Mass Grave with Remains of 150 Kurdish Women and Children Unearthed in Southern Iraq

Peregraf

A mass grave of Anfal victims containing the skeletons of approximately 150 Kurdish women and children has been excavated in southern Iraq's Muthanna province. The bodies bear bullet marks on their heads, indicating execution-style killings.

The grave, located in the Tel Sheikh area of Salman district, 130 kilometers from the provincial center, was discovered via satellite imagery in May 2024.

"What we saw is beyond description. We saw women hugging their children," Iraqi First Lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmad said tearfully as she oversaw the excavation. "They are wearing spring clothes and have bullet wounds on their heads. What pain they must have suffered."

The First Lady announced that DNA samples would be taken from the remains to identify their relatives, a process that has been a long-standing demand of the families of the Anfal victims. The collection of DNA samples from the victims' relatives will continue as part of this initiative.

In December 2023, the remains of 172 suspected Kurdish Anfal victims were returned to the Kurdistan Region for reburial. The burial ceremony took place on February 21, 2024, at the Anfal Monument in Chamchamal. These remains, including women and children, were found in a mass grave in Muthanna governorate in 2019 and had been stored in Baghdad for more than four years.

The exhumation of mass graves, identification of remains, and reburial of Anfal victims are governed by the Law on Mass Graves Affairs No. 5 of 2006. Despite the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims from the Anfal and Barzani genocides of the 1980s, only about 2,500 bodies have been exhumed from the southern deserts and returned to the Kurdistan Region.

The Anfal campaign, which lasted seven months from February to September 1988, resulted in the systematic killing of more than 182,000 people across eight regions of the Kurdistan Region. Thousands of villages were destroyed. The third phase of the campaign, centered on the Garmian region, is widely regarded as the most brutal.