ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – A former Iraqi security officer who tortured and executed Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign in a notorious southern Iraqi desert prison arrived in a Baghdad court on Thursday to stand trial.

Hajaj Ahmed Hardan al-Tikriti, more infamously known as Hajaj, was arrested in August of last year and described by the Iraqi National Security Service (INSS) as “one of the most wanted henchmen of the former regime” of Saddam Hussein.

According to the INSS, Tikriti “committed a series of crimes against humanity against hundreds of Iraqi citizens, particularly those of Kurdish origin who were forcibly exiled to Muthanna province. These crimes included torture, murder, and rape inside this infamous detention center.”

Jabbar Mohammed, head of the Martyrs and Anfal Affairs department in Garmiyan, told The New Region on Wednesday that 200 complaints had been filed against Hajaj, with some 50 individuals expected to take part in the trial. 

The Nugra Salman prison, a relentless prison complex in the deserts of Muthanna province, is recounted as a place of daily beatings, starvation, and fear by the Kurds who suffered through the Baath era. It is also where Hajaj would torture countless of his victims.

During the brutal Anfal campaign in 1988, which sought to suppress Kurdish resistance against the Baathist regime and saw myriad punitive atrocities perpetrated by Hussein's forces against civilian Kurds, thousands of Kurdish men were transported to the Nugra Salman prison, where Hajaj had ruled. 

The prison held between 6,000 and 8,000 people, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.