The Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq is seeking to pressure the federal government in Baghdad to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ensure that what took place under the rule of the successive regimes in Iraq before 2003 — when the Kurdish people were subjected to assaults and ethnic cleansing — would never repeat itself.

During the reign of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, Kurds were subjected to genocidal campaigns dubbed the Anfal Campaign by the government itself, in reference to the eighth chapter of the Quran, which details the triumph of proponents of the newly descended Islam over pagans.

In 2008, the Iraqi Parliament deemed the Anfal operations implemented by Iraqi forces under the reign of Saddam Hussein as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people.

At the time, the Iraqi government destroyed around 4,000 Kurdish villages and killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the Kurdistan region. Nearly half a million of Kurdish citizens were driven out of the regions they came from and were forced to stay in villages set up by the Iraqi government in order to closely monitor them. According to unofficial statistics, more than 182,000 Kurds were arrested, killed and buried in mass graves in remote areas of Iraq.