Shafaq News/ The remains of about 172 Anfal victims were buried in a large public ceremony in Chamchamal, al-Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region, on Wednesday. The remains which had been in Baghdad's Medicolegal Directorate for four and a half years.
The first lady Shahnaz Ibrahim Ahmed, who attended the ceremony said in a speech: "We honor our martyrs who gave their lives for Kurdistan's freedom, and who were only guilty of being Kurds."
The national campaign to collect blood samples and information from the Anfal victims' relatives started in Chamchamal, by a team from the medicolegal directorate in Baghdad and the Martyrs Foundation, in coordination with the first lady's office and the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), to identify the martyrs.
In 1983, the Kurds rose up against Saddam Husain’s rule, and launched the Anfal campaign, which was deemed "a crime against humanity and genocide" by the Iraqi Supreme Criminal Court in 2011.
Moreover, Saddam assigned the campaign to Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti, the secretary of the north in the Baath Party, who bombed Halabja and nearby villages with chemical weapons on March 16, 1988, in a genocidal attack.
Notably, The Anfal campaign displaced tens of thousands of Kurds from their homes in Kurdistan, and banished many of them to the southern desert, in al-Diwaniyah and al-Muthanna provinces.
After 2003, the former regime's leaders were arrested and tried, including Saddam Hussein in the Anfal case. Some of them, such as al-Majid, were executed.