"Less than a mile from the checkpoint we reached what had been a large Kurdish town. Except for a small section on the west side that had not yet been leveled, it was just piles of rubble. Between Jalawla and Suleimania, we counted twenty-nine destroyed towns and villages, but clearly there were many more in the area. In some cases, bulldozers were still at work, parked near half demolished buildings. Where the demolition was more advanced, the Iraqi Army had burned orchards and fields, blown up mosques, knocked over grave markers, and stripped wire from the utility poles. Closer to Suleimania, we passed through a landscape dotted with fruit trees but with no sign of human presence, not even a shepherd."
"By August 1, 1990, the Iraqi government had eradicated more than 4,000 of the approximately 4,500 villages in Kurdistan. In eastern Iraqi Kurdistan, the army destroyed the cities of Qalat Diza, Halabja, and Sayid Sadiq. According to the Iraqi Kurdistan Front, al-Majid's [Ali Hassan al-Majid, governor of the north, Saddam Hussein's cousin] decrees put 45,000 square kilometers of Kurdistan off limits to human life, out of a total of 75,000. Kurds living in the prohibited zones were deported to southern Iraq, or executed. After Saddam's fall in 2003, the Kurdistan government minister for human rights, Mohammed Ihssan, led forensic teams that uncovered mass graves containing thousands of Kurdish corpses near Samawa in southern Iraq and west Iraq in Salahaddin Governorate. The Kurdistan Government officially estimates that 182,000 died between 1987 and 1990 in the Anfal [from a Koranic verse interpreted to entitle the Muslim faithful the right to plunder the property of infidels]."

"On the morning of March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes flew over the small city of Halabja, on a plain east of the strategically important Darbandikan Dam in Eastern Kurdistan. The day before, Iranian Pasdaras [Revolutionary Guards] and Kurdish peshmerga had captured the city, but both forces withdrew, possibly suspecting an Iraqi attack. Three years later, I was in Halabja and the survivors told me what happened next. Planes with Iraqi markings dropped bombs that made softer detonations. There followed a smell that resembled burned almonds. Leaves turned brown, and people dropped dead. The corpses turned black."
"More than five thousand people died int he Halabja gassing."
From The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Peter W. Galbraith

Now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- many of whose leaders were the elite among the Saddam military, dismissed with the fall of Iraq to the U.S.-led 2003 invasion to remove Saddam Hussein -- has picked up the bloody thread, targeting Kurds and Yazidis along with Christians and other minority ethnic and religious sects in the regions they now dominate.

In Kurdistan, the most effectively fierce opponent of ISIL, there is haven provided for all those who have been tormented and escaped slaughter by the viciously predatory killers. The Kurds themselves in Syria and Turkey remain targets of discrimination and bloody violence, perpetrated against them by the Turkish military thanks to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They are denied sovereignty in their ancient homelands which Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey claim as their own geography.

How much suffering can a people absorb? When will justice gain them their own internationally recognized sovereign state for a people representing 40 million people denied nationhood?