The Anfal Campaign

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The Anfal Campaign

Case Study:The Anfal Campaign

(Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988

Kilde: http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html

Summary

The anti-Kurdish "Anfal" campaign, mountedbetween February and September 1988 bythe Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, was

both genocidal and gendercidal in nature."Battle-age" men were the primary targets of Anfal,according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East (hereafter,HRW/ME). The organization writes in its book Iraq's Crime ofGenocide: "Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, although women andchildren vanished in certain clearly defined areas, adultmales who were captured disappeared en masse. ... It isapparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate

all adult males of military service age captured in rural IraqiKurdistan" (pp. 96, 170). Only a handful survived theexecution squads.

The background

The Kurds are considered the world's largest nation withouta state of their own. Numbering approximately 20-25 millionpeople, their traditional territory is divided among the modern

states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with a small number inthe states of the former Soviet Union. Just over four millionof these Kurds live in Iraq, constituting about 23 percent ofthe population.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.htmlhttp://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html


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In the wake of World War I, with U.S. President Woodrow

Wilson's call for "self-determination" echoing loudly, theKurds were promised a homeland -- Kurdistan -- in theTreaty of Svres (1920). However, the victorious alliesbacked away from their pledge in an attempt to court thenew Turkish regime of Kemal Ataturk, and in fear ofdestabilizing Iraq and Syria, which were granted to Britainand France, respectively, as mandated territories. The 1923Treaty of Lausanne thus reneged on Kurdish independenceand divided the Kurds among Turkey, Iraq, and Syria.

Ataturk's discrimination against Turkey's Kurdish populationbegan almost immediately, with Kurdish political groups andmanifestations of cultural identity banned outright. In theimmediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Kurds ofIran, with Soviet support, succeeded in establishing the firstindependent Kurdish state (the Kurdish Republic ofMahabad). But this was quickly crushed by Iranian troops.

In 1946, an Iraqi Kurd, Mustafa Barzani, founded theKurdistan Democratic Party - Iraq (KDP). Barzani died in1979, but the KDP remains one of the most prominentKurdish resistance organizations. Its more radical rival, thePatriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), was founded in 1975 by


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Jalal Talabani. It was the PUK that would bear the brunt ofthe Anfal campaign in 1988.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The ascent to power of Iraqi leaderSaddam Hussein in 1968 (though he didnot become president until 1979) at firstseemed to augur well for the Iraqi Kurds.In 1970, Saddam's Ba'ath Party reacheda wideranging agreement with theKurdish rebel groops, granting the Kurdsthe right to use and broadcast their

language, as well as a considerabledegree of political autonomy. But theagreement broke down when the Ba'athParty "embarked on the Arabization of

the oil-producing areas in Kurdistan, evicting Kurdishfarmers and replacing them with poor Arab tribesmen [andwomen] from the south, guarded by government troops." InMarch 1974, the KDP rose up against Saddam, sparking afullscale war the following year, when some 130,000 Kurds

fled to Iran. "In March 1975," writes Khaled Salih, "tens ofthousands of villagers from the Barzani tribes were forciblyremoved from their homes and relocated to barren sites inthe desert south of Iraq, where they had to rebuild their livesby themselves, without any form of assistance." (Khaled,"Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq".)

It was these displaced populations of Barzani tribespeople

who, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, would fallprey to one of the largest gendercidal massacres of moderntimes. Martin van Bruinessen writes:

In [July-]August 1983, Iraqi security troops rounded up themen of the Barzani tribe from four resettlement camps near


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Arbil. These people were not engaged in anyantigovernment activities. ... Two of Barzani's sons at thattime led the Kurdistan Democratic Party and were engagedin guerrilla activities against the Baghdad government, but

only a part of the tribe was with them. ... All eight thousandmen of this group, then, were taken from their families andtransported to southern Iraq. Thereafter they disappeared.

All efforts to find out what happened to them or where theyhad gone, including diplomatic inquiries by several Europeancountries, failed. It is feared that they are dead. The KDP[Kurdish Democratic Party] has received consistent reportsfrom sources within the military that at least part of this group

has been used as guinea pigs to test the effects of variouschemical agents. (van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan?,"in George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual andHistorical Dimensions([University of Pennsylvania Press,1994], pp. 156-57, emphasis added.)

