Anfal genocide

Anfal, officially conducted in 1988, had eight stages (Anfal 1–Anfal 8) altogether, seven of which targeted areas controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The Kurdish Democratic Party-controlled areas in the northwest of Iraqi Kurdistan, which the regime regarded as a lesser threat, were the target of the Final Anfal operation in late August and early September 1988. For those assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000 soldiers with air support against Kurdish guerrilla forces that numbered no more than a few thousand.

The first Anfal stage was conducted between 23 February and 18 March 1988. It started with artillery and air strikes in the early hours of 23 February 1988. Then, several hours later, there were attacks at the Jafali Valley headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan near the Iranian border, and the command centers in Sargallu and Bargallu. There was heavy resistance by the Peshmerga. The battles were conducted in a theater around 1, 154 square kilometres.[21] The villages of Gwezeela, Chalawi, Haladin and Yakhsamar were attacked with poison gas. During mid March, the PUK, in an alliance with Iranian troops and other Kurdish factions, captured Halabja.[22] This led to the poison gas attack on Halabja on 16 March 1988,[22] during which 3,200–5,000 Kurdish people were killed, most of them civilians.[23][24] The Peshmerga managed to open a flight route to Iran through which a part of the population in the Jafali Valley was able to flee. During the first Anfal campaign, no prisoners were taken by the Iraqi army.

During the second Anfal from 22 March and 2 April 1988, the Qara Dagh region, including Bazian and Darbandikhan, in the Suleimanya governorate, was targeted. Again several villages were attacked with poison gas. Villages attacked with poisonous gas were Safaran, Sewsenan, Belekjar, Serko and Meyoo. The attacks began on March 22 after Nowruz, surprising the Peshmerga. Although of shorter duration, Peshmerga suffered more severe casualties in this attack than the first Anfal.[25] As a result of the attack, the majority of the population in the Qara Dagh region fled in direction Suleimanya. Many fugitives were detained by the Iraqi forces, and the men were separated from the women. The men were not seen again. The women were transported to camps. The population that managed to flee, fled to the Garmia region.[26]

In the next Anfal campaign from 7 April to 20 April 1988, the Garmian region east of Suleimanya was targeted. In this campaign, many women and children disappeared. The only village attacked with chemical weapons was Tazashar. Many were lured to come towards the Iraqi forces due to an amnesty which was announced through a loudspeaker of a mosque in Qader Karam from 10–12 April. The announced amnesty was a trap, and many who surrendered were detained. Some civilians were able to bribe Kurdish collaborators of the Iraqi Army and fled to Laylan or Shorsh.[27]

Anfal 4 took place between 3–8 May 1988 in the valley of the Little Zab, which forms the border of the provinces of Erbil and Kirkuk. The morale of the Iraqi army was on the rise due to the capture of the Faw Peninsula on the 17–18 April 1988 from Iran in the Iran–Iraq war.[28] Major poisonous gas attacks were perpetrated in Askar and Goktapa.[29] Again it was announced an amnesty was issued, which turned out to be false. Many of the ones who surrendered were arrested. Men were separated from the women.[30]

In these three consecutive attacks between 15 May and 16 of August 1988, the valleys of Rawandiz and Shaqlawa were targeted, and the attacks had different success. The Anfal 5 failed completely; therefore, two more attacks were necessary to gain Iraqi governmental control over the valleys. The Peshmerga commander of the region, Kosrat Abdullah, was well prepared for a long siege with stores of ammunition and food. He also reached an agreement with the Kurdish collaborators of the Iraqi Army, so the civilians could flee. The villages Hiran, Balisan, Smaquli, Malakan, Shek Wasan, Ware, Seran and Kaniba were attacked with poisonous gas. After the Anfal 7 attack the valleys were under the control of the Iraqi government.[30]

The last Anfal was aimed at the region controlled by the KDP named Badinan and took place from 25 August to 6 September 1988. In this campaign, the villages of Wirmeli, Barkavreh, Bilejane, Glenaska, Zewa Shkan, Tuka and Ikmala were targeted with chemical attacks. After tens of thousands of Kurds fled to Turkey, the Iraqi Army blocked the route to Turkey on the 26 August 1988. The population who did not manage to flee was arrested, and the men were separated from the women and children. The men were executed, and the women and children brought to camps.[31]

When captured, Kurdish populations were transported to detention centers (notably Topzawa, near the city of Kirkuk), and adult and teenage males, who were 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.[32]^:143–45

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."[32]^: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."[32]^:191 Nevertheless, on 1 September 2004, U.S. forces in Iraq discovered hundreds of bodies of Kurdish women and children at the site near Hatra, who are believed to have been executed in early 1988, or late 1987.[33]

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 military supplies 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 make it to the "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.[32])

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."[32]^: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[32]^:298)

"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.[34] 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. Another part of the arabization campaign was the census of October 1987. Citizens who failed to turn up for the October 1987 census were not anymore recognized as Iraqi citizens. Most of the Kurdish population who learned that a census was taking place, did not take part in the census.[18]

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 Kurdistan Region. Major General Wafiq al Samarrai is quoted to have said: "You can kill half a million Kurds in Erbil, but it wont change anything; it will still be Kurdish, but killing 50,000 Kurds in Kirkuk will finish the Kurdish cause forever."[35]

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), a self-proclaimed 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.

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;[37]
• Destroyed 1,754 schools, 270 hospitals, 2,450 mosques, and 27 churches;[38]
• 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.[39]

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

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.[12] The court also ruled that the killing of thousands of Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s was indeed an act of genocide.[12] 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".

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.[43]

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.[44] 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.[45]

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, were convicted of genocide and related charges and sentenced to death by hanging.[14] 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.[46]

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.[47] Sultan Hashem Ahmed was not hanged due to opposition of the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who opposed the death penalty.[48]