After the Ba'ath Party came to power in Iraq in a military coup in July 1968, it intensified its attacks on Kurdistan once again. The Behdinan region was one of the areas that fell under the attacks of the Iraqi Army in order to dominate and remove all obstacles to the military rule they had been striving for for years. They carried out a number of attacks on various areas of Kurdistan, which resulted in the death of a large number of innocent civilians. The tragedy of the Christian village of Suriya was one of a series of crimes and massacres carried out by the brutal Iraqi Army against the leadership of the Kurdish people's revolution and the residents of Kurdistan, in order to remain and strengthen their positions.
Suriya is a small village in the Silivana plain in the Zakho region, a few kilometers from Fishkhabur, and is located on the left bank of the Tigris River in the Syrian-Turkish-Iraqi border triangle. The population of the village was about twenty families, most of them Christians, working in agriculture and livestock breeding.
On 16 September 1969, a mine exploded under an Iraqi Army vehicle on the main road near the village, which led to the death and injury of all its passengers, and among the dead was the military officer Abd al-Wahhab Abd al-Karim. Since the village was near the scene of the incident, a large military force headed towards the village on the same day under the pretext of revenge. When the villagers saw the military convoy heading towards their village, the village mukhtar and a religious priest with his driver, who had visited the village as guests to welcome the Iraqi Army forces led by Lieutenant Abd al-Karim from the Fourth Battalion of the Twenty-Third Brigade, went to them, but as soon as they reached them, without any inquiry or question, the army arrested them and killed them by shooting.
Then they besieged the village and took the villagers forcibly, including women, children, and young men from their homes, and placed them inside a wall and arrested them. They did not stop there, but committed a brutal and fierce crime against them, as they killed them all, and no one survived the crime, until all the residents of the village were killed. Not only that, but the army burned their homes and destroyed the entire village. This was one of the Ba'ath's political plans in the villages of Kurdistan to destroy the economic infrastructure under the name of the scorched earth policy. The injustice and assault reached its peak after they found five children inside a grain silo and killed them all. In addition to that, they stole all the belongings of the village people, including cutting off the hands and fingers of women to obtain rings, bands, and gold bracelets. The total number of victims of this incident reached (39) people, including nine women and (11) children, all of whom were buried in two pits, one for women and the other for men, near the village.
Of course, what can be noted in this military campaign of the Iraqi Army against innocent civilians such as women, children, and others, is a crime that exceeded all limits of human conscience, and became the most heinous genocide against humanity over the past century.
Sources:1- Masoud Barzani, Barzani and the Kurdish Liberation Movement, Volume Three, Part One, Aylul Revolution 1961-1975, Ed: First 2004.
2- Hozhin Masoud Sarni, Aylul Revolution in the Behdinan Region 1061- 1975, First Edition, 2018.
3- Ari Karim, Some living pages from the Aylul Revolution, Khabat Press, Duhok 1999.
4- Ibrahim Jalal, Southern Kurdistan and the Aylul Revolution, Foundations and Collapse, 1961-1975. Fourth Edition, 2021.
5- Hawkar Karim Hama Sharif, Aylul Revolution 1961-1970, First Edition - Salahaddin University Press, Erbil, 2012.