One Barzani woman described the roundup of the menfolk:"Before dawn, as people were getting dressed and ready togo to work, all the soldiers charged through the camp

[Qushtapa]. They captured the men walking on the streetand even took an old man who was mentally deranged andwas usually left tied up. They took the preacher who went tothe mosque to call for prayers. They were breaking downdoors and entering the houses searching for our men. Theylooked inside the chicken coops, water tanks, refrigerators,everywhere, and took all the men over the age of thirteen.The women cried and clutched the Qur'an [Koran] and

begged the soldiers not to take their men away." In 1993,Saddam Hussein strongly hinted at the final fate of theBarzani men: "They betrayed the country and they betrayedthe covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them,and they went to hell." As Human Rights Watch noted, "Inmany respects, the 1983 Barzani operation foreshadowed


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the techniques that would be used on a much larger scaleduring the Anfal campaign." (Human Rights Watch, Iraq'sCrime of Genocide, pp. 4, 26-27.) Khaled Salih notes that"No doubt, the absence of any international outcry

encouraged Baghdad to believe that it could get away withan even larger operation without any hostile reaction. In thisrespect the Ba'ath Party seems to have been correct in itscalculations and judgement of the international inaction."(Khaled, "Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq"; see also"Who was responsible?," below.)


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Aftermath of Iraqi chemical attack on Halabji, March1988.

Among the most horrificfeatures of the Iraqi

campaigns against theKurds in the 1980s was theregime's resort to chemicalweapons strikes againstcivilian populations. On April16, 1987, a chemical raid onthe Balisan valley killed

dozens of civilians; in its wake, "some seventy men were

taken away in buses and, like the Barzanis, never seenagain. The surviving women and children were dumped onthe plain outside Erbil and left to fend for themselves."(Jonathan C. Randal, After SuchKnowledge, What Forgiveness?, p. 230.)Less than a year later, on March 16, 1988, afar more concentrated chemical attack waslaunched on the town of Halabji, near theIranian border, which had briefly been heldby a combined force of Kurdish rebels andIranian troops. Thousands of civilians died,and with the town still under Iranianoccupation after the raid, journalists andphotographers were able to reach thescene. "Their photographs, mainly ofwomen, children, and elderly peoplehuddled inertly in the streets or lying on their

backs with mouths agape, circulated widely,demonstrating eloquently that the greatmass of the dead had been Kurdish civiliannoncombatants." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide,p. 72.) Although it took place during the

Anfal campaign, however, the attack on


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Halabji is not normally considered part of that campaign.

The gendercide

The male is born to be slaughtered.- Kurdish proverbYour men have gone to hell.

- Iraqi soldier to a survivor of the attack on Qaranawvillage, Fourth Anfal, May 1988

In March 1987, Saddam Hussein's cousin from hishometown of Tikrit, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was appointedsecretary-general of the Ba'ath Party's Northern Region,

which included Iraqi Kurdistan. Under al-Majid, who "even bythe standards of the Ba'ath security apparatus ... had aparticular reputation for brutality," control of policies againstthe Kurdish insurgents passed from the Iraqi army to theBa'ath Party itself. This was the prelude to the intended "finalsolution" to the Kurdish problem undertaken within months ofal-Majid's arrival in his post. It would be known as "al-Anfal"("The Spoils"), a reference to the eighth sura of the Qur'an,

which details revelations that the Prophet Muhammadreceived after the first great victory of Islamic forces in A.D.624. "I shall cast into the unbelievers' hearts terror," readsone of the verses; "so smite above the necks, and smiteevery finger of them ... the chastisement of the Fire is for theunbelievers." Anfal, officially conducted between February23 and September 6, 1988, would have eight stagesaltogether, seven of them targeting areas controlled by thePUK. For these assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000soldiers with air support -- matched against Kurdish guerrillaforces that numbered no more than a few thousand.

On June 20, 1987, a crucial directive for the Anfal campaign,SF/4008, was issued under al-Majid's signature. Of greatestsignificance is clause 5. Referring to those areas designated


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"prohibited zones," al-Majid ordered that "all personscaptured in those villages shall be detained and interrogatedby the security services and those between the ages of 15and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has

been obtained from them, of which we should be dulynotified." However, it seems clear from the application of thispolicy that "those between the ages of 15 and 70" meant"those males" in the designated age range. HRW/ME, forexample, 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 automaticpenalty for any male of an age to bear arms who was found

in an Anfal area." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 11, 14.) Asubsequent directive on September 6, 1987, supports thisconclusion: it calls for "the deportation of ... families to theareas where there saboteur relatives are ..., except for themale [members], between the ages of 12 inclusive and 50inclusive, who must be detained." (Cited in Iraq's Crime ofGenocide, p. 298.)

