In 1983 thousands of Barzani men were taken and never returned. Ji Çîrokên Cînosayda Barzanîyan records the stories of those left behind.
In the summer of 1983 around eight thousand men and boys of the Barzani tribe were rounded up from the camps where their families had been forcibly resettled. Most were never seen again; their remains were found in mass graves in southern Iraq years later.
The documentary series Ji Çîrokên Cînosayda Barzanîyan (From the Stories of the Barzani Genocide) does not try to explain this history from the outside. It listens to mothers, sisters and children who spent decades waiting for news.
Memory as testimony
Each episode centres on a single family. Their homes, their photographs and the objects they kept become the documentary’s evidence. Historians and survivors add context, but the families lead.
“We kept his clothes folded for twenty years. We believed that one day he would knock on the door.”
WAAR produced the series so that these testimonies are preserved for the next generation, in the language in which they were lived.
