REFILE-Anfal verdict stirs painful memories for Iraq's Kurds

ARBIL, Iraq, June 24 (Reuters) Ifa Ismail was born in the back of a military truck taking her family from their village in Iraq's Kurdish north to an internment camp. She has no memory of her mother, whose remains were found in a mass grave in 2003.

Ifa, now a 19-year-old student, came into the world in 1988, as Saddam Hussein's troops began a military campaign against Iraq's minority Kurds in which tens of thousands were killed, villages razed, and many rounded up and forced into camps.

Today, the architect of the so-called Anfal campaign, Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majeed, widely known as ''Chemical Ali'', was sentenced to death for genocide by a court in Baghdad.

Kurds in Iraq's now largely autonomous Kurdish region, who have long sought justice over Anfal, celebrated the outcome but also recalled their suffering.

''Do you know why I am called Ifa?'' the 19-year-old asked.

''Because I was born in the back of a truck,'' she said, referring to the East German-made IFA trucks used by the Iraqi military.

''How can I forget what happened? If I forget, my name reminds me of everything,'' she said in Kurdistan's capital of Arbil.

In 2003, members of an Anfal survivors group contacted her to tell her that her mother's remains had been found in a mass grave in the desert in southern Iraq.

The Anfal trial, in which two former military commanders were also sentenced to death and two others given life in jail, heard how the remains of hundreds of Kurdish women and children were found in mass graves in northern and southern Iraq.

ANIMALS SCREAMING Narkez Aziz, 52, another resident of Arbil, lost her husband, a son and her brother-in-law in the Anfal campaign after they were forced from their village into a detention camp.

''I cannot forget the picture of my brother-in-law. He died in detention and then the soldiers threw his body outside the camp. Dogs ate his body,'' she said.

Despite's today's verdicts, Aziz is still looking for justice, saying many Kurds collaborated with Saddam's forces and have not been brought to trial.

''I did not see Ali Hassan al-Majeed or Saddam Hussein when I was tortured. They were a mixture of Kurds and Arabs. I want them to be tried too,'' she said.

The trial, which opened in August 2006, heard scores of witnesses describe villages being burned, thousands of Kurds being taken from their villages and interned or executed, and bombed from the air with mustard gas and other nerve agents.

The town of Halabja is a byword for those chemical attacks, although the March 1988 attack that killed 5,000 residents did not form part of the Anfal trial.

A few dozen residents gathered in the town's graveyard today after hearing that Majeed had been sentenced to hang.

Rizgar Latif, 29, who says he lost 25 members of his family in the gas attack, said he ''felt joy'' at the verdicts.

''I remember we were sitting in our home and then we smelt rotten apples. At first we did not know where it came from. Then the smell became very unpleasant.

''We heard the screaming of women and children and even animals. We started running but people started falling down, one after the other,'' he said, standing in a market in the town.

Nearly 20 years after the Anfal campaign, Kurds say the memories are still painful but they are not yet ready to put them to rest. There is even talk that June 24 will be marked in future years as a holiday, to remember the day that Kurds say they finally received their justice.

REUTERS JT BST0014