Anfal campaign

Years of partisan guerrilla operations against the army and agents of Saddam Hussein.

including the years during Saddam's Kurdish genocide, the Anfal, which was sadly capped by the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, which was history's largest chemical strike against civilians.

He was called back to duty to fight against ISIS, and he led Kurdish forces in the Great Battle of Mosul, the largest ground battle since World War II.

In many ways, it became Iraq's Verdun.

using infantry everywhere, with backup by helicopters.

That's why it was hard for them to bear that time.

During Anfal, Qaqsh al-Jaffa was the military part, a military commander of the center.

They had a center in the Qardakh area.

All while Saddam is using chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers and his own people.

The Anfal campaign in 1988 is where I had to put the book down.

A genocidal operation against the Kurds with chemical attacks on Halabja that killed thousands of civilians.

The world saw the images and what happened? A UN condemnation, but no real action.

And people were hungry to kind of get dollars in.

And if you had been a Kurdish person who had gone abroad during the Kurdish Civil War, after the Kurdish Civil War, after Anfal, but you had property.

When you came back, you were like so wealthy because that property had such value.

And so I remember I was teaching in an international school and I had 10th and 11th graders.

Not the realization of that, but the actual doing of that.

Then in 2008, I got a long assignment to go to the Kurdish region of Iraq to create portraits of the survivors of Anfal, which was the-- Saddam's genocide against the Kurds in the 1980s.

Uh, when I was in Iraq, I met an Iraqi photojournalist named Kamaran Najm, um, and I realized that all the photos of Iraq I'd seen up until that point were taken by non-Iraqi photographers.

So the two of us set up a photo agency that was, uh, who-- all we did, and we felt was very important, was to train up Iraqi photojournalists and then represent them to the international press.