The Desert Witnessed Everything: The Location Where Kurdish Children Were Interred Alive

Peregraf- Haval Ghalib

The long road to Tel Sheikh was not merely a journey into the desert—it was the final route of life for thousands of Kurds, forcibly taken from their villages into military custody, driven toward the mass graves.

From the farthest point of the Kurdistan Region’s border to the Tel Sheikh desert in Samawa Governorate, Iraq —where the largest mass graves of the Anfal victims are located—the distance spans 715 kilometers. Along this path, nothing is visible except the vast sky and the endless desert sands.

"How terrified those women and children must have been, in what psychological state they must have endured, how the soldiers must have brutalized them. Perhaps when the military trucks reached the edges of the mass graves, these women and children hoped they would be given water and their suffering would end—not that they would be buried alive," said Habil Ahmed.

Habil, the director of the Anfal Monument in Chamchamal and a witness to that deadly route, traveled earlier this year with a group of Anfal survivors to visit the mass graves of women and children in the Tel Sheikh desert.

Many of the women and children from various villages and regions of Kurdistan had perhaps never been so far from their homeland in their lives and had never traveled such a distance by road. Many similar questions arise in the minds of those who, like Habil, walk this path today—how distant and arduous it must have been for the victims, who were transported under the worst conditions imaginable. How much hunger, exhaustion, and terror they must have endured inside those military trucks.

"We can never fully articulate neither in speech nor in writing, the magnitude of the oppression inflicted upon the Kurdish people in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, you realize the depth of our enemies' hatred and the inhumanity with which they buried Kurdish women, children, and men alive," Habil Ahmed told Peregraf.

During the Anfal campaigns in the 1980s, the Iraqi Ba’ath regime forcibly displaced thousands of Kurds—including women and children—from Kurdish regions to the remote deserts of southern Iraq, where they were executed and buried alive in mass graves. Many of these graves remain undiscovered to this day.

"The mass grave we visited was 17 meters long, five meters wide, and one meter deep, dug with a shovel. Just 30 meters away was another grave exhumed in 2019, containing the remains of 172 Anfal victims—women and children," Habil recounted. In the same area, another grave was marked for exhumation, and two more mass graves were discovered nearby, meaning three additional graves in Tel Sheikh are yet to be opened.

In the Tel Sheikh desert, the remains of 172 Anfal victims were exhumed and, after forensic examination, reburied in Chamchamal in February 2024. Currently, the remains of 153 victims from a mass grave in Samawa have been exhumed and sent to the Baghdad Medical Institute for DNA testing.

So far, 1,745 remains have been recovered from mass graves in central and southern Iraq and reburied in Kurdistan.

Pari Nuri, an advisor to the Iraqi Presidency and the representative of Iraq’s First Lady for Mass Grave Affairs, told Peregraf: "The same team working on exhuming the graves operates from Zakho to Faw. They handle mass graves from ISIS, Anfal, and the Iran-Iraq War. The process is not slow—it is meticulous, scientific, legal, and humanitarian, conducted according to international standards."

Anfal mass graves are scattered across Iraq:

- Mosul: 256 remains exhumed, reburied in Dukan, Sulaymaniyah, in early 2008.
- Dubz Military Prison: 106 remains exhumed, reburied in Chamchamal in April 2010—victims of starvation and torture, including 104 children and one pregnant woman.
- Najaf: 187 remains found, reburied in Garmiyan in April 2014.
- Mahari Desert (Najaf): 730 remains exhumed, returned to Chamchamal in May 2012.
- Hamrin Mountain (Salahaddin): 158 remains, transferred to Garmiyan in late 2012, with only two sent to Chamchamal.
- Near Nugra Salman Prison (Samawa): 56 remains exhumed, reburied in Garmiyan in mid-2014.
- Topzawa Military Base (Kirkuk): 80 remains found, reburied in 2013.

The process of locating, exhuming, identifying, and reburying remains follows Iraq’s Mass Grave Affairs Law No. 5 of 2006, managed through specialized committees.

Pari Nuri explained, "After exhumation, each remains is placed in a forensic bag and sent to Baghdad for DNA sampling. Unfortunately, identification has been delayed due to the lack of a centralized database for Anfal victims by both the Kurdistan Regional Government and the federal government."

Once DNA samples are taken, the remains are returned to Kurdistan and reburied in Chamchamal or Garmiyan. If any identifying documents (like IDs or notebooks) are found, a biological code is assigned for future identification.

"The Baghdad Medical Institute cannot store all remains indefinitely—delaying their return would hinder further exhumations."

In Baghdad, forensic experts reassemble skeletons, take bone samples, and assign biological codes. Under the First Lady’s directive, a committee has been formed to collect blood samples from Anfal survivors. So far, 2,250 samples have been collected in Chamchamal, Garmiyan, and Koya.

"We’ve urged the team to expedite identification to validate the process internationally and prove the Kurdish genocide," Nuri said.

In 2007, after extensive hearings, Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal recognized the Anfal campaigns as genocide, based on witness testimonies and international conventions.

Among the 172 remains returned to Chamchamal last year, several IDs were found—one belonging to Jawhar Kani Hanjiri. Eleven members of his family were Anfal victims. After identifying his brother’s remains, Jawhar now seeks answers about the fate of his other ten relatives, disappeared in the fourth Anfal phase in Aghjalar.

One morning, Jawhar and other Anfal survivors traveled from Chamchamal to southern Iraq’s deserts to witness an exhumation—to see with their own eyes the crimes committed against their loved ones.

"The road is unbearably long. Even with modern cars and rest stops, it is grueling. I remembered a survivor, an elderly woman, who said on TV: ‘They took us… took us… took us… far, far away.’ My heart ached. How could they have endured this journey in military trucks?" Jawhar told Peregraf.

A fellow survivor recounted, "In a prison yard, women and children were separated. One child tried to run to his mother. An officer grabbed him, broke his neck in front of her, and threw his body aside."

Six kilometers from Nugra Salman, Jawhar saw a freshly exhumed mass grave—a pit where women and children’s remains were tangled together.

"You could tell they were embracing each other, executed together. I saw baby bottles, toys, scarves, and mirrors—they had hoped to live until the edge of the grave."

Pari Nuri noted that while they welcome Anfal families’ visits to mass graves, the trips are emotionally devastating.

"The scenes are traumatic. The sites are remote, with no medical facilities. Many visitors suffer psychological breakdowns. The cruelty is overwhelming, and sometimes our work is delayed."

The horrors left Habil Ahmed sleepless after returning from Tel Sheikh. "Mothers were blindfolded with their scarves, children gagged. Bullet casings still littered the grave edges—some were inside the graves."

The Anfal campaigns lasted seven months (February–September 1988), spanning eight phases across Kurdistan. The Ba’ath regime disappeared over 182,000 people, massacring them and destroying thousands of villages.