‘Iraqi soldiers struck the young men in front of their parents with a metal hose’

After Iraqi jets gassed Kurdish peshmerga strongholds in the Gara mountains, 99 men from Guze village were rounded up and executed. AISHA HAJI SALAM describes how her two sons were taken from her and never seen again.

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‘My brother begged for Allah’s help as policemen took him away’

Death was a constant threat for the Kurdish villagers held in detention camps during Anfal. FATIMA KHURSHEED MAHMOUD describes how many of her relatives, including her father and brother, never returned from Iraqi captivity.

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‘My Kurdish family were the original inhabitants of Mama village, not Arabs’

In the 1960s Arab militia drove Kurdish farmers from their homes near Kirkuk and established control over this oil rich territory. ABDUL QADIR ABDULRAHMAN describes how the Ba'ath Party made his family suffer.

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‘The Iraqis tortured, looted and killed so the people of Qara Dara rose up’

Iraq's ruling Ba’ath Party used brutal tactics to "arabise" oil-rich Kurdish lands near Kirkuk in the 1960s. HADI HAMA MUSTAFA, a child at the time, witnessed a Kurdish smuggler being shot dead at an Iraqi checkpoint.

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‘Anyone could be tortured: it made no difference if you were 13 or 70 years old’

When the Iraqis gassed villages just south of the Turkish border, close-knit Kurdish communities fragmented. SHUKRI HASI ABDULLAH, who was from Guze village in the Gara mountains, says it was everyone for himself.

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