Zawayan's parents, four siblings and their children died in former Iraqi dictator's notorious Anfal campaign aimed to subdue the Kurds in 1988 that killed at least 100,000 people.

Saddam, currently on trial for the killing of 148 Shiites in the village of Dujail in the early 1980s, is expected to be tried on charges of genocide for the Anfal campaign later this year.

Stories like Zawayan's abound in Smud, a dusty, overcrowded slum that started as one of the government's resettlement villages but has grown into cinderblock shantytown as Kurds from around Iraq flee violence for the relative safety of Kurd-controlled areas.

It is here that legacy of Anfal lives on in the poverty visited on the inhabitants who lost the breadwinners in their families and all their property.

Zawayan's family was captured as Saddam's Baathist forces overran their village of Khan in the northern Sulaimaniyah province and were never heard from again in a scene that was replayed over and over throughout Kurdistan that year.

"Nobody wanted to tell me my family was 'Anfaled.' When I found out that Saddam murdered my family I wished they had kept me in prison so I wouldn't know. Then I wished that I had died with them," Zawayan said.

Zawayan, however, was lucky compared to most, since his wife and three-month old son escaped the massacres and they have been able to move out of the misery that is Smud, located south of the ethnically-mixed oil city of Kirkuk.

In contrast to the cool green mountain villages from which its residents were expelled, Smud looks like many other towns in the rest of the battered country -- baking heat, open sewage, a sandy yellow haze in the air that parches throats, and a sea of thrown-together concrete and mud houses.

Of some 30,000 people that live in Smud, nearly half the families live on less than three dollars per day, according to Aryan Rauf Aziz, the local representative for Kurdistan's Refugee, Human Rights and Anfal Issues Ministry.

"The population increased two or three times after the regime fell because people couldn't afford land anywhere else," Aziz said.

Anfal survivors only found out their relatives wouldn't be coming back for sure after the US invasion in 2003.

Mohammed Hamid Mohammed was one of the thousands who were packed onto flatbed trucks and moved to prisons by Saddam's Anfal campaigners in Nugrasalman in the south of Iraq where some 20 members of his extended family, including his father, died of hunger, beatings and disease, he said.

"We were given filthy water and a piece of bread every two or three days. Ten to 15 people were dying per day. We tried to bury them in graves we dug with our hands but they were too shallow. The bodies were eaten by dogs," Mohammed said.

After seven months in the prison, Hussein 'pardoned' those interned and Mohammed, who was only 14 at the time, was resettled in Smud with what was left of his family.

Wali Mohammed Ali, a man so old he said he didn't know his age but could remember Kurdish tribes fighting British forces during their mandate that ended in 1930, is one of those who has lived in the poverty of Smud since its inception.

His elderly sister sleeps fully clothed on a bare floor of packed mud. Above his head is a roof made of woven reeds held up by four cinderblock walls. These are all the family and property Ali was left with after Anfal.

"All I have is my God. I live on the charity of others, I beg God for one dinar" Ali said, adding that his wife and two sons died along with three brothers and their families in the Anfal attack on his village, Qala Chamala.

In the closing days of the Iran-Iraq war in which the United States supported Hussein, rebel Iraqi Kurdish militias sided with Iranian forces and Saddam is said to have ordered a threefold campaign of annihilation against his Kurdish subjects.

Entire swaths of Kurdistan were declared uninhabitable and troops were given free reign to eradicate anyone or anything remaining inside, leveling thousands of villages in the "Anfal areas".

The rest either disappeared or were sent to internment camps in Iraq's desert south where many perished in inhuman conditions.

The campaign was personally managed by Ali Hassan al-Majid, known to Kurds as Chemical Ali for ordering the gassing of the Kurdish city of Halabja in which some 5,000 people died in 1988. The Halabja killings are not considered part of the Anfal murders, but are closely linked with the overall anti-Kurd campaign.

Anger over the killings still runs deep today and many Kurds said they felt Hussein's trial was too soft on the ex-dictator.

"I fought a bloody war for Saddam, and while I rotted in prison, he killed my family. His trial is not just. Justice would be if a piece were cut from his body every day until he died. I'd like to cut his head off myself," Zawayan said.