Amna Suraka, Red Museum

The red-walled buildings of Amna Suraka — "Red Security" in Kurdish — were once the most feared address in Sulaymaniyah. From 1979 to 1991 this was the northern headquarters of Saddam Hussein's security directorate, a place where Kurdish students, activists and dissidents were imprisoned and tortured. When the Kurdish uprising swept the region in March 1991, Peshmerga fighters stormed the compound, and the buildings were left exactly as the fighting ended — their walls still torn by gunfire, captured tanks and artillery standing in the yard.

In 2003 Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, a former Peshmerga fighter, led the effort to turn this place of suffering into a museum of memory, often called Iraq's first war-crimes museum. Its most haunting space is the Hall of Mirrors, created by the artist Kamaran Omar: walls and ceiling glitter with 182,000 shards of broken mirror — one for each Kurd the memorial commemorates as lost in the Anfal genocide — lit by 4,500 small lights, one for each Kurdish village destroyed. (Historians' documented tolls are lower, but the hall enshrines the number the Kurdish people carry.)

To walk it is to be surrounded by countless fragments of yourself, scattered like the lives it remembers. Today entry is free, and the place that was once a prison has become one of Iraqi Kurdistan's most visited — and most moving — destinations.