Forced Resettlement of the Kurds

Regarding to my experience, Kurdish experience or Kurdistan experience, I want to add that during 1988, starting from March 1988, Saddam Hussein decided to pull the Kurds out of their region, put them in collective towns. He named that operation Anfal Campaign. Anfal Campaign was implemented during nine steps, nine operations. The first operation was where the main resistance was. According to the papers that I saw, Saddam Hussein said that the head of the snake is here; that was where the Kurdish parties were struggling, especially Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. So when they did that, then they implemented the second step, was towards the oil-rich areas. What Saddam Hussein did, he gathered all the people that were living in the oil-rich lands. The Kurds that were living in the oil-rich lands, about 200,000 people, were taken to the southern desert of Iraq and they were buried alive. Iraq used about thirty-five times chemical weapons against Kurdish villages and towns, then destroyed over 4,500 cities and towns and villages. In the rural country there was only few villages and towns and cities that were left all over Kurdistan during 1988. Saddam Hussein destroyed a type of living that has been there since first time mankind moved from the caves to be settled in villages. Some of these villages and towns were very old. We have the city of Irbīl, is the only city in the world that live was continuously in it in the past 9,000 years. This is history. Saddam Hussein was destroying that history, that type of living in Iraqi Kurdistan, and buried people alive. There is over, as I say, 200,000 people in the oil-rich lands that have been buried alive.