The state-affiliated Martyrs Foundation announced that the mass grave, located in the Tal Sheikha area of Iraq’s southern Samawa desert, was exhumed and the remains of 155 Kurds, mostly women and children killed during the 1988 Anfal campaign, were found.
An additional seven graves in the area have been found and are being excavated, according to the foundation.
Chro Hama Sharif, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s martyrs, victims, and political prisoners committee, told Rudaw that the Martyrs Foundation has yet to inform them about the mass graves.
The Anfal campaign began in 1986. Then-president Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime killed more than 182,000 Kurds in two years of slaughter and demolished around 4,500 villages in the Kurdistan Region.
Many of the victims were brought to prisons in the south of the country, where they were killed and their bodies buried in mass graves.
On December 22, several mass graves were discovered via satellite images in Tal Sheikha.
Iraq’s Supreme Court recognized Anfal as a crime against humanity in 2008. Years later, however, very little has been done for the survivors or the families of the victims.
