After the Ba'ath Party came to power in Iraq through the military coup of July 1968, it once again intensified its war and attacks against Kurdistan. The Badinan region was one of the areas attacked by the Iraqi army in its effort to impose control and remove every obstacle before the military authority against which people had struggled and fought for several years. To achieve that aim, it carried out several attacks across many parts of Kurdistan and killed and massacred many innocent civilians. The tragedy of the Christian village of Sorya was one episode in the chain of crimes, massacres, and suffering perpetrated by the brutal Iraqi army in order to preserve and strengthen its position against the leadership of the Kurdish people's revolution and the Kurdish people.

Sorya is a small village on the Silêvan plain in the Zakho district, a few kilometers from Peshabur. It lies on the left bank of the Tigris River, in the Syria-Turkey-Iraq border triangle. Its population numbered about 20 families, most of them Christians who made their living from farming and animal husbandry.

On September 16, 1969, a mine exploded under an Iraqi army vehicle on the main road near the village, killing and wounding those traveling in it. One of those killed was a military officer named Abdulwahab Abdulkarim. Because the village was close to the site of the incident, a large military force was immediately sent there under the pretext of retaliation. When the villagers saw the military convoy heading toward their village, the village headman, the priest, and the priest's driver, who had come to the village as a guest, went out to meet the Iraqi army. The force was commanded by Lieutenant Abdulkarim of the 4th Battalion of the 23rd Brigade. When they reached the village representatives, they arrested all three without asking questions, hearing an explanation, or listening to them. They ordered that they be shot, leaving them writhing in their blood.

They then surrounded the village and forcibly removed the villagers—including women, children, adults, and the elderly—from their homes, herded them behind a wire fence, and detained them. They then opened fire without mercy and committed a massacre. The Ba'athist military officer did not stop there: the soldiers searched among the bodies, fired bullets into the heads of those still alive, and continued until everyone trapped behind the wire had been massacred. He then ordered the houses burned and the village destroyed. This was another part of the Ba'ath regime's planned policy in the Kurdish countryside to destroy the economic infrastructure, a policy known as scorched earth. While the village was burning, 5 children were found in a grain store, and all five were shot. The soldiers still did not stop: they searched the martyrs' bodies, desecrated them, and began plundering the women's gold, cutting off their hands and wrists to take their rings and bracelets.

In total, the number of victims was 39, including 9 women and 11 children. They were all buried in two pits near the village, one for the women and the other for the men. What occurred in this Iraqi army operation against civilians and innocent people such as women and children was a crime that crossed every boundary of human conscience and belongs among the most savage acts of genocide against humanity in the entire past century.

Sources:

  1. Masoud Barzani, Barzani and the Kurdish Liberation Movement, Volume 3, Part 1, the September Revolution 1961-1975, 1st edition, 2004.

  2. Hojin Masoud Sarni, the September Revolution in the Badinan Region 1961-1975, 1st edition, 2018.

  3. Ari Karim, Living Pages from the September Revolution, Khabat Press, Duhok, 1999.

  4. Ibrahim Jalal, Southern Kurdistan and the September Revolution: Construction and Collapse 1961-1975, 4th edition, 2021.

  5. Hawkar Karim Hama Sharif, the September Revolution 1961-1970, 1st edition, Salahaddin University Press, Erbil, 2012.