“ONE minute children were happily splashing about in the water, the next it was a bloodbath. The tranquillity and laughter turned into chaos and screams.

“The whole world turned upside down in an instant. Mums ran into the water to find their children. The shop was destroyed and a man lay over there, dead,” Rezbar Muhammad said, pointing to the road where we had parked our car.

“My uncle was speaking to a man who was buying some eggs. He was putting them in a bag when the missile struck. His daughter was blown into the air and landed 8 feet below the shop.

“His wife was in here too. She had her leg blown off. There was blood everywhere,” he said.

We arrived in the popular tourist resort of Kuna Masi in the mid-afternoon having made the short 30-minute drive from the city of Slemani, in Iraqi Kurdistan. 

As we arrive a coach full of tourists from Basra in the south of Iraq pulls in, with families eager to catch the last of the summer sun.

“It was like that the day Turkey sent its bombs,” Rezbar said: “There were around 40 people here that day, some from Baghdad, some from Iran and many other places,” he tells us, beckoning us down the steps as he showed us where the missile struck.

“I said to my uncle ‘today is going to be a good day’ as I came down to collect the money for renting the chalets. It was the last time I spoke to him that day. An hour later the rocket hit us.”

“All of this was covered in blood,” he says pointing to the chalets, “It was like a scene from a horror film. The water had turned red. People were screaming. It was chaos.”

He shows the extent of the damage it caused. Turkey of course insisted that it was targeting “terrorists” and celebrated the “neutralisation” of what it claimed where leading figures from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

“As has been the case before, no civilian has been harmed or will be harmed in this operation,” a Turkish Defence Ministry statement said at the time.

The attack was widely condemned and Rezbar believed it was meant to send a message to the Kurdish people – “you are not safe anywhere, we can kill you whenever and wherever we want.”

He and his uncle are sure that the missile was fired from a drone. When jets fly overhead they can usually hear them approach and will often get a warning of a possible attack. But this time the first sound they heard was the explosion. 

Drones often fly overhead, but have never before launched an attack on Kuna Masi. This was the height of Operation Claw Eagle –Turkey’s assault on Iraqi Kurdistan that lasted from June to September 2020.

The shop has since been rebuilt and some sense of normality has returned, although people fear a repeat attack. Rezbar shows us photographs of the shop taken soon after the bombing as we sip on bottles of water he hands us from the fridge.

He offers to call his uncle who agrees to meet us at the house the family are staying in back in the suburbs of Slemani.

We meet Kaywan Kawe Salih and Peyman Talib Tahir at a relatives house They have been forced to sell their home and leave the business they had built over the past year behind as they need to be close to the hospital, requiring daily treatment.

Their injuries are horrific. Their bodies are still full of metal, shrapnel from the missile. Their six-year-old son has metal from the bomb lodged in his head. Removing it might kill him. Their seven-year-old daughter was thrown 10 feet onto the rocks below their shop and lost her hearing.

“We lost everything that day,” Peyman says as she recalls the horror of the blast. “One minute we were in the shop. A man asked Kaywan for some eggs and he went to fill a bag. The next thing I remember is waking up in hospital.”

Peyman is just 30 years old. A graduate from Slemani University, she says her life has been ruined as a result of the missile strike. She is in constant pain, having her leg amputated and burn marks covering her arms and other parts of her body. She is reliant on Kaywan for her mobility. 

“We get no support,” she said, “Nobody is helping us. We have to pay for our treatment and the government does nothing.”

Kaywan explains that the Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) made a televised speech where he promised to personally take care of the families’ needs and pay for Peyman’s treatment.

But, once the cameras stopped rolling and the publicity died down, he told the family they wouldn’t be getting a penny from him.

“He lied,” Kaywan said: “He promised everything to make himself look good, as the saviour of the poor people that were bombed. But he’s like all politicians.”

I asked why he went back on his promise. “It was, he claimed, because I had criticised both him and the PUK in the media. He told me that because of this he couldn’t help us.”

Peyman came back into the living room clutching a letter. “Here it is in writing,” she said, reading out the words of Mr Talabani. “We will not receive any help with hospital fees or any funding to support our family.

“But they did nothing for us before this. They said we should thank them, but for what, for what?” she asks.

