‘Children died like leaves falling from trees’: Anfal in a Baath prison

The moment he steps into the Anfal monument in Chamchamal, Hazhar Ghazi’s feet take him to the tombs of the children who died in Nugra Salman and Dibs prisons, for he was almost one of them. Ghazi was born in Dibs prison and barely made it out alive. Whenever he lays his eyes on a tomb, he thinks that it could have been him.

Ghazi is an Anfal survivor who resides in the town of Shorsh, near Kurdistan Region’s Chamchamal district.

The Anfal campaign, named after the eighth surah in the Quran, was the codename for Saddam Hussein’s genocidal massacre of around 182,000 Kurds in the 1980s when his army raided Kurdish villages accused of siding with revolutionary Peshmerga, separated families, and imprisoned thousands of women and men.

Ghazi’s mother was imprisoned and pregnant. When she went into labour, the women in the ward pleaded with the Iraqi soldiers to let her deliver her baby in a hospital or a safe place, but they refused and her fellow prisoners had to act as midwife.

His mother told him the tale of his birth and Ghazi recounts it as if it is still happening now: “The women try hard to be given a razor or anything sharp to cut my umbilical cord, but they are denied. So they go and bring two rocks, and put one under the cord and hit with the other until the cord ruptures… I was born that way.”

Another story Ghazi recalls is about his cousin who asked for a cucumber after seeing one in the hand of a soldier. The soldier refused to give a piece to the child and the women had none to give him. So his mother handed him a green sandal. “He has a single green sandal in his mouth until the moment he died,” said Ghazi.

The women who survived are eyewitnesses of the atrocities that were carried out in Nugra Salman and Dibs prisons. Auntie Rezhaw, one of the survivors, has more than 10 of her relatives buried in lost graves. She now lives in Chamchamal and remembers dozens of children dying every day in the prisons. Scores of women, too, died in childbirth or from illness and hunger.

“Imagine a woman going into labour and no one comes to help. No matter how much we screamed and yelled, it was futile. I was one of them. In one of the wards of the prison I had a piece of cloth in hand until the woman gave birth to her child, but children died like leaves falling from trees. Some days 50 children used to die,” she said.

“The soldiers told us, we don’t care, let them die,” she added.

Thirty-five years later, Rezhaw still has the blanket that was the only thing she had to keep her children warm in prison. She said she raised four children with that blanket in prison. It was a carpet, a blanket and all they had to feel some warmth. It is a souvenir from the darkest and bitterest days of her life.

The Lights of Midnight is a book that tells the stories of the tragedy of Anfal through the eyes of four children who were born in Dibs prison. “At first, it was said the number of children born in the prisons and still alive is a lot, but after investigations with the directorate of martyrs and Anfal we found out that only four of them are alive and they live in the town of Takia,” said author Ismail Hanarayi.

The children were given names reflecting the situation they born into. One is called Najat (survival in Arabic) because he and his mother were released from prison days after he was born. Another’s name is Ghambar (sad in Kurdish), but was later changed to Dilshad (happy in Kurdish).

Most of the children lost their fathers during the massacres of Anfal and the job of raising and nurturing them fell entirely on the shoulders of the women.

Ghazi’s father disappeared during Anfal. Twenty years later his mother died after falling from the rooftop of their home. Now, he is asking for the return of the remains of his relatives and other victims of Anfal.

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