Bullets on the ground in Mosul, Iraq, 01 June 2017. Picture by Noe Falk Nielsen/NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All right reserved. I arrived in Baghdad in November 2013. It was part of my doctoral research on the afterlives of the Iraqi Baʿth state’s al-Anfāl genocide (1987-1991). I wanted to record how the Iraqi federal government shows its responsibility for the past, present, and future of Iraq. I saw the future of Iraq to be entirely wrapped in women survivors’ persistent demands for legal and ethical justice, for tracing, exhuming, identifying and returning the remains of their loved ones scattered in unknown mass graves in the country. In Iraq women survivors remain the voice that translates into the ethical urgency for building a more responsible and virtuous Iraq.
With modern bureaucracy the Iraqi Baʿth regime pulled religion and the constitution together to justify and to make legitimate genocidal violence. The state’s decree no. 4008, dated June 20, 1987, declares the Kurdish rural areas and village as outlawed, and that they “shall be regarded as operational zones strictly out of bound to all persons and animals […] in which the troops can open fire at will […] The Corps shall carry out random bombardment, using artillery, helicopter and aircraft […] in order to kill the largest number of persons in the outlawed areas.” Jointly with thousands of other al-Anfāl documents, the decree became a key legal evidence during the al-Anfāl trials (2006-2007) and was used against Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Secretary General of the Northern Bureau from 1987-1989. Al-Majid was the one who had signed the decree. Following the trials, the verdict judged al-Anfāl as genocide.
“This is life in Baghdad. It is a biological duration”
