Thirty-eight years have passed, yet a certain smell still hangs over Kurdistan. Survivors remember it clearly: the smell of mustard gas, burned earth, and silence. The Anfal genocide of 1988 was not only a military crime committed by the Ba'ath regime under Saddam Hussein. It was a systematic attempt to erase an entire people from history: their bodies, their language, their villages, and their memory.
Between February and September 1988, thousands of Kurdish families disappeared into the deserts of Iraq. More than 4,000 villages were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Up to 182,000 Kurds were killed or disappeared. Men were separated from their families and executed. Women and children were taken to camps. Entire regions of Iraqi Kurdistan were emptied and destroyed.
Halabja became the symbol of this horror when chemical gas fell from the sky on March 16, 1988. Within hours, around 5,000 civilians were dead. The images of lifeless bodies on the streets shocked the world for a brief moment. But Anfal was far greater than Halabja alone. The genocide reached nearly every part of southern Kurdistan: Garmiyan, Badinan, Qaradagh, and hundreds of villages whose names survive today only in the memories of the living.
The tragedy of Anfal was also a tragedy of international silence.
This genocide did not begin suddenly. It was the result of years of dehumanization. For decades, Kurds in Iraq were denied political rights, displaced from their lands, and stripped of their cultural existence. Genocide does not begin with mass graves. It begins with the idea that some people are worth less than others. It begins when a language is forbidden, when identity is denied, and when an entire population is described as a threat.
The violence did not end in 1988. It only changed its form.
Even today, survivors carry the genocide inside their bodies and minds. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, severe depression, chronic anxiety, sleep disorders, psychosomatic illness, and complicated grief. Survivors often speak of nightmares that never stopped, sudden panic, emotional numbness, and a permanent feeling of insecurity. Many were never able to rebuild a normal life after Anfal. Some lost entire families. Others still live with memories of executions, chemical attacks, starvation, and disappearance.
But perhaps the deepest wound is uncertainty.
Thousands of victims still lie in anonymous mass graves across Iraq. Many families still do not know where their loved ones were buried. There is no grave to visit, no final goodbye, no certainty. Grief remains unfinished. The pain continues to live like an open wound that never had the chance to heal.
What is even more painful is that trauma does not end with one generation.
Children and grandchildren of survivors grow up with memories they never personally experienced. They inherit fear, silence, emotional distance, and mistrust. Many children of traumatized parents develop anxiety disorders, depression, problems with attachment, or a constant feeling that danger may return at any moment. Trauma is passed from one generation to the next not only through stories, but also through silence, behavior, fear, and the emotional atmosphere inside families and society.
The psychological impact of Anfal shaped not only individuals, but Kurdish society as a whole. It influenced the relationship between people and the state, between citizens and politics, and between memory and the future. A generation that grew up during bombings, displacement, and mass killing carried these experiences into adulthood. Many of today's political leaders, intellectuals, and public figures in Kurdistan belong to that generation. Their political thinking, their fears, and even their hopes were shaped by war, loss, and insecurity.
Societies that survive genocide often lose trust in stability and justice. When entire villages can disappear within hours, the future itself becomes fragile. Hope becomes difficult. Trust becomes difficult. Even ordinary life can feel uncertain.
This is why Anfal is not only a historical event. It remains a psychological, social, and political reality until today.
And yet, the Anfal genocide has still not received the moral recognition it deserves internationally. For a short time, the images from Halabja shocked the conscience of the world. Then Kurdistan disappeared once again from international attention. Geopolitical interests became more important than human suffering.
That is why recognizing Anfal as genocide is far more than a legal act. It is an act of justice. It means telling survivors: your suffering is real, your death will not be forgotten, and your history matters. But responsibility does not end with recognition alone.
The Iraqi state carries a deep historical and moral responsibility. The recognition of Anfal by the Iraqi parliament in 2008 should not have been the end of the process, but its beginning. Baghdad has the duty to fully and honestly investigate the crimes of the Ba'ath regime, open all mass graves, identify the victims, return remains to their families, and provide long-term psychological and material support for survivors.
Healing does not begin only inside therapy rooms. Healing also requires truth, justice, recognition, and honest confrontation with the past. A society cannot overcome collective trauma while crimes are minimized, ignored, or politically avoided. As long as the truth remains incomplete, trauma continues to live inside society.
This is why the full historical investigation of Anfal is not only about the past. It is about the future of Iraq itself.
Political responsibility cannot stop at memorial speeches once a year. Real action is needed: psychological support centers for survivors, compensation for families, educational programs about the genocide, international recognition, and the inclusion of Anfal in the historical memory of Iraq and the wider world.
Children must learn what happened, not as an abstract number, but as a human tragedy. They must understand that villages were destroyed because the people living there were Kurdish. The goal of genocide is not only to kill people. Its deeper goal is to destroy a people's future. That is why memory is political.
At a time when authoritarianism, ethnic hatred, and dehumanization are once again growing in many parts of the world, Anfal is not only a story from 1988. It is a warning. A warning about how quickly the world can look away when strategic interests become more important than human life.
The survivors of Anfal are still waiting. Not only for compensation, but for something more fundamental: recognition of their humanity.
And perhaps this is the final responsibility of Iraq and the international community: to ensure that the dead of Halabja, Garmiyan, Badinan, and the thousands of destroyed villages of Kurdistan do not die a second time in the memory of the world.
Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan is a psychologist, author and publisher, an expert in psychotraumatology, trauma, terror and war, transcultural psychiatry, psychotherapy and migration.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.