According to KurdPress, the Anfal operation, which the Iraqi Baath Army carried out against the Kurds in 1988, played a fundamental role in the formation of Kurdish identity in Iraq and is considered one of the fundamental narratives in the political and social history of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Although there are many written sources about Anfal, the most authentic and tangible narratives are still the oral testimonies of the survivors of this campaign, which were formed not through abstract concepts, but from the lived experience of the victims.Survivors of Anfal use familiar elements of their lives and culture to explain what happened to them, from nature and animals to religion, tradition, culture and collective memory. A study by Hirsch Abdullah Hamma Karim of the Jabbari area in Garmyan, near Kirkuk, published on the website of the London School of Economics, attempts to reconstruct a coherent narrative of Anfal, drawing on oral testimonies collected during fieldwork, in which the narrators’ words and structures are preserved as much as possible.

Anfal in the Jabbari area

The Anfal operation was carried out in eight phases from February to September 1988. According to Kurdish sources, some 182,000 people were killed in the operation and more than 5,000 villages were destroyed. Iraqi forces carried out coordinated air and ground attacks on Kurdish areas, including the use of chemical weapons.The third phase of Anfal, commanded by Barak Haji Hanati, targeted the Garmyan region and parts of Kirkuk between 7 and 20 April 1988. According to the data used in this study, an estimated 159,433 people were injured and 43,841 killed in this phase.

A large proportion of civilians were transferred to the Topzawa, Dibs and Tikrit detention camps, while others were executed in the deserts of southern Iraq. After the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the official amnesty declared by Saddam Hussein, some survivors were able to return to Kurdistan. Jabbari, which is part of the Garmyan region, was one of the areas that suffered heavy losses during Anfal. Of the population of 2,481 in the region, 284 deaths were recorded, which is approximately one in ten of the population.Narrative Codes of Anfal

One of the most important features of the oral narratives of Anfal is the extensive use of images and metaphors that originate from the natural environment of Kurdistan. For the villagers who had lost their homes and lands, nature was one of the main sources of knowledge of the world. Animals, birds, and insects were part of their daily experience, and these elements later entered their narratives to recount the Anfal experience.

When describing the onslaught of soldiers, one of the survivors likens them to locusts; a metaphor that conveys the devastation and vastness of the attack. In this narrative, the experience of war is made understandable to the listener not through military and political language, but through an image of devastating nature. Religion is also one of the most important semantic frameworks in the survivors’ narratives.The concept of the Day of Judgment in Islam, which is associated with fear, screaming, chaos and people’s ignorance of each other, has been the best image for some survivors to describe the moments of Anfal.

“The voices of children, women, dogs and sheep mixed with the smoke made us feel like we were on the Day of Judgment,” says one survivor. Another survivor summed up the experience as follows: “We felt like we were seeing the Day of Judgment on Earth.”

In this way, the Anfal narrative crosses the world of nature and religion and reaches the realm of Kurdish culture and language. Certain cultural terms and symbols are used to express the intensity and density of the event. For example, the Kurdish phrase “not even a needle can reach the surface of the earth” describes a situation in which everything has become so crowded and dense that there is no room left for anything new.But language, culture, religion, and nature are not always able to explain the Anfal experience. At times, what happened to the victims was so incomprehensible that even the narrator himself could not explain it.

“I didn’t know why that night seemed so long. We didn’t know where we were going. The buses came one after the other, taking people away. We didn’t know what they were going to do to them. Would they kill them or not? I didn’t know why the soldiers were doing it. We didn’t know what they were going to do to us in Saudi Arabia [southern Iraq],” says one survivor of the night of the transfer.

This inability to explain is also part of the historical narrative of Anfal. Silence, hesitation, unanswered questions, and unfinished sentences have become part of the survivors’ memory.Anfal and the Formation of Kurdish Consciousness

One of the most important findings of these oral narratives is the direct connection between the Anfal experience and the formation of consciousness about Kurdish identity. The victims of Anfal considered themselves Kurds, and during their detention and transfer to the camps, they observed thousands of other prisoners who also realized that the victims of this operation were mainly Kurds and Kurdish-speaking. As a result, it became clear to many of them that being Kurds was part of the reason they were subjected to this organized repression.

“You thought there was no one left, but there was a huge crowd there,” says one survivor about entering the Topzawa camp. Another survivor says: “When we looked around, we saw only Kurdish men. We felt like there was not a single man left in all of Kurdistan and everyone was here.»

The experience raised a fundamental question in the minds of survivors: If all these people are Kurds and all were targeted for the same reason, what is the fate of the Kurds and why are they unable to defend themselves? One narrator puts the question this way: Are the Kurds really helpless? Direct exposure to mass killings caused some victims to confront for the first time the question of why Kurdish society could not defend itself.

In some accounts, even a religious interpretation of Anfal appears. Some survivors have raised the possibility that the disaster was God’s punishment or wrath against the Kurds, a perception that was shaped by their Islamic beliefs and suggests that the victims turned to available sources of meaning to make sense of a disaster that was difficult for them to rationally explain.The Importance of Oral History of Anfal

The study of oral narratives by Jabbari shows that survivors, despite their great efforts to reconstruct the past, cannot fully and accurately translate the experience of Anfal into reality. Human memory is always influenced by language, culture, social environment, religious beliefs, and personal experience. But this does not mean that oral narratives are unrealistic. On the contrary, oral narratives of Anfal were formed in a specific social and local context, and this context gives them a historical and social reality that is not visible in many official and written sources.

From this perspective, the historian’s task is not simply to record events; he must also explain what happened, why it happened, and how survivors remembered and narrated it.In researching genocides such as Anfal, historians cannot ignore the oral narratives of the victims. The narrative must first be recorded as the survivor tells it, and then the narrative codes, metaphors, symbols, and cultural frameworks embedded in it must be analyzed.

The importance of this approach is that it does not reduce Anfal to a mere collection of statistics, names of destroyed villages, concentration camps, and numbers of victims. Oral history shows how Anfal has remained in the memory of the people who experienced it; how nature, religion, and culture have been used to explain a historical catastrophe; and how the experience of mass murder has become part of Kurdish historical consciousness and identity.Ultimately, the oral narrative of Anfal is not just the narrative of a generation of victims; it is part of the collective Kurdish memory of the relationship between identity, repression, statehood, and survival. For this reason, recording and analyzing these narratives is not a complement to the written history of Anfal, but rather a primary source for understanding the human and social meaning of this genocide.

London School of Economics