KIRKUK, Iraq - A group of anti-genocide activists is urgently calling for the excavation of a cemetery in southern Kirkuk once used to bury unidentified bodies.
They believe the cemetery may hold the remains of dozens of Kurds who were killed during the toppled Baath regime’s brutal Anfal campaign in the 1980s.
The cemetery, located near Topzawa village, spans nearly 100 dunams and contains over a thousand unmarked graves.
According to Salih Hasib, these are not mass graves, but individual ones. He told Rudaw on Saturday that around 80 percent of those buried in this cemetery may be Kurdish victims of Anfal campaign.
“After extensive investigation, we discovered this cemetery, which was used by the Kirkuk municipality in the 1980s to bury individuals whose bodies were not claimed. We cannot be certain that all the graves belong to our [Kurdish] people, but our research shows that until 1988, fewer than 100 bodies were buried here. Now, the cemetery contains more than a thousand remains,” he told reporters.
The Anfal campaign, carried out in eight stages against what is now the Kurdistan Region, resulted in the mass killing of over 182,000 Kurds.
Even 37 years after the campaign ended, dozens of mass graves remain undiscovered.
Despite its brutality, Anfal was only one chapter in the Baath regime’s decades-long genocide and discrimination against the Kurdish people.
