PM Al-Zaidi honors Barzani victims on Anfal anniversary

Shafaq News- Baghdad

Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi on Friday marked the 43rd anniversary of the killing of thousands of Barzanis, crediting their sacrifices, alongside those of other Iraqi communities, with helping pave the way for Iraq’s federal democratic system.

Al-Zaidi called the Anfal campaign an act of genocide committed by the former Baathist regime as part of its repression of the Kurdish national movement and attempts to suppress Kurdish identity, maintaining that the killings failed to break Iraqis’ opposition to “tyranny and dictatorship.” He extended condolences to the Kurdish people and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), particularly its leader, Masoud Barzani.

In 1983, around 8,000 Barzani men and boys were detained, transferred to southern Iraq, executed, and buried in mass graves. The killings preceded the broader Anfal campaign carried out by Saddam Hussein’s regime against Kurdish communities in the late 1980s under Ali Hassan Al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali.” The campaign involved mass killings, displacement, widespread destruction, and the March 1988 chemical attack on Halabja.

The Iraqi High Criminal Court recognized Anfal as genocide and a crime against humanity in 2011.