The endless road bore witness to an unprecedented and heart-wrenching journey by Hassan from Garmiyan, who has lost all family members, and Ali Arif from Halabja to the barren and terrifying deserts of southern Iraq. A journey seeking, after 38 years, to deliver a letter to that fortress which to this day remains the clearest trace of Baathist brutality and its terrifying legacy. The message carried one short sentence full of sorrow: “Father, I saw with my own eyes the end of Ajaj.”
Until we reached near Baladruz between Baghdad and Samawah, I did not know what painful memory Ali was staring at through the bus window. “Right here our bus stopped because of the cries of a little girl from Halabja whose thirst had exhausted her. She was four years old and her name was Bahar Fakhraddin. She asked for a sip of water, and the officer told her, ‘Come down and I’ll give you water.’ But after a while the officer returned to the bus without the girl and told the driver to continue. Nobody knew what happened to that helpless child left on the roadside! Did he kill her, or leave her alive for the wild dogs and animals?”
The Baathist factory of death turned every Kurdish household into a refuge for heartbreaking stories, waves of grief crashing across frail faces. In this vast, dry, and thorny land, the only moisture can be seen in the eyes of our convoy. This is Arab southern Iraq, yet Kurds still make up the majority of those buried beneath its soil.
Hassan Ali Haji, an Anfal survivor who lost his entire family, brought along his eight-year-old son. “I want him to see how his grandparents, uncles, and aunts were buried with such suffering and humiliation.”
As darkness and dusk fell, the convoy reached the city of Samawah and stayed in one of the Husseiniyas in the Mahdi neighborhood to rest from the exhausting road, because more than two more hours remained before reaching the fortress of death (Nugra Salman prison). The request made by Dara Azizi, a relative of victims from Samawah province who had come to welcome them, was striking: “Please tell your farmers not to cultivate that area. It is all the bones and remains of our people, and nothing grows on their bones!”
Around 300 relatives of victims and survivors of Anfal from various areas of Southern Kurdistan (which includes what is now the Kurdistan Region) waited impatiently for the night to pass so they could resume the journey.
At the beginning of April 1988, Iraq’s former Baathist regime began carrying out a bloody and terrifying campaign to erase an entire nation from its own land and homeland, naming the operation “Anfal.” The massacre claimed the lives of 180,000 innocent Kurdish civilians. After the Holocaust of the Jews, the twentieth century had not witnessed such a brutal genocide.
That horror had reached this place after an even more terrifying prelude, because a month earlier Halabja, Ali Arif’s city, had been annihilated with chemical gas, killing more than 5,000 people and displacing thousands more. Ali himself was among those who, at the age of 17 and suffering the effects of mustard gas and cyanide, had been deported with his family to this endless desert.
Dilshad Ahmed is from the village of Qurri Cha near Kalar, where 56 people were subjected to the Anfal campaign. “Except for God, nobody knows whether we have already passed by their mass grave or if it still lies ahead of us.” Ahmed addressed his fellow travelers while standing on his feet: “For a week now, the burden of Ajaj has lifted slightly from our grieving hearts, but I have not heard a single religious preacher explain to people during Friday sermons what really happened.”
Ahmed wants to remain a good Kurd and cherishes the story of Kurdish identity. That is why he asked people to bring their children on future trips, so future generations would grow deeply rooted in their origins. Then softly he said, “Do you know how our neighbor Mam Hama Ali died here? One of his daughters disappeared during Anfal and he always waited in Nugra Salman hoping to find her again. A fire burned inside him. One day he whispered weakly, ‘I wonder who from Arabs is keeping her now?’ With that longing, one night in Nugra Salman, he died. I saw Mam Hama Ali’s skull lying before a dog.”
Half an hour before reaching Nugra Salman, the vehicles turned onto a dirt road toward Tal Sheikh, part of the endless desert and home to several mass graves, both those already exhumed and those still waiting for Iraq’s indifferent state institutions to uncover them.
The long road of Tal Sheikh was the final path in the lives of thousands of Kurds who were forcibly loaded into military trucks from their villages toward pits of death. Signs suggest these were Kurdish youths who were executed on the way immediately after being separated and then buried beneath the soil.
From the last southern border point of Kurdistan to the Tal Sheikh desert in Samawah province, where most Anfal mass graves are located, is 715 kilometers. Along the road, nothing can be seen except the sky and the dust of the desert.
The crying and wailing of Suad Fars shook the barren plains and silent sky. Who could watch her fist full of dirt and not tremble? I asked myself why this woman raised a new handful of soil to her face with every name she uttered. Fifteen names and 15 handfuls of dirt — they were her sisters and cousins, all left without graves or markers. This soil has received the kisses of Kurdish mothers and fathers more than any other. Do you know why? Because their loved ones’ graves are lost, and to gain even a little comfort they are forced to kiss every place.
Throughout history, Kurds have never been this far from their homeland. Another woman bent over one of the mass graves, 17 meters long, five meters wide, and one meter deep, dug with a bulldozer. Thirty meters away lies another grave exhumed in 2019 from which the remains of 172 victims of Anfal -- women and children -- were recovered.
