The
al-Anfal Campaign ( ), also known as
Operation Anfal, was a campaign against the
Kurdish population of Iraq led by the Iraqi
regime of
Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid. The campaign
takes its name from
Surat al-Anfal in the
Qur'an, which
was used as a
code name by the former
Iraqi
Baath regime for a series of attacks against the
peshmerga rebels and the mostly
Kurdish civilian population of rural Northern Iraq,
conducted between 1986 and 1989 culminating in 1988.
Name
Al-Anfal is the eighth sura or
chapter of the Qur'an which explains the triumph of 319 followers
of the new Muslim faith over almost 900 pagans
at the battle of Badr
in 642
AD. Al Anfal literally means
the spoils (of war)
and was perhaps quite fitting for a military campaign of
extermination and looting commanded by
Ali Hassan al-Majid. His orders informed
jash (literally "donkey's foal" in
Kurdish) units that taking cattle,
sheep, goats, money, weapons and even Kurdish women was
legal.
Summary
The Anfal
campaign began in 1986 and lasted until 1989, and was headed by Ali
Hassan al-Majid (a cousin of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from Saddam's hometown of
Tikrit
). The Anfal campaign included the use of
ground
offensives,
aerial bombing, systematic destruction of
settlement,
mass
deportation,
firing squads, and
chemical warfare, which earned
al-Majid the
nickname of "
Chemical Ali".
Thousands of civilians were killed during the anti-insurgent
campaigns stretching from the spring of 1987 through the fall of
1988. The attacks were part of a long-standing campaign that
destroyed almost every Kurdish village in areas of northern Iraq
where pro-Iranian insurgents were based and displaced at least a
million of the country's estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population.
Independent sources estimate 100,000 to more than 150,000 deaths
and as many as 100,000
widows and an even
greater number of
orphans.
Amnesty International collected the
names of more than 17,000 people who had "disappeared" during 1988.
The campaign has been characterized as
genocidal in nature. It is also characterized as
gendercidal, because "battle-age" men
were the primary targets, according to
Human Rights Watch/Middle East. According
to the Iraqi prosecutors, as many as 180,000 people were
killed.
The campaign
In March
1987, Ali Hassan al-Majid appointed secretary-general of the Ba'ath Party's
Northern Region, which included Iraqi Kurdistan
. Under al-Majid, control of policies against
the Kurdish insurgents passed from the
Iraqi
Army to the
Ba'ath Party itself. It
would be known as "al-Anfal" ("The Spoils"), in a reference to the
eighth
sura of the Qur'an.
Anfal, officially conducted between February 23 and September 6,
1988, would have eight stages altogether, seven of them targeting
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 these assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000 soldiers with
air support -- matched against Kurdish
guerrilla forces that numbered no more
than a few thousand.
Military operations and chemical attacks
Concentration camps and extermination
When
captured Kurdish populations were transported to detention centers
(notably Topzawa near the city of Kirkuk
), 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 these camps, the men accused of being
insurgents were trucked off to be killed in
mass execution.
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 en masse ... 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,"
though "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 September 1, 2004, U.S.
forces in
Iraq discovered hundreds of bodies of Kurdish women and children at
the site near al-Hatra, believed to be
executed in early 1988 or late 1987..
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 (August 25-September 6,
1988).
This was launched immediately after the
signing of a ceasefire with Iran
, which
allowed the transfer of large amounts of men and matériel from the southern
battlefronts. The final Anfal focused on "the steep, narrow
valleys of Badinan, a
four-thousand-square mile chunk of the Zagros Mountains
bounded on the east by the Greater Zab River and on the north by Turkey
."
Here, 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 signal exception of
Assyrian and
Caldean Christians 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, being 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 June 20, 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 this policy that this
referred only to males "between the ages of 15 and 70." Human
Rights Watch/Middle East takes this as given, writing that clause
5's "order [was] to kill all adult males," and later: "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 September 6, 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 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. 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 Kurdish Democratic
Alliance. Hussein'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 an
increasingly sovereign Kurdish
Autonomous Region
.
Results
Statistics
According to the HRW during the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi
government:
- massacred 50,000 to 100,000 non-combatant civilians including
women and children;
- 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;
- destroyed 1,754 schools, 270 hospitals, 2,450 mosques, 27 churches;
- wiped out around 90% of Kurdish villages in targeted
areas.
Violation of human rights
The campaigns of 1987-1989 were characterized by the following
gross
human rights
violations:
- a) mass summary executions and mass disappearance of many tens
of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women
and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages;
- b) the widespread use of chemical
weapons, including mustard gas and
the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, against the town of Halabja as well as dozens
of Kurdish villages, killing many thousands of people, mainly women
and children;
- c) the wholesale destruction of some 2,000 villages, which are
described in government documents as having been "burned",
"destroyed", "demolished" and "purified", as well as at least a
dozen larger towns and administrative centers (nahyas and
qadhas); Since 1975, some 4,000 Kurdish villages have been
destroyed by the former Iraqi regime.
- d) Human Rights Watch/Middle East estimates that between 50,000
and 100,000 people were killed. Some Kurdish sources put the number
higher, estimating 182,000 Kurds were killed.
- e) Army engineers destroyed the large Kurdish town of Qala Dizeh (population 70,000) and declared its
environs a "prohibited area," removing the last significant
population center close to the Iranian border.
Genocide
Article 2 of the 1949
United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide defines
Genocide as "acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group". In December 2005 a
court in The Hague ruled that the killing of thousands
of Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s was indeed an act of genocide.
The
Dutch
court said
it considered "legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish
population meets requirement under 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."
Trials
Trial of Saddam Hussein
In an
interview broadcast on Iraqi
television on September 6, 2005, Iraqi president
Jalal Talabani 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.
Anfal trial
In June 2006, the
Iraqi Special
Tribunal announced that Saddam Hussein and six co-defendants
would face trial on August 21, 2006, in relation to the Anfal
campaign. In December 2006 Saddam was put on trial for the genocide
during Operation Anfal. The trial for the Anfal campaign was still
underway on December 30, 2006, when
Saddam Hussein was executed for
his role in the unrelated
Dujail
massacre.
The Anfal trial recessed on December 21, 2006, and when it resumed
on January 8, 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.
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
prosecution's demand.
See also
References
- Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What
Forgiveness?: My Encounters with Kurdistan, 356 pp., Westview
Press, 1998, ISBN 0813335809, p.231
- David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 504
pp., I.B. Tauris, 2004, ISBN 1850434166, pp. 359, 391.
- Iraq: 'Disappearances' – the agony continues
Amnesty International
- Whatever Happened To The Iraqi Kurds? Human Rights
Watch Report, 1991
- Iraq to hang 'Chemical Ali' Associated Press,
June 25, 2007
- Mass grave unearthed in Iraq CNN, October 13,
2004
- GENOCIDE IN IRAQ Human Rights Watch, 1993
- Michael Rubin, Are Kurds a pariah minority? Social Research,
Spring, 2003.
- The Crimes of Saddam Hussein - 1988 The Anfal
Campaign PBS Frontline
- Iraqi Anfal, Human Rights Watch, 1993.
- Ethnic Cleansing and the Kurds
- Killing of Iraq Kurds 'genocide' BBC News, 23 December
2005
- Lawyer denies Saddam confession BBC News, 8
September 2005
- Iraqi High Tribunal announces second Saddam trial to
open Associated Press, June 27, 2006
- Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence Is Hanged for
Crimes Against Humanity The New York Times, December 30,
2006
- 'Chemical Ali' sentenced to hang CNN, June 24,
2007
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