Amna Suraka 🇮🇶
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#TBT to this day a decade ago when I was standing in front of this bullet-ridden building. This was Amna Suraka (literally “Red Security”), which served as a prison for political prisoners from 1979 to 1991.
Inside its walls, Kurdish dissidents were tortured, which is now vividly represented by mannequins. Saddam Hussein’s Baathist forces controlled the prison while his brutal, genocidal Al Anfal campaign unfolded against the Kurdish people.
In 1991, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces (literally “Those Who Face Death”) liberated the prison after a 2 hour long assualt, leaving the building covered in bullet holes. You can see them in the second photo.
Opened in 2003, the museum depicts the terrible acts that happened inside, as well of scenes from the nearby Halabja Massacre, where 5,000 Kurds were killed in an instant following a chemical gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s forces.
The Hall of Mirrors in the last photo has a shard of glass for all 182,000 Kurds killed during the Al Anfal campaign, as well as a light for each of the 4,500 Kurdish villages destroyed during this time.
Visiting was a very moving and powerful experience. This helped illuminate a genocide that I knew very little about.
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đź“ŤAmna Suraka Museum, Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region, Iraq. 9 June 2012.
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