Anfal genocide

Military operations and chemical attacks

On 16 March 1988, there was a poison gas attack on the city of Halabja in which 3,200–5,000 Kurdish people were killed, most of them civilians.^[18][19]

Concentration camps and extermination

When captured, Kurdish populations were transported to detention centers (notably Topzawa, near the city of Kirkuk), and adult and teenage males viewed as possible insurgents were separated from the civilians. According to Human Rights Watch/Middle East,

With only minor variations... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal. ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together. Roughly speaking, this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, but there was no rigorous check of identity documents, and strict chronological age seems to have been less of a criterion than size and appearance. A strapping twelve-year-old might fail to make the cut; an undersized sixteen-year-old might be told to remain with his female relatives.... It was then time to process the younger males. They were split into smaller groups.... Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustled into large rooms, or halls, each filled with the residents of a single area.... Although the conditions at Topzawa were appalling for everyone, the most grossly overcrowded quarter seem to have been those where the male detainees were held.... For the men, beatings were routine. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 143–45. ISBN 0-300-06427-6)

After a few days in the camps, the men accused of being insurgents were trucked off to be killed in mass executions.

In its book Iraq's Crime of Genocide, Human Rights Watch/Middle East writes: "Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, although women and children vanished in certain clearly defined areas, adult males who were captured disappeared in mass. ... It is apparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate all adult males of military service age captured in rural Iraqi Kurdistan." (pp. 96, 170). Only a handful survived the execution squads. Even amidst this most systematic slaughter of adult men and boys, however, "hundreds of women and young children perished, too," but "the causes of their deaths were different—gassing, starvation, exposure, and willful neglect—rather than bullets fired from a Kalashnikov." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 191.) Nevertheless, on 1 September 2004, U.S. forces in Iraq discovered hundreds of bodies of Kurdish women and children at the site near al-Hatra, who are believed to be executed in early 1988, or late 1987.^[20]

The focus of the Iraqi killing campaign varied from one stage of Anfal to another. The most exclusive targeting of the male population occurred during the final Anfal (25 August – 6 September 1988). It was launched immediately after the signing of a ceasefire with Iran, which allowed the transfer of large numbers of men and amount of matériel from the southern battlefronts. The final Anfal focused on "the steep, narrow valleys of Badinan, a four-thousand-square mile (10,360 km²) chunk of the Zagros Mountains bounded on the east by the Great Zab and on the north by Turkey." There, uniquely in the Anfal campaigns, lists of the "disappeared" provided to Human Rights Watch/Middle East by survivors "invariably included only adult and teenage males, with the single exception of Assyrians and Yezidi Kurds," who were subsidiary targets of the slaughter. Many of the men of Badinan did not even make it as far as "processing" stations but were simply "lined up and murdered at their point of capture, summarily executed by firing squads on the authority of a local military officer." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 178, 190, 192; on the fate of the Christians and Yezidi Kurds, see pp. 209–13.)

On 20 June 1987, Directive SF/4008 was issued, under al-Majid's signature. Of greatest significance is clause 5. Referring to those areas designated "prohibited zones," al-Majid ordered that "all persons captured in those villages shall be detained and interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of 15 and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them, of which we should be duly notified." However, it seems clear from the application of the policy that it referred only to males "between the ages of 15 and 70." Human Rights Watch/Middle East takes that as given and writes that clause 5's "order [was] to kill all adult males" and later writes: "Under the terms of al-Majid's June 1987, directives, death was the automatic penalty for any male of an age to bear arms who was found in an Anfal area." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 11, 14.) A subsequent directive on 6 September 1987, supports this conclusion: it calls for "the deportation of... families to the areas where there saboteur relatives are..., except for the male [members], between the ages of 12 inclusive and 50 inclusive, who must be detained." (Cited in Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 298.)

Arabization

"Arabization," another major element of al-Anfal, was a tactic used by Saddam Hussein's regime to drive pro-insurgent populations out of their homes in villages and cities like Kirkuk, which are in the valuable oil field areas, and relocate them in the southern parts of Iraq.^[21] The campaign used heavy population redistribution, most notably in Kirkuk, the results of which now plague negotiations between Iraq's Shi'a United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdish Kurdistani Alliance. Saddam's Ba'athist regime built several public housing facilities in Kirkuk as part of his "Arabization," shifting poor Arabs from Iraq's southern regions to Kirkuk with the lure of inexpensive housing.

