"This kind of exhibition is very important for the citizens of the region because it reminds them of those who lost their lives for freedom and the building of democracy in Kurdistan," said curator Abdelkarim Ali Haldani.

The director of the Foundation for Martyrs of the Kurdish Movement in the autonomous province of Sulaimaniyah hopes the exhibit, which also includes letters and possessions of former prisoners, will educate a new generation.

The rope once hung from the rafters of Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein's forces tortured and killed thousands of prisoners, many of them political dissidents and Kurds who had rebelled against the regime.

Bakhtiar Amin, the former Iraqi minister for human rights, estimates that more than 100,000 people were either tortured to death or executed in Saddam's prisons, of which Abu Ghraib was one of the worst.

"Every Monday and Wednesday they were executing people. They used to charge their families for the bullets," he told AFP in Baghdad.

The Kurds have since enjoyed a rebirth of sorts in their largely autonomous northern region, which has seen little of the sectarian fighting and insurgent attacks that have convulsed the rest of Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.

The exhibition is largely aimed at Kurds born after 1991 -- when a US and British-enforced "no-fly zone" kept Saddam's forces out of northern Iraq.

"A new generation of Kurds has been born who never saw the oppression of the former regime," said Jamal Agha, an aide to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd.

"This exhibition will help many young Kurds to learn about the lives of their fathers, how they lived in the midst of this unjust regime," he said. "Those who do not respect the past have no future."

The exhibit contains artifacts from the former regime's security apparatus: execution orders signed by senior officials, messages written by the prisoners, and objects they created during their detention, including a chess set.

For older visitors to the exhibit, including several former prisoners, the display is a painful reminder of the suffering they endured.

Othman Said, a 40-year-old who earned the nickname "Othman the Prisoner" after spending five years in Abu Ghraib, had close friends who might have died on the rope that now hangs limp before the passing visitors.

"This exhibition expresses the suffering of thousands of Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen who sacrificed everything against the unjust and oppressive former regime," he said as he looked on.

"It reminds me of those days when I was in prison. I saw lines of condemned men waiting to be executed. It happened to dozens of people, including some of my best friends."