Amna Suraka Museum

Amna Suraka — Arabic for "Red Security" — was the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's secret police in Sulaymaniyah, a complex used for interrogation, torture, and detention of Kurdish political prisoners. It is now a museum and memorial dedicated to documenting the Ba'athist regime's persecution of the Kurds, and it is one of the most important and disturbing sites in the entire Middle East.

The cells are intact, with graffiti from former prisoners still visible on the walls. The interrogation rooms have been left largely as they were. A substantial exhibition documents the Anfal campaign — the systematic mass murder of Kurdish civilians conducted by the Iraqi state between 1986 and 1989, involving chemical weapon attacks, mass executions, and the destruction of thousands of villages.

The museum is not easy to visit but it is essential. It documents something that the world largely failed to notice while it was happening, and that Iraqi Kurdistan has chosen to remember with full force rather than conceal. It is one of the most important memorial museums in the world.

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The building's walls are still riddled with bullet holes from the 1991 Kurdish uprising, when residents and peshmerga fighters stormed the compound and freed the prisoners inside. The complex was taken in fierce fighting; the holes were deliberately left unrepaired as evidence. In the compound outside, 182,000 glass fragments are suspended in the air — one for each Kurdish village destroyed during the Anfal campaign, which killed an estimated 50,000 to 182,000 people between 1986 and 1989.

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