Iraq's Kurds now strongly resent Arabs still residing in Ba'ath-era Kirkuk housing and view them as a barrier to Kirkuk's recognition as a Kurdish city (and regional seat) in the then-increasingly sovereign Kurdish Autonomous Region, which started relying more and more on the central Iraqi government, especially after it fell into economic crisis and the brutal murder of its own citizens by the KRG.^[22]

Documenting events

In August 2013, after many years of relationship-building, Imani Lee Language Services entered a multi-year and multi-phased agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous state within the borders of Iraq, on an important project of historical significance.

The first phase of the project concerned the translation of historical documents related to the events that happened in Halabja, Kurdistan, Iraq on 16 March 1988, when Saddam Hussein’s regime bombed the entire district with chemical weapons in the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 5,000 Kurds. The attack on Halabja has been well-documented as being the single most brutal attack of the regime as well as the deadliest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in the history of the world. Today, many of the living Kurdish civilians affected by the chemical attack still suffer from various illnesses both psychological and physical in addition to the birth defects of their progeny.

For years, the victims of the attack and the KRG have tried to tell their story to the rest of the world. Their effort has included petitioning international countries to recognize the attack as an official act of genocide.

The Kurdish Genocide has been published in Halabja: Facing the Poisons of Death, A Legal Reading of the Event and the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court Documents, authored by Bakr Hamah Seddik Arif, a lawyer and member of the Iraqi Parliament.

Statistics

According to Human Rights Watch, during the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi government did the following:

• Massacred 50,000 to 100,000 non-combatant civilians, including women and children.^[1] However, Kurdish officials have claimed the figure could be as high as 182,000.^[2]
• Destroyed about 4,000 villages (out of 4,655) in Iraqi Kurdistan. Between April 1987, and August 1988, 250 towns and villages were exposed to chemical weapons;^[23]
• Destroyed 1,754 schools, 270 hospitals, 2,450 mosques, and 27 churches;^[24]
• Wiped out around 90% of Kurdish villages in the targeted areas.^[2]
• Made 2,000 Assyrian Christians, along with Kurds and others, victims of gas campaigns.^[25]

Violation of human rights

The campaigns of 1987–89 were characterized by the following human rights violations:

Frans van Anraat

In December 2005 a court in The Hague convicted Frans van Anraat of complicity in war crimes for his role in selling chemical weapons to the Iraqi government. He was given a 15-year sentence.^[10] The court also ruled that the killing of thousands of Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s was indeed an act of genocide.^[10] In the 1948 Genocide Convention, the definition of genocide is "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". The Dutch court said that it was considered "legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets the requirement under the Genocide Conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion than that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq".

Trial of Saddam Hussein

In an interview broadcast on Iraqi television on 6 September 2005, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a respected Kurdish politician, said that judges had directly extracted confessions from Saddam Hussein that he had ordered mass killings and other crimes during his regime and that he deserves to die. Two days later, Saddam's lawyer denied that he had confessed.^[28]

Anfal trial

In June 2006, the Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Saddam Hussein and six co-defendants would face trial on 21 August 2006, in relation to the Anfal campaign.^[29] In December 2006, Saddam was put on trial for the genocide during Operation Anfal. The trial for the Anfal campaign was still underway on 30 December 2006, when Saddam Hussein was executed for his role in the unrelated Dujail Massacre.^[30]

The Anfal trial recessed on 21 December 2006, and when it resumed on 8 January 2007, the remaining charges against Saddam Hussein were dropped. Six co-defendants continued to stand trial for their roles in the Anfal campaign. On 23 June 2007, Ali Hassan al-Majid, and two co-defendants, Sultan Hashem Ahmed and Hussein Rashid Mohammed l, were convicted of genocide and related charges and sentenced to death by hanging.^[12] Another two co-defendants (Farhan Jubouri and Saber Abdel Aziz al-Douri) were sentenced to life imprisonment, and one (Taher Tawfiq al-Ani) was acquitted on the prosecution's demand.^[31]

Al-Majid was charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He was convicted in June 2007, and was sentenced to death. His appeal of the death sentence was rejected on 4 September 2007, he was sentenced to death for the fourth time on 17 January 2010, and was hanged eight days later, on 25 January 2010.^[32]