Mîtra

Hybrid warfare

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beautiful world day one million

David Hockney

Stress Yoan Capote

Had a vision that I needed to make a newt bowl. I will never do ceramics again, but 10/10 experience every time I eat soup 🦎

"The Kiss", a 12,000-year-old rock painting at Pedra Furada in Brazil

Trailer from the documentary ‘All My Mothers’. “In the summer I ask for my bed to be placed on the side of the road [...] that I wish one of the people in the cars (passing by) was one of my sons”. Never forget. Enfal le bîr nakeyn.

While we remember the victims of the Anfal as part of our collective identity, it’s equally important to remember the survivors and the difficulties they faced not only during the genocide but also after it.

Because if these women worked on their own, they were sometimes stigmatized and rumors could spread. There have even been cases in the past of some being killed.

Many of these women shared a strong sense group identity, many ended up living in communities together after their release, they raised their children together and went to work together. (Younger women who got work easier would form groups and help other, older women, get a job).

There are few studies on the Anfal in general but @chomahardi has for example written a book about the women’s experience of Anfal; their lives, survival strategies, sexual abuse, rebuilding of their lives and the difficulties they faced; poverty, exploitation, stigma, and so on.

Many of the women survivors, both those who managed to flee or were in hiding and those who were taken to concentration camps had to rebuild their lives and take up all the responsibility of their (surviving) children alone.

Despite all these things, they are still here today, among us. We should not view these strong and resilient people as victims but as survivors. Another group that needs more attention are the women survivors of Anfal which is often neglected.

Survivors do not only deal with mental health issues and the burden of having to deal with their memories of horror but also struggle with stigmatization, marginalization, poverty and lack of opportunities for their children.

Issues of discovering mass graves, the question of where their family and relatives were taken, what happened to them, where and how they were killed is something many survivors had to deal with. Many hoped their loved ones would return up until the toppling of Saddam in 2003.

Not only do we need to hear their stories but we also need to acknowledge many issues and obstacles they have and are facing still. Many Anfal survivors suffer from mental health issues due to trauma but also due to lack of closure. Many don’t have graves to mourn at to this day.

[This book have collected many survivor’s stories on what they experienced and how they survived during the Anfal, region by region.]

The Anfal is also a story of survivors. The Anfal is a testament of how violence rupture human bonds that are necessary for cohesion, identity and mental health. It is thousands of individual stories of suffering, grief, fear, hope, survival. Listen to their stories.

There are a few things I think we need to talk about more. The Anfal is more than 180.000+ victims, usage of chemical gases and the destruction of more than 4.000 villages. The Anfal story is much more than numbers and casualties only.

Today is the remembrance day of the #AnfalGenocide, the 8 step campaign aimed at exterminating a large portion of the rural population through concentration camps, ground/arial offensives, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportations, firing squads & chemical warfare.