to take place under the most difficult conditions, for the mass grave lies in a region in which Islamist terror groups have the upper hand”, reported the GfbV colleague Masud Siany from Arbil, the capital of the north Iraqi autonomous federal state of Kurdistan. The GfbV is represented there with a section.

The Anfal Offensive was carried out under the leadership of Saddam Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan Al Majid (better known under the name "Chemical Ali”). Something like 182,000 Kurds - among them also Christian Assyro-Chaldaic Aramaeans – were killed during eight attack waves by the Iraqi army in the north of the country between February and the beginning of September 1988. Chemical and biological weapons were also used here. The murders were aimed specifically at men of working age and boys aged between eleven and fifty years old to prevent active counter-attacks or later acts of revenge.

In the Barzan Valley the Kurds lost on one day alone, 30th July 1983, nearly all their male population. 8,000 men and boys were loaded onto lorries by the Iraqi military and deported as "agents of international imperialism and Zionism”, driven through Baghdad and exhibited on TV. Those people who had been abducted never appeared again. It was only after many years that it became known that they had been shot. The genocide [attack] against the Kurds was meticulously registered by the Iraqi administration, by the army and Saddam’s special units with all details. Up till now however only 503 of the
murder victims from the Barzan Valley and the remains of 258 dead from the Kurdish area Doli Jafayati could be found, exhumed, identified and brought to Kurdistan.