Anfal Genocide Remembrance Day

Culture of origin: Kurdish · Historical

Holiday sources: Kurdish

Between February and September 1988, in the last stage of the Iran–Iraq War, Saddam Hussein's Baath regime waged the Anfal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq in eight phases, with ground offensives, aerial bombardment, chemical weapons and forced displacement. Civilians were executed en masse; women and children were taken to camps in southern Iraq, where many were killed and put in mass graves, some buried alive in the desert. Its best-known chemical attack was on Halabja on 16 March 1988. Estimates of the dead range from 50,000–100,000 (Human Rights Watch, 1993) to more than 182,000 killed or disappeared, the Kurdistan Regional Government's figure; about 1,200 villages were destroyed by Wikipedia's account, more than 4,000 by the KRG's. Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali"), its main perpetrator, was sentenced to death in 2007 and hanged on 25 January 2010, and Iraq's parliament has declared the campaign a genocide. Since 2007 the Kurdistan Region has kept 14 April as the day of remembrance for Anfal's victims, with a ceremony each year; only a fraction of the dead have been found.