One Man’s Story of Saddam’s ‘Anfal Campaign’

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Amin Samin’s 10-year-old son was tending the family’s sheep on a spring day in 1988, when Saddam Hussein’s forces launched their genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds.

Since then Samin, who is now 82 and bedridden, has only seen his son in dreams.

“I had a happy family, owned 80 sheep, and every day my children played with them in the pastures,” Samin recalls in his village home, now bereft of the six children and wife he says were buried alive during Saddam’s systematic killing of the Kurds, which began in 1986 but culminated in the closing weeks of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

 “That day my 10-year-old son was tending the sheep right outside the village, when I heard the sound of helicopters overhead,” Samin remembers, the memories bringing tears to his eyes.  “I ran out of the home to comfort my son, because he was afraid of the sound of helicopters.  But I never found him that day, or ever again. I still see him in dreams,” the old man recounts.

 

Though painful, among Iraq’s estimated five million Kurds Samin’s story is mundane: In 1988 alone, an estimated 182,000 Kurds disappeared in cruel round-ups. In March of that year, death caught up with 5,000 innocent men, women and children, after Saddam’s planes dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja.

For the survivors of Saddam’s so-called Anfal campaign, the memories are still as fresh as the day they last saw loved ones, or were picked up themselves.

In campaigns from February to September 1988, soldiers surrounded Kurdish villages and towns, arbitrarily rounding up Kurds and stuffing them into helicopters and armored vehicles for journeys that ended in Saddam’s infamous prisons.

That day when Samin ran out to look for his son, it was to comfort him from the sound of the  helicopters. Little did the simple villager know what was to occur.

“I didn’t know the village had flocked with soldiers,  or why the helicopters had come. But when I saw the armored cars, I knew something bad was about to happen.”

 

A helicopter landed near him and the sheep, he was summoned by an officer who asked for his gun. When he explained he was a villager and had none, he was searched, and the pocket knife found on him was enough to have him pushed into a helicopter already filled with other cowering villagers.

“I begged him to let me go so I could go find my children, but the officer replied, ‘your children will come too,’” Samin recalls.

The helicopters kept dropping people at schools surrounded by soldiers. Samin thought of escape, but a Kurd working with the soldiers gave him away before he had a chance to try, earning him his first beating, with sticks.

Samin was taken to a prison in southern Iraq, where he was tortured and starved, he recounts, his careful narration of events running like a documentary.

“Mothers and children were screaming for help, children trembled with fear and begged for someone to come and save their mothers from the hand of torturers,” Samin recalls. 

“I had often heard our village mullah (preacher) speak of the torture and suffering of hell. I saw it all in that prison. We witnessed scores of children die from starvation,” he remembers, narrating how one day one of his own wife’s relatives laying on the ground as if in shock, and passing away the same night.

 

Samin recalls the prison’s most brutal torturer, a man nicknamed Hajaj.

“He was a tall, angry and scary man. I only saw him laughing when he was drunk. He never listened to anyone and never called anyone by their name, only cursed at all of us,” Samin says.

Once, the villager risked his life to ask Hajaj what no one had dared ask: Why did the torturer do what he did, and what were the crimes of these poor prisoners?

“Hajaj laughingly replied, ‘we do it because we’re bored,” Samin recalls the man saying, as he spun a bat in his hands.

“Sir, you kill us anyway, why don’t you just shoot us?,” Samin asked. The reply: “Wait! That will come later.”

“I never forgot the day when I was told in prison not to expect to see my wife and children again,” Samin remembers, his tears flowing anew.  “Once, a relative of mine was near death, as her child sat next to her. She didn’t have the strength to say even a word to her child before closing her eyes forever.”

He also remembers a woman removing her dead child’s clothes to use as fuel to make tea, to drink with a piece of dry bread.

Samin remembers one day when guards took hundreds of young people from the prison. “I counted 500 hundred people myself. We all knew they would never come back. They knew it themselves too,” he recalls.

“One night, 28 people died in our prison. Next morning, a doctor told us they had been poisoned.

Years later, Samin was freed due to old age.

“I am not alive,” he says.  “I don’t know how to start over. I have lost everyone.”