Composite Opinion @jfhorsley - Tumblr Blog

If you could one by one count all the leaves in this garden. If you could count all the fish little and big in the flowing river in your front of you. If you could one by one count the migratory birds during their migration season. From the North to South and from the South to North. I would also promise to count one by one all the victims of this beloved land of Kurdistan.

*Thousands of Kurds, driven out of Iraq by Saddam’s troops, were forced to live on the side of a mountain range between Iraq and Turkey. A thousand died a day from lack of water, denied to them by the Turks who would not allow them to come into Turkey.

gulistan

The government has tried to assimilate the Kurdish people for years, oppressing them, banning publications in Kurdish, persecuting those who speak Kurdish, forcibly deporting people from fertile parts of Kurdistan for uncultivated areas of Anatolia where many have perished. The prisons are full of non-combatants, intellectuals are shot, hanged or exiled to remote places. Three million Kurds, demand to live in freedom and peace in their own country.

Nuri Dersimi, 1937 (via gulistan)

ibtimesuk

"No-one can imagine how difficult it was to live under Saddam Hussein’s regime,” she said. “It happened ten years ago but sometimes I feel ‘Oh my God, is he really gone?’ I keep asking myself this question every time.”

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/425502/20130118/kurdish-genocide-iraq-saddam-hussein-recognition-chemical.htm

lombiegee

It made smoke, yellowish-white smoke. It had a bad smell like DDT, the powder they kill insects with. It had a bitter taste. … I saw my parents fall down with my brother after the attack, and they told me they were dead. I looked at their skin and it was black and they weren’t moving. And I was scared and crying and I did not know what to do. I saw their skin turn dark and blood coming out from their mouths and from their noses. I wanted to touch them but they stopped me and I started crying again.

Aziga was eight years old when she was out in the fields in her village near Bahdinan. She recounts seeing the warplanes coming in and dropping the bombs in 1988.

Source: Ghosts of Halabja: Saddam Hussein and the Kurdish Genocide, Chapter 3: The Gassing of Halabja. Author: Kelly, Michael J.

(via lombiegee)

mashable

Facebook has launched a new initiative to help find missing children by pushing Amber Alerts into the news feeds of its users.

The program, which Facebook has developed in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), launches for U.S. users on Tuesday.

"When a child goes missing, the most important thing is getting out the relevant information, the correct information, to the right people at the right time," Emily Vacher, Facebook head of global safety told USA Today.

Learn more here.