Iraq discovers Faili Kurds mass graves

Shafaq News / The Martyrs Foundation announced on Tuesday, the discovery of sites of mass graves belonging to Faili Kurds and victims of Baath Party crimes, while the foundation did not indicate the area where the graves were discovered.

The authorities in Saddam Hussein's regime stripped Faili Kurds of Iraqi nationality, and worked to deport them to Iran under the pretext of subordination, before carrying out genocide and burying their youth in mass graves.

A statement of the foundation stated, "The staff of the Department of Mass Graves Affairs and Protection of the Martyrs Foundation managed to analyze some of the aerial photos and link them with information available to them, as several mass grave sites belonging to Faili Kurd victims and the victims of the Baath Party crimes were reached."

The statement added that "the formation of a team headed by the Director General of the Cemetery Department Dia Karim Al-Saadi and the cadres of the department to prepare plans and features and install coordinates for these sites," stressing that "these sites will be included in the department's plans to open them as soon as possible when financial allocations are available for that."

In the 1970s and 1980s, the former regime had expelled half a million people to Iran, according to statistics prepared by the United Nations until 1991.

The Faili Kurds in particular were subjected to systematic displacement since the founding of the modern Iraqi state, and then during the rule of former President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in 1970 and 1975, and by Saddam Hussein in 1980 with many arguments, under the pretext that they were originally from Iran before their nationality was abolished.