This is an excellent huge museum. In fact there are several museums in the complex, so to say. Amna Surak, the formal name of the Red Museum, was the headquarters of the Baath party in Sulaymaniyah, the second largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. But at the same it was a prison and torture center for the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This was all transformed (well, not all, there are plenty of spaces off limits to the visitors) in a smart way. Buildings were not fixed after the war and are all covered with bullet holes, adding to the general atmosphere. But inside there are several exhibits with different subjects within the main topic. For example, there is an exhibit about the mines left behind, which involved a huge effort to clean. Then there is the jail zone, with cells and toilets and some exhibits.
Outside there is a good collection of war equipment, tanks APC's, artillery, trucks, etc.
A great museum to visit, a must. And entrance is free.
From Wikipedia:
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"In 2003, a museum was opened at the site for documenting the human rights abuses under Saddam's rule. The museum is free to attend, open six days a week, and mostly funded by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a political party, and has also received funding from the Talabani family and the Qaiwan Group. The museum exhibits include mannequins demonstrating how people were tortured in the prison and a hall of broken mirrors with 182,000 shards commemorating Kurds killed during the genocidal Anfal campaign, with 4,500 backlights to represent the Kurdish villages destroyed during the campaign. There is also another exhibition on Anfal, with pictures of exhumed bodies and the names of prominent Kurds who were killed or disappeared. A later exhibit is on Peshmerga fighters killed by ISIS.
At the museum, the history of human rights abuses is used in a narrative of Kurdish nationalism. According to Autumn Cockrell-Abdullah, the museum attempts to "constitute the Kurds as a nation and nation-state and to demarcate the boundaries of a Kurdish national identity" by memorializing human rights abuses against Kurds.
In 2013, Vice News reporter Orlando Crowcroft called Amna Suraka "the world's most depressing museum", as well as the biggest tourist attraction in Sulaimaniyya."
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