Kaywan explains that he has been forced to give up work because of his injuries. “We gave up everything to build our shop and resort in Kuna Masi. We didn’t earn much money, just enough to survive and live a quiet life. We were happy. We had plans for the future.

“All that changed the day we were hit by the missile. What did we do to deserve this?” he continues, becoming increasingly angry. “We don’t belong to any political party, even the PUK. We are just an ordinary family trying to live our lives, to build a family.”

He scoffs when I ask if Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apologised for what happened. “Of course not, he doesn’t care because we are Kurdish. To him we are all the same. We are all terrorists.”

Kaywan also casts doubt on claims that the man that came to his shop was a senior PJAK or PKK figure. He acknowledges that he was an Iranian Kurd, saying he could tell by the accent when he spoke.

“This is all we know. I have no idea if he was from any organisation. It would be strange for senior commanders to come to a shop to buy eggs. They were wearing normal clothes and alone. There are no guerillas in the area. Just people on holiday.”

They explain that they have been forced to sell their home and the shop and have used most of their savings to pay for their daily treatment. The whole family are traumatised by the incident and have nightmares and flashbacks.

“We had one course of psychological treatment,” Kaywan explains. “But we couldn’t afford any more sessions so we had to stop.”

Their son is deeply traumatised by the events, Peyman explains. He can’t be left on his own and he cries constantly and has aggressive outbursts – he becomes angry and tearful during our visit, clinging tightly to his mum.

“He has constant headaches because of the metal stuck in his head,” she says.

She tells me that she needs a prosthetic leg but it is impossible. To have one fitted means leaving the country and seeing a specialist, something that the family cannot afford and the government will not pay for.

Both Peyman and Kaywan hope for an end to war and attacks on the Kurdish people. They want to live their lives in peace. But they also blamed the British government for continuing to sell the weapons that have caused so much pain and suffering.

“The British government doesn’t care about people,” Peyman says angrily, “They are only interested in money. They don’t care about the human cost.”

Since I I met with Peyman, Kaywan and their family the situation in Iraqi Kurdistan has worsened. In December 2020 huge anti-government protests erupted, triggered by a failure to pay public-sector workers’ wages for months.

The anger at a broken political system dominated by just two families – the Barzanis and Talabanis – was met with a violent response. Government forces detained hundreds of workers and journalists, opposition media organisations were shut down and at least nine people, including two children were shot dead.

The bullets and weapons that were used were possibly supplied by Britain and the government forces that led the killing spree were probably trained by British soldiers. But the terror on the streets of cities including Slemani was met with a blanket silence.

The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Iraqi Kurdistan instead praised a deal that saw pomegranates from Halabja shipped to Britain, posing on Twitter with photographs of crates of the fruit while the citizens of that city were being gunned down and tear-gassed.

If you were told that the APPG was funded by Erbil-based oil company Kar Group who pay some £57,001 per year to the secretariat you might understand the reason for the silence while the ordinary people of Iraqi Kurdistan were in revolt.

Given that the secretary of the APPG Gary Kent also lists himself as a columnist for the Rudaw media organisation – often seen as linked to the KDP – it is easy to see why it is seen as the mouthpiece of the Barzanis in Westminster.

Liberal US academic Noam Chomsky wrote some 20 years ago that if the Nuremberg principles were applied today, every US president in history would be guilty of war crimes. He’s almost certainly right.

The same surely applies to British prime ministers, most notably Tony Blair. Behind the arms sales and security partnerships that Britain and the APPG for Iraqi Kurdistan prides itself on lie the shattered lives of families like Peyman’s.

Charges of war crimes will of course be hard to bring, even if they are proven. The imperialist countries that perpetrate the world’s worst human atrocities – whether directly or through proxies – are the same ones that control the courts that would try them. 

But it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be demanded or pursued. Along with charges of war crimes, Britain and the companies that supply arms, including EDO MBM, which supplies the Hornet Bomb rack, should pay reparations for the lives they have blighted.

A campaign is currently underway for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be brought to trial for war crimes. Initiated by the Kurdish Women’s Movement in Europe, the Hundred Reasons campaign is gathering signatures and is running until March 8, International Women’s Day.

But we owe it to the Peymans, Kaywans, Fatmas and Mohammads to ensure that our own government is held to account for its actions and we must raise their voices and build the case for an end to arms sales and an end to complicity on war crimes. We must break the silence.