A
l?Anfal
, which is Arabic for ?the spoils of war,? is the name of the
eighth
sura,
or chapter, of the Qur?an. It tells a tale in which followers of Mohammed pillage the lands
of nonbelievers. Some say the government chose the term for
its campaign against the Kurds of northern
Iraq because it suggested a religious justification for its actions. Saddam?s Anfal
was a mammoth campaign of civic annihilation, displacement
and mass killing. The Anfal was unleashed against the Kurds
from February through September 1988, and was tied
to Saddam?s goals in the final phase of the Iran?Iraq
war.
After the war with Iran began
in 1980, Iraqi troops stationed in the north were transferred to the
frontline, allowing Kurdish
peshmerga
forces to gain in strength and numbers. At the time, Kurdistan, as the
area is often called, simmered with revolt, led by the KDP and the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK). In the war, both parties actively sided with
Iran. By 1987, although Kurdish cities were still controlled by Iraqi
troops, the villages of the vast interior were safe havens for the Kurdish
rebels. That year, Saddam tapped his cousin, Ali Hassan
al?Majid, a man well?known for his brutality, to take charge of northern
Iraq. Al?Majid quickly deployed military resources to, in
his words, ?solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs.?
He ordered Iraqi aircraft to drop
poison gas on PUK and KDP targets and civilian villages, killing hundreds
indiscriminately. The Iraqi regime had become the first in history to
attack its own civilian population with chemical weapons.
Al?Majid came to be known as ?Chemical Ali.?
The Anfal began
in earnest in early 1988. A directive from Baghdad ordered
commanders to bomb rural areas of the north day or night
?in order to kill the largest number of persons present.? The same
directive declared that ?[a]ll 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.? There were eight Anfal attacks in all,
each following a similar pattern. First, air attacks dropped chemical weapons on both civilian and peshmerga targets. Next,
ground troops surrounded the villages, looting
and setting fire to homes. Then townspeople were herded
into army trucks and taken to holding facilities, the largest being
Topzawa, an army camp near Kirkuk. At these camps, men and boys deemed
old enough to carry a weapon were separated from
women, the elderly and young children. Routinely and uniformly, these
men and boys were taken to remote sites, executed in
groups, and dumped into pre?dug mass graves. Many women and children
were also executed, especially those from
areas that supported the Kurdish resistance.
The Anfal military campaign ended in September 1988 when Saddam?s regime
announced a general amnesty for all Kurds (although they were not permitted
to return to ?prohibited zones?). In any case, 90 percent of Kurdish
villages had essentially been wiped off the map, and the countryside
was strewn with land mines to discourage resettlement. The
response from the international community was muted, as many nations,
including the United States, had supported Hussein with money and arms
during the Iran?Iraq war.
Charges and evidence
Human Rights Watch estimates
that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed during al?Anfal; Kurdish
officials have put the number as high as 182,000. When presented
with this figure, ?Chemical? Ali Hassan al?Majid took exception.
?It could not have been more than 100,000,? he said. Since the fall
of Saddam, mass graves related to al?Anfal have been found in Hatra,
near Mosul, and in Samawa, southeast of Baghdad. In some
cases, audiotapes document meetings of Ba?ath leaders discussing the
campaign. Soil samples taken from bomb craters in northern Iraq show
evidence of the use of chemical weapons. Observers expect that Saddam
will be tried for his role in al?Anfal following the Dujail trial. He
may be charged with genocide.
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