After the Ba'ath Party became the ruling power in Iraq through the military coup of July 1968, they intensified their wars and attacks on Kurdistan again. The Badinan region was one of the areas that was subjected to an attack by the Iraqi army to establish dominance and remove all obstacles in the way of the military power they had been struggling and fighting for for several years. For that purpose, they carried out several attacks on many areas of Kurdistan and killed and massacred many innocent civilians. The epic of the Christian village of Sorya was one of those series of crimes, massacres, and miseries that the brutal Iraqi army carried out to continue and strengthen its position against the leadership of the Kurdish people's revolution and the Kurdish people.

Sorya is a small village in the Silêvaneyan plain of the Zaxo district and is a few kilometers away from Pêşabûr, located on the left side of the Tigris River in the Syria-Turkey-Iraq border triangle. Its population was about 20 families, most of whom were Christians, who were engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry.

On September 16, 1969, on the main road near the village, a mine exploded under an Iraqi army vehicle, and as a result, all its passengers were killed and wounded. One of the dead was a military officer named Ebdulwehab Ebdulkerîm. Because the village was close to the scene of the incident, on the pretext of revenge, they immediately sent a large military force to the village. When the people saw that the military convoy was heading towards their village, the village mukhtar, the religious priest, and his driver, who had gone to the village as guests, went to meet the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army forces, under the command of Lieutenant Ebdulkerîm from the 4th Battalion of the 23rd Brigade, when they came to the village greeters, without asking, explaining, or listening, captured those three, gave the order to shoot them, and left them wallowing in blood.

Then they surrounded the village and forcibly removed the villagers, including women, children, the elderly, and children, from their homes, put them in a fence, and captured them. Then they mercilessly opened fire on them and carried out a massacre. The Ba'ath military officer did not stop there; he searched the corpses, shot the brains of those who were still alive, and massacred everyone who was stuck in the wire. Then he gave the order to burn the houses and destroy the village. This was another of the planned policies of the Ba'ath regime in the rural areas of Kurdistan to destroy the economic infrastructure, known as the scorched earth policy. During the burning of the village, they found 5 children in a grain warehouse and shot all five of them. They did not stop there; they searched the bodies of the martyrs, insulted them, and began looting the women's gold, cutting off their hands and wrists to take their rings and bracelets.

In total, the number of victims reached 39, including 9 women and 11 children. They were all buried in two pits, one for women and the other for men near the village. Certainly, what is seen in the Iraqi army's military operation against civilians and innocent people such as women and children is a crime that has crossed all boundaries of human conscience and has gone into the category of the most brutal genocide against humanity in the entire last century.

Source:

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

  2. Hojîn Mesûd Sernî, September Revolution in the Badinan Region 1961-1975, 1st Edition, 2018.

  3. Arî Kerîm, Some Living Pages in the September Revolution, Xebat Printing House, Duhok 1999.

  4. Îbrahîm Celal, South Kurdistan and the September Revolution Construction and Collapse 1961-1975, Fourth Edition, 2021.

  5. Hawkar Kerîm Hema Şerîf, September Revolution 1961-1970, 1st Edition - Salahaddin University Printing House, Erbil, 2012.