A Post-Anfal Village in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Remote Sensing Retrogressive Analysis

Lenka Starková

doi:10.3390/app11094208

Abstract

The Anfal genocide represents one of the most important events in the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan. This topic is still very sensitive for the majority of local people; on the other hand, it needs to be studied as part of a modern social transformation of the Iraqi agricultural landscape. The violent liquidation of Qazbagi village in the 1980s prompted a large-scale change in the morphology and social structure of the settlement area. This development could be reconstructed through multi-temporal remote sensing, combined with field verification and oral research. According to the results of this study, research focused on the development of rural settlements can be extended to older periods (modern history before the 20th century, the Middle Ages) and thus elucidate the process of nucleation and dispersion of agricultural settlements, which has rarely been studied in an Iraqi context.

Highlights

The end of the 1980s brought radical changes for the Kurds and other ethnic groups in northern Iraq
Operation al-Anfal caused the discontinuity of village settlement on an unprecedented scale, and it is necessary to study how this turning point was reflected in the morphology of the villages that were repopulated
In the Middle East, the most frequently used images of remote sensing are those acquired through the CORONA satellite system

Summary

Introduction

The end of the 1980s brought radical changes for the Kurds and other ethnic groups in northern Iraq. During the Iraq-Iran war, the former Iraqi Baathist government began a series of systematic attacks against the Kurdish fighters. The al-Anfal campaign led to many demographic changes. One of the main aims of the alAnfal campaign was to displace Kurdish people from areas with high strategic importance (oil field areas) and replace them with Arabs from southern Iraq. This process caused extensive changes in the history of the human population in northern Iraq and led to a massive restructuring of settlements in northern Iraq [1].

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion