Criminal court resumes session on Feyli Kurds case

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Iraq’s Supreme Criminal Court on Tuesday resumed its sessions under Judge Ra’oof Rashied Abdulrahman on the trial of suspects in the killing and forced relocation of Fayli Kurds. The judge announced the beginning of the trial with the suspects in attendance, including Ali Hassan al-Majid and a number of former officials. Iraq’s Supreme Criminal Court held its first session on January 26, 2009 to try 16 officials of the former Iraqi regime on charges of involvement in the killing and forced relocation of Feyli Kurds to Iran. The defendants include two brothers of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein – Watban and Sabaawi al-Hassan. Feyli Kurds, who make one of the ethnic groups of the Iraqi people, are inhabiting the border areas between Iraq and Iran, mostly concentrated in the areas of Jalawlaa, Khanaqin, Mandili, Badra, Jassan, al-Kut, al-Numaniya and al-Aziziya. There are no official statistics regarding the number of Feyli Kurds in Iraq, particularly after the mass displacement and citizenship deprivation. Some Feyli writers and politicians attribute this group’s problem to the early stages of founding the Iraqi state, at the end of the conflict between the Persian and Ottoman empires or after the demarcation of borders between the two countries and the following establishment of Iraq after affiliation to the Ottoman empire became the basis for belongingness criteria. The worst displacement, though, has taken place in March and April 1980 when the then-Iraqi government, represented in the so-called Revolutionary Command Council, has issued decrees 150 and 180, by virtue of which all Feyli Kurds had been banished from Iraq. The authorities had then forced all Feyli Kurdish families to emigrate to Iran and took them by force from their original residential areas in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities and threw them at the Iraqi-Iranian borders on the pretext that they belong to Iran with strict instructions to the Iraqi forces to “open fire at whoever tries to return to the Iraqi territories. SH (S)/SR 1