Witness
Kulajo: My Heart is Darkened
How villagers from a Kurdish farming community in Iraq survived the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Editor’s note: We no longer have rights to show this film on our website.
Filmmakers: Helena Appio and Gwynne Roberts
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In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein launched a massive campaign against the Kurds of Iraq. This was at a time when Iraq was at war with Iran and Hussein wanted to punish the Kurds for siding with the Iranians.
The campaign was code-named ‘Anfal’ and by the time it ended, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were imprisoned or killed.
Kulajo was one of of thousands of farming communities in Kurdistan, caught up in ‘Anfal’. When the campaign began, about 300 people lived in Kulajo – all related to each other – by the end, nearly half were dead.
In this film, survivors from this tiny remote farming community tell their extraordinary stories.
Teimour Abdullah Ahmad, who was 11-years-old during ‘Anfal’ remembers: “I begged him in Kurdish, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t kill us, what did we do? Why are you killing us?’ He didn’t understand, his eyes were full of tears, it was as if he’d been forced to do this.”