Bakhtiyar Raouf told me that around 80 other mass graves still exist there. “Last year one grave was unearthed and it contained 154 and a half bodies!” In astonishment I asked, “Half?” He replied that only a few bones had been found and the other half remained missing. “Those remains are still kept at Baghdad’s forensic department and their fate has not been determined. Federal officials say no more graves will be unearthed until those remains are identified because there is no place left to store more bones.”
Bakhtiyar himself is from the small village of Tileko in Kalar district of Sulaimani province, originally part of Kirkuk before the Baath regime attached it to Sulaimani as part of its Arabization campaign. Twenty-eight of his close relatives fell victims of Anfal. “These graves must be opened and the victims returned to their own soil. They cannot endure the alienness of this desert forever.”
If you look at the geographical distribution of Kurdish mass graves across Iraq, you better understand the brutality of the Baath regime toward Kurds. To this day, bones and remains continue to be found in the deserts of Samawah, Najaf, Salahaddin, and elsewhere. Imagine Kurdish victims forever crossing Iraq’s dry and thorny lands searching for their uprooted roots.
As soon as the unsettling silence of the fortress of death appeared, I wanted to quickly reach the place Ahmad Hama Salih, 73, had told me about on April 6, 2012. That man, whom death deprived of seeing Ajaj’s pale and terrifying face again, was the subject of a story I titled “The Grave Digger of the Desert,” because with his own hands he had hidden the bodies of 50 children who died of hunger and thirst from the eyes of dogs.
I remember how his face swelled while speaking, anger reddening his features. He lit a cigarette and said bitterly: “They took us to the cinema and monkey shows. They would bring out a woman and tell a man, ‘Hug her and hold her.’ Then they’d bring another man and tell him, ‘Take that woman.’ God knows what they did to those people. Whoever refused their wishes was beaten.”
Nugra Salman was a factory where Kurds were melted away, like Nazi camps for the Jews. Inside its large halls I heard the screams of the recent history of a stateless and helpless nation. I heard the collapse of humanity when no protection remained to defend one’s honor against the immorality of heartless people in that desert.
I saw Ali Muhammad showing me where his father had been tortured with electric cables. Rizgar Shamzin led me to the place where Ajaj Ahmad Hardan al-Tikriti picked delicate Kurdish girls. Behind every person I followed there was a memory of pain, brokenness, rotting corpses, and death.
But what I witnessed from Amina Muhammad Ahmad was a pain impossible to bear easily. The poor woman dragged herself beneath one of Nugra Salman’s halls, speaking to her son and daughter who had died there of hunger 38 years ago. “By God, that dog Ajaj tied me with cables with these hands and beat me and did not let me stay beside your bodies. My children, I swear I still long for that lonely and weak death you suffered.”
This is the day of reckoning. Every story I hear tears cries from the chests of helpless mothers. At that moment Ali Arif hurried toward me and said, “Come, let me show you the Halabja ward.”
Do you know what the Baathists wrote on the wall of the main Halabja ward? In writing sharper than a knife blade: “Everyone loves the president.” A little farther away another slogan read: “Baath is the school of generations.” At the same moment Ali’s brother was breathing his last with his head on his mother’s lap, these slogans mocked the deaths of those loved ones who all shared one thing in common: they all hated the leader.
The prison guards in Nugra Salman led everything toward death. Every glimmer of hope drowned in despair. “One day 17 bodies were piled up here and nobody was prepared to bury them. Half were from Halabja and the other half from Garmiyan.” As Ali showed me where the bodies had been stacked, Taklif Kamil, the mayor of Salman district, drew my attention to Fazila Muhammad, who had suffered indescribable horrors in that fortress.
– How was your food and drink?
– One hard loaf of bread a day and a cup of dirty water.
– How did the lower-ranking soldiers under Ajaj treat you?
– A few of them were kind, but most behaved like him.
– I heard you have been searching for Kazim and Jasim, two brutal officers under Ajaj. Did you find anything?
– Someone we know in Salman told me Kazim and Jasim died from terrible illnesses.
Then the mayor of Salman said Fazila had a message for the people of Kurdistan and the governments of Iraq and Kurdistan: “University and institute students must be brought here and taught practical lessons about the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The Kurdistan government should do this too, because this fortress is a very good teacher.”
The journey took place on Friday. One of the clerics delivered a Friday sermon reminding attendees that in the end all oppression returns before God’s justice. The collective prayer held there was not only an expression of gratitude for the fall of Ajaj, but also an answer to the choice of the operation’s name, which came from a chapter of the Holy Quran.
I saw Salih Fatih and two young men from Garmiyan returning from the graves outside the fortress carrying a nylon bag. Before I even reached them, I asked what they had been doing there for two hours. Salih told one of the youths to open the bag and show me. “I found the clothes of a neighbor of ours at the grave site.”
– How did you know it was his grave?
– I buried him with my own hands.
– But that is a dishdasha!
– Yes. The day they brought him to Nugra Salman he was wearing that dishdasha. He was an old man. He died wearing it.
– Who killed him?
– Ajaj. Aajaj drove his knee into his stomach three times and he died.
It was time to leave. Many journeys and stories remain. It seems this barren and endless desert, more than 800 kilometers from Ali Arif’s neighborhood of Bakh Mir and 715 kilometers from Hassan’s sorrowful village, whether one wants it or not, will continue like a magnet pulling future convoys toward itself. Those convoys whose entire bloody historical justification can be summed up in one phrase: “Because they were Kurds.”
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.