Families of missing Iraqis share endless anguish

Baghdad: the table running across sam yak ha sr o’ s living room wall is a shrine to the missing: flickering candles and fading photographs of her 26 Iraqi relatives who vanished 35 years ago.

Khasro, who hails from a once-persecuted Shiite Kurdish minority, says her family was guted by the disappearance of so many loved ones - and the anguish of not knowing their fate.

“We’re still waiting. The day we get their bones, only then can we say they died ,” says the 72- year-old.

The 26 are Khasro’s siblings, in-laws and their children. Across the broader family, more than 100 remain missing.

Iraq is one of the countries with the highest number of missing or disappeared persons, according to the International Commitee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The numbers range between 250,000 and well over a million, a discrepancy indicating both staggering loss and the difficulty of documenting such cases.

They have accumulated across decades of instability, beginning with ex-dictator Saddam Hussein’s practice of executing and forcibly disappearing his opponents en masse.

Saddam’s Iraq fought a deadly war with Iran in the 1980s and between 1987-1988 carried out the ruthless “Anfal Operation,” which is thought to have killed some 180,000 Kurds.

His forces also targeted the ethno-religious minority of Shiite Kurds, with many jailed in secret, forcibly evicted from Iraq or simply snatched off the street.

Khasro, a former parliamentarian who spoke in her Baghdad home, believes that’s how her family was shatered.

“Did I tell God to make me Kurdish? Or to make my birthplace Iraq? Or make me Shiite? It’s not my fault, it’s inherited - so how can I be punished for it?” she asks.

Virtually every family in Iraq has been touched by a case of enforced disappearance and its seemingly endless grief.

Khasro’s husband Saadoun has not seen or heard from one of his brothers since they were young men, and another let Iraq 45 years ago, fearing persecution.

As they age, Khasro fears the answers her family has sought will be buried along with the older generation.

“We’ ll go eventually. but will the grief of those who come ater us be the same as our grief?” she asks.

Iraq has made some progress in its missing case files in recent months, uncovering several mass graves dating back to the Anfal campaign and the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait.