Kurds genocide why

But the Kurdish genocide began decades before the Anfal and has claimed countless victims. The genocide perpetrated over decades began with the arabisation of villages around Kirkuk in It involved the deportation and disappearances of Faylee Kurds in the ss, the murder of 8, male Barzanis in , the use of chemical weapons in the late s, most notably against Halabja, and finally the Anfal campaign of Hundreds of thousands of innocent people perished, families were torn apart, many still live with severe health problems.

The term al-Anfal is the name given to a succession of attacks against the Kurdish population in Iraq during a specific period. This suggests that the annihilation process was governed, at least in principle, by rigid bureaucratic norms. But all the evidence suggests that the purpose of these norms was not to rule on a particular person's guilt or innocence of specific charges, but merely to establish whether an individual belonged to the target group that was to be "Anfalized," i.

Kurds in areas outside government control. At the same time, survivor testimony repeatedly indicates that the rulebook was only adhered to casually in practice. The physical segregation of detainees from Anfal areas by age and sex, as well as the selection of those to be exterminated, was a crude affair, conducted without any meaningful prior process of interrogation or evaluation.

Those who were released from prisons such as Nugra Salman, Dibs and Salamiyeh, as well as those who returned from exile under the amnesty, were relocated to complexes with no compensation and no means of support. Civilians who tried to help them were hunted down by Amn. The mujamma'at that awaited the survivors of the Final Anfal in Badinan were places of residence in name alone; the Anfalakan were merely dumped on the barren earth of the Erbil plain with no infrastructure other than a perimeter fence and military guard towers.

Here, hundreds perished from disease, exposure, hunger or malnutrition, and the after-effects of exposure to chemical weapons.

Several hundreds more--non-Muslim Yezidis, Assyrians and Chaldeans, including many women and children--were abducted from the camps and disappeared, collateral victims of the Kurdish genocide. Their particular crime was to have remained in the prohibited majority Kurdish areas after community leaders declined to accept the regime's classification of them as Arabs in the census. The regime had no intention of allowing the amnestied Kurds to exercise their full civil rights as Iraqi citizens.

They were to be deprived of political rights and employment opportunities until Amn certified their loyalty to the regime. They were to sign written pledges that they would remain in the mujamma'at to which they had been assigned--on pain of death.

Arrests and executions continued, some of the latter even involving prisoners who were alive, in detention, at the time of the amnesty. Middle East Watch has documented three cases of mass executions in late ; in one of them, people were put to death. Documents from one local branch of Amn list another eighty-seven executions in the first eight months of , one of them a man accused of "teaching the Kurdish language in Latin script.

Army engineers even destroyed the large Kurdish town of Qala Dizeh population 70, and declared itsenvirons a "prohibited area," removing the last significant population center close to the Iranian border. Killing, torture and scorched-earth policies continued, in other words, to be a matter of daily routine in Iraqi Kurdistan, as they always had been under the rule of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party.

But the Kurdish problem, in al-Majid's words, had been solved; the "saboteurs" had been slaughtered. Since , some 4, Kurdish villages had been destroyed; at least 50, rural Kurds had died in Anfal alone, and very possibly twice that number; half of Iraq's productive farmland had been laid waste.

All told, the total number of Kurds killed over the decade since the Barzani men were taken from their homes is well into six figures. By April 23, , the Ba'ath Party felt that it had accomplished its goals, for on that date it revoked the special powers that had been granted to Ali Hassan al-Majid two years earlier. At a ceremony to greet his successor, the supreme commander of Anfal made it clear that "the exceptional situation is over.

Intent and act had been combined, resulting in the consummated crime of genocide. And with this, Ali Hassan al-Majid was free to move on to other tasks demanding his special talents--first as governor of occupied Kuwait and, then, in , as Iraq's Minister of Defense. Everything changes. But Saddam Hussein is worse than Tamburlaine of years ago. It is a land of spring flowers and waving fields of wheat, of rushing streams and sudden perilous gorges, of hidden caves and barren rock faces.

Above all, it is a land where the rhythm of life is defined by the relationship between the people and the mountains. One range after another, the peaks stretch in all directions as far as the eye can travel, the highest of them capped year-round by snow. Jarmo, in the valley of Chamchamal, at present in Iraq, is the most ancient village of the Middle East.

Here, four thousand years before our era, man already cultivated diverse grains wheat, barley, lentils, peas, etc. Fromthe 16th to the early 20th centuries, their territories formed part of the Ottoman and Persian empires. But that promise evaporated as the nationalist movement of Kamal Ataturk seized control of the Kurdish lands in eastern Turkey and the Kurds saw their mountain homeland divided once more among four newly created states--Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the Soviet Union, and one ancient land--Iran, or Persia as it was then known.

Each of these states has balked at assimilating its Kurdish minority, and each of the Kurdish groups has rebelled against the authority of its new central government. Of these traditions of rebellion, none has been more persistent than that of the Iraqi Kurds.

They were proportionately the largest ethnic minority in the region, at least until the s, accounting for fully 23 percent of the total Iraqi population 4. The proportion of Kurds in Turkey may now be fractionally higher, but this is not a consequence of normal demographic trends. The relative decline of the Iraqi Kurdish population is a political matter. Hundreds of thousands have fled into exile; tens of thousands more have been killed, above all in , in the course of the six-and-a-half month long campaign of extermination known as Anfal.

The Iraqi Kurds have also been the victims of an accident of geography, for vast oil reserves were discovered in the 20th century on the fringes of their ancestral lands. The Kurds have repeatedly challenged the government in Baghdad for control of these areas--especially the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk.

And it is this contest for natural resources and power, as much as any consideration of ideology or deep-rooted ethnic animus, which underlies the brutal treatment of the Kurds by the ruling Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party. Since the s, the Iraqi Kurds have staged one revolt after another against the central authorities. Most of these rebellions had their nerve center in a remote area of northeastern Iraq called the Barzan valley, which lies close to the Iranian and Turkish borders on the banks of the Greater Zab river.

From the early s to the mids, the idea of Kurdish rebellion was inseparable from the name of a charismatic tribal leader from that valley, Mullah Mustafa Barzani. Barzani's only real success came in , when Iraqi and Iranian Kurds joined forces to found the Mahabad Republic. But the Mahabad experiment lasted only a year before it was crushed, and Barzani fled to the Soviet Union with several thousand fighters in a celebrated "long march.

The name that they adopted expressed accurately the condition of their existence. They called themselves peshmerga --"those who face death. At least metaphorically, the regime of Saddam Hussein did "level the mounts," in the sense of razing thousands of villages, destroying the traditional rural economy and infrastructure of Iraqi Kurdistan and killing many tens of thousands of its inhabitants. The outside world has long known of two isolated episodes of abuse of the Iraqi Kurds in In both instances, it was the proximity of the victims to international borders, and thus to the foreign media, that accounted for the news leaking out.

In the first, the March 16 poison gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, near the border with Iran, the Iranian authorities made it their business to show off the site to the international press within a few days of the bombing.

Even so, the illusion has long persisted, fostered initially by reports from the U. The thousands who died, virtually all of them civilians, were victims of the Iraqi regime. Chemical weapons were banned by the Geneva Protocol of , to which Iraq is a party, and many countries subsequently destroyedtheir stockpiles.

While Iraq, and to a lesser extent Iran, had broken the battlefield taboo on many occasions since , the Halabja and Badinan attacks marked a new level of inhumanity, as the first documented instances of a government employing chemical weapons against its own civilian population.

Yet Halabja and Badinan are merely two pieces in a much larger jigsaw puzzle, and they formed part of a concerted offensive against the Kurds that lasted from March until May In the judgment of Middle East Watch, the Iraqi campaign against the Kurds during that period amounted to genocide, under the terms of the Genocide Convention.

Our methodology has had three distinct and complementary elements. The first was an extensive series of field interviews with Kurdish survivors. Between April and September , Middle East Watch researchers interviewed in depth some people in Iraqi Kurdistan and spoke to hundreds of others about their experiences. Most had been directly affected by the violence; many had lost members of their immediate families.

In March and April , an additional fifty interviews sought to deal with the questions that remained unanswered. The second dimension of Middle East Watch's Iraqi Kurdistan project was a series of forensic examinations of mass gravesites, under the supervision of the distinguished forensic anthropologist Dr.

Clyde Collins Snow. Snow's first preliminary trip, to the Erbil and Suleimaniyeh areas, was in December On two subsequent visits, Dr. Snow's team exhumed a number of graves, in particular a site containing the bodies of twenty-six men and teenage boys executed by the Iraqi Army in lateAugust on the outskirts of the village of Koreme, in the Badinan area. During and early , through a variety of sources, Middle East Watch had assembled a modest file of official Iraqi documents that described aspects of the regime's policy toward the Kurds.

For the most part, these had been seized from Iraqi government buildings during the aborted Kurdish uprising of March Then, in May , Middle East Watch secured permission to examine and analyse boxes of Iraqi government materials that had been captured during the intifada by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan PUK , one of the two main parties in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Through an arrangement between the PUK and the U. As Raul Hilberg notes in his history of the Holocaust, "There are not many ways in which a modern society can, in short order, kill a large number of people living in its midst. This is an efficiency problem of the greatest dimensions Some of these documents were seized during the uprising by the citizens of the Kurdish city of Suleimaniyeh and later stuffed haphazardly into stout plastic flour sacks.

Others, piled first into tea boxes and then wrapped in sacks stamped"PUK Shaqlawa," were taken from the offices of Iraq's General Security Directorate Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh , commonly known as Amn , in Erbil and the northern resort town of Shaqlawa. Some are wrinkled, partly shredded and almost illegible after prolonged exposure to moisture. The documents are crammed into bulging ring-back letter files or bound together loosely with staples, string, laces or pins. Hand-written ledgers are covered with flowered wallpaper, kept clean with sheets of transparent plastic.

Sometimes their Arabic titles are lettered in ornate psychedelic script with a variety of colored felt-tip pens, by bored or whimsical clerks with the right security clearance. One police binder is neatly bound in Christmas wrapping paper from Great Britain that shows a red-breasted robin singing cheerfully among sprigs of holly. Between them, the documents show in compelling detail how the Iraqi security bureaucracy tackled the "efficiency problem" of razing thousands of Kurdish villages from the map and murdering tens of thousands of their inhabitants.

There are smoking guns here, in the form of signed government decrees ordering summary mass execution. Yet equally telling in their own way are the thousands upon thousands of pages of field intelligence notes, scribbled annotations of telephone conversations, minutes of meetings, arrest warrants, deportation orders, notes on the burning of a particular village, casualty lists from chemical attacks, lists of the family members of "saboteurs," phone surveillance logs, food ration restrictions, interrogation statements and salutes to victorious military units.

Between them these are, so to speak, the innumerable tiny pixels that together make up the picture of the Kurdish genocide. The word is religious in origin; it is the name of the eighth sura , or chapter, of the Koran. According to the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, whose May article in Harper's Magazine was the first written journalistic treatment of the Anfal campaign, the eighth sura is "the seventy-five-verse revelation that came to the Prophet Mohammed in the wake of the first great battle of the new Muslim faith at Badr A.

It was in the village of Badr, located in what is now the Saudi province of Hejaz, that a group of Muslims numbering routed nearly 1, Meccan unbelievers. The battle was seen by the first Muslims as vindication of their new faith; the victory, the result of a direct intervention by God. It begins, "They will question thee concerning the spoils. Say: 'The spoils belong to God and the Messenger; so fear you God, and set things right between you, and obey you God and his Messenger, if you are believers.

I shall cast into the unbelievers' hearts terror; so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them! That for you; therefore taste it; and that the chastisement of the Fire is for the unbelievers. The victims of the Anfal campaign, the Kurds of northern Iraq, are for the most part Sunni Muslims. During Anfal, every mosque in the Kurdish villages that were targeted for destruction was flattened by the Iraqi Army Corps of Engineers, using bulldozers and dynamite.

Ironically, when Iraqi Kurds are asked if they can recall a period of stable peace, they speak first of the early years of the second Ba'ath Party regime, after the coup of July The radical pan-Arabist ideology on which the party had been founded was hostile to the non-Arab Kurds, who are culturally and linguistically related to the Persians.

Yet the new Iraqi regime made a priority of achieving a durable settlement with the Kurds. The Ba'ath was not lacking in pragmatism. The party was weak when it came to office, and it had no desire to contend with a troublesome insurgency. Pan-Arabist rhetoric was therefore played down after , in favor of a new effort to forge a single unified Iraqi identity, one in which the Kurds would be accepted as partners--if not exactly equal ones.

The modern nation-state of Iraq had been an artificial creation of the League of Nations in the s, when the former southern vilayat of the Ottoman Empire were subdivided into mandate territories administered by Britain and France.

Iraq's boundaries, incorporating the vilayet of Mosul, reflected British interest in achieving control over that region's known oil resources. It was oil that proved to be the Achilles' heel of the autonomy package that was offered to the Kurds by Saddam Hussein, the Revolutionary Command Council member in charge of Kurdish affairs.

On paper the Manifesto of March 11, was promising. It recognized the legitimacy of Kurdish nationalism and guaranteed Kurdish participation in government and Kurdish language-teaching in schools. Such a census would surely have shown a solid Kurdish majority in the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding oilfields, as well as in the secondary oil-bearing area of Khanaqin, south of the city of Suleimaniyeh.

But no census was scheduled until , by which time the autonomy deal was dead. In April , the Ba'ath regime signed a year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union; two months later it nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company; and with the October Arab-Israeli war, Iraq's oil revenues soared tenfold.

Baghdad interpreted this as a virtual declaration of war, and in March unilaterally decreed an autonomy statute. The new statute was a far cry from the Manifesto, and its definition of the Kurdish autonomous area explicitly excluded the oil-rich areas of Kirkuk, Khanaqin and Jabal Sinjar. In tandem with the autonomy process, the Iraqi regime carried out a comprehensive administrative reform, in which the country's sixteen provinces, or governorates, were renamed and in some cases had their boundaries altered.

The old province of Kirkuk was split up into two. The area around the city itself was now to be named al-Ta'mim "nationalization" and its boundaries redrawn to give an Arab majority. A new, smaller province, to be known as Salah al Din, included the city of Tikrit and the nearby village of al-Ouja, Saddam Hussein's birthplace.

Clearly the parallel between Saddam and the legendary mediaeval warrior, known in the West as Saladin, was anything but accidental although, ironically, Saladin was himself a Kurd, and like many of his kin had initially hired himself out to Arab armies. In the belief that they have no lasting friends, Kurdish leaders have long made alliances of convenience with outsiders, and Barzani assumed that foreign support would allow his fight to prosper.

Central Intelligence Agency trained senior KDP leaders and kept Barzani generously supplied with intelligence and arms, including heavy weaponry. The Shah of Iran, meanwhile, provided an indispensable rearguard territory as well as logistical support.

With this help, the peshmerga resisted the Iraqi assault for a year, although more than a hundred thousand refugees fled to Iran and the Kurdish towns of Zakho and Qala Dizeh were heavily damaged by aerial bombing.

But Barzani grossly overestimated the commitment of outsiders to his cause. In March , the Shah and Saddam Hussein signed the Algiers Agreement, which surprised most observers by putting an end--atleast for the time being--to the long-standing quarrel between the two countries.

Iraq granted Iran shared access to the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway; as a quid pro quo, the Shah abruptly withdrew his military and logistical support from the Iraqi Kurds. Within a week, Barzani's revolt had collapsed. Its leader, a broken man, was soon dead. Henry Kissinger's famous remark on the affair. Its culmination was the campaign known as Anfal. The traditional concerns of counterinsurgency planners now gave way to the more ambitious goal of physically redrawing the map of northern Iraq.

This meant removing rebellious Kurds from their ancestral lands and resettling them in new areas under the strict military control of the Baghdad authorities. In the Iraqi government embarked on a sweeping campaign to "Arabize" the areas that had been excluded from Kurdistan under theoffer of autonomy--an effort that had first begun in Hundreds of Kurdish villages were destroyed during the mids in the northern governorates of Nineveh and Dohuk, and about more in the governorate of Diyala, the southernmost spur of Iraqi Kurdistan, where there were also significant oil deposits.

Uprooted Kurdish farmers were sent to new homes in rudimentary government-controlled camps along the main highways. Some were forcibly relocated to the flat and desolate landscapes of southern Iraq, including thousands of refugees from the Barzani tribal areas who returned from Iran in late under a general amnesty.

Once moved, they had no hope of resuming their traditional farming activities: "The houses that the government had allocated for the Kurds in those areas were about one kilometer away from each other," recalled one returning refugee.

The relocated Kurds were simply driven south in convoys of trucks, dumped in the middle of nowhere and left to their own resources. In time they managed to build mud houses with the money that the men earned as day-laborers in the nearest town. In , under the terms of the Algiers Agreement, Iraq began to clear a cordon sanitaire along its northern borders.

At first, a former Iraqi military officer told Middle East Watch, this no-man's land extended five kilometers 3. The governorate of Suleimaniyeh, which shares a long mountainous border with Iran, was the worst affected, and estimates of the number of villages destroyed during this first wave of border clearances run as high as , the great majority of them in Sulemaniyeh. This was no haphazard operation. A new bureaucratic infrastructure was set up in August to handle these forced mass relocations, in the form of the Revolutionary Command Council's Committee for Northern Affairs, headed by Saddam Hussein.

Reportedly, a "Special Investigation Committee" Hay'at al-tahqiq al-khaseh was also set up at this time, charged with identifying potential peshmerga and authorized to order the death penalty without consulting Baghdad.

Sometimes the Kurds received some nominal compensation for their confiscated lands, although the amounts offered were usually derisory. They could also apply for loans from the government's Real Estate Bank in order to build a home in the complexes; but they were forbidden to return to their ancestral lands.

After the start of the war with Iran, which began with the Iraqi invasion of September 22, , Baghdad's campaign against the Kurdsfaltered.

Army garrisons in Iraqi Kurdistan were progressively abandoned or reduced, their troops transferred to the Iranian front; into the vacuum moved the resurgent peshmerga. Villages in the north began to offer refuge to large numbers of Kurdish draft dodgers and army deserters. Increasing stretches of the countryside effectively became liberated territory. The Iraqi regime's hostility only grew when it learned that the Kurdish group was now allying itself quite as readily with Iran's new clerical rulers as it had with the Shah.

The villagers who had been removed from the Barzan valley in spent nearly five years in their new quarters in the southern governorate of Diwaniya. But in army trucks, East German-supplied IFAs, rolled up outside their desert encampment and told them they were to be relocated again. For most, the new destination was Qushtapa, a new resettlement complex a half-hour drive to the south of the Kurdish city of Erbil. Some were taken to Baharka, north of Erbil, and others to the mujamma'at of Diyana and Harir, some way to the northeast.

There was no permanent housing in these complexes, nothing but tents, but the villagers were relieved at first to be breathing the air of Kurdistan once more. But in the last week of July , the residents of Qushtapa became aware of unusual military movements.

Fighter planes screamed overhead, making for the Iranian border. Troop convoys could be seen on the paved highway that bisected the camp, headed in the same direction.

Listening to Teheran radio, the Barzanis learned that the strategic border garrison town of Haj Omran had fallen to an Iranian assault. What they did not know at first was that the KDP had effectively acted as scouts and guides for the Iranian forces.

The reprisals began in the early hours of July They captured the men walking on the street and even took an old man who was mentally deranged and was usually left tied up.

They took the religious man who went to the mosque to call for prayers. He said the digging process has since been put on hold. Like Majeed and Abdulla, Najiba Mahmud, a year-old Kurdish woman from the Garmiyan region, also lost family members in the Anfal campaign. So they put obstacles in the way. Kadhim, who heads the Manawa Organisation for victims of the Anfal campaign, said the KRG has so far failed to provide DNA testing facilities to help identify the bodies. He added authorities have also failed to compensate the survivors and bring collaborators to justice.

According to Hakim Adil, head of media at the KRG Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs, while the medical and legal aspects of the process are in place, the process has been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Kareem also acknowledged the delay but did not specify a reason for it.

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