President of Kurdistan Region attended the 30th anniversary of genocide of Barzani tribes by toppled Saddam regime, local media broadcasted.

Numbers of ambassadors and officials from other countries were attended the event, which took place in Barzan.

In 1983, 8000 men from the Barzani tribe were killed when Mustafa Barzani, leader of the tribe and father of current Kurdistan president Masoud Barzani, led the Kurdish rebellion against the state.

Kurds had been pushing to have the murders recognized as genocide since the fall of the Ba'ath regime in 2003.

Human Rights Watch, in its book Iraq's Crime of Genocide, said: "Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, although women and children vanished in certain clearly defined areas, adult males who were captured disappeared en masse. It is apparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate all adult males of military service age captured in rural Iraqi Kurdistan"

The Supreme Court, which was set up after the 2003 US led war against Iraq to try former members of Saddam Hussein's government, has already recognized other mass killings of Kurds by the former regime as genocide. This includes the chemical attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja in 1988 which killed 5,000 and left some 10,000 inured, as part of a military campaign known as Anfal.

The genocidal campaign conducted in Kurdistan by Saddam’s regime is estimated to have killed some 100,000 civilians.