Accordingly, when captured Kurdish populations were

transported to detention centres (notably the concentrationcamp of Topzawa near the city of Kirkuk), they weresubjected to the classic process of gendercidal selection:separating adult and teenage males from the remainder ofthe community. According to HRW/ME,

With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sortingnew arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women

were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks hadrolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or paradeground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men werefurther divided by age, small children were kept with theirmothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off toseparate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be


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of an age to use a weapon were herded together. Roughlyspeaking, this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, butthere was no rigorous check of identity documents, and strictchronological age seems to have been less of a criterion

than size and appearance. A strapping twelve-year-old mightfail to make the cut; an undersized sixteen-year-old might betold to remain with his female relatives. ... It was then time toprocess the younger males. They were split into smallergroups. ... Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustledinto large rooms, or halls, each filled with the residents of asingle area. ... Although the conditions at Topzawa wereappalling for everyone, the most grossly overcrowded

quarter seem to have been those where the male detaineeswere held. ... For the men, beatings were routine. (Iraq'sCrime of Genocide, pp. 143-45.)

After a few days of such treatment, without a single knownexception, the men thus "processed" were trucked off to bekilled in mass executions. According to HRW/ME, the"standard operating procedures" of the gendercidal killings(extended, in some cases, to other segments of the

population -- see below) were "uncannily reminiscent of ...the activities of the Einsatzkommandos, or mobile killingunits, in the Nazi-occupied lands of Eastern Europe":

Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front,and dragged into predug mass graves; others were made tolie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of freshcorpses, before being killed; still others were tied together,

made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back sothat they would fall forward into it -- a method that waspresumably more efficient from the point of view of thekillers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely overthe heaps of corpses. Some of the grave sites contained


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dozens of separate pits and obviously contained the bodiesof thousands of victims. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 12.)

Excavating the skeleton of a Kurdish man

killed at Koreme, final Anfal.The genocidal and gendercidal focusof the Iraqi killing campaign variedfrom one stage of Anfal to another. Nomass killings of civilians appear tohave taken place during first Anfal(February 23-March 19, 1988). Themost exclusive targeting of the male

population, meanwhile, occurredduring the final Anfal (August 25-September 6, 1988). This waslaunched immediately after the signingof a ceasefire with Iran, which allowedthe transfer of large amounts of men

and matriel from the southern battlefronts. It 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 HRW/ME by survivors "invariablyincluded only adult and teenage males, with the signalexception of Assyrian and Caldean Christians and YezidiKurds," who were subsidiary targets of the slaughter. Manyof 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, executed by firing squads on theauthority of a local army officer." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide,pp. 178, 190, 192; on the fate of the Christians and YezidiKurds, see pp. 209-13.) The best-known case is the assaulton the village of Koreme, where a forensic investigationconducted by Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human


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Rights in May-June 1992 uncovered the bodies of 27 menand adolescent boys executed on August 28. (See MiddleEast Watch/Physicians for Human Rights, The AnfalCampaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme

[Human Rights Watch, 1993].)

Even amidst this most systematic slaughter of adult men andboys, however, "hundreds of women and young childrenperished, too," though "the causes of their deaths weredifferent -- gassing, starvation, exposure, and willful neglect -- rather than bullets fired from a Kalashnikov [rifle]." (Iraq'sCrime of Genocide, p. 191.) The fate of other segments of

the Kurdish community throughout Anfal receives attention inthe following section.

Genocide against women,the elderly, and children

In its landmark study of the Iraqigenocide in Kurdistan, HRW/MEcalls the decisions surrounding

the deaths of thousands ofwomen, children, and elderlyKurds "one of the great enigmasof the Anfal campaign." "Manythousands of women and childrenperished," the organization notes,"but their deaths were subject toextreme regional variations, withmost being residents of twodistinct 'clusters' that wereaffected by the third and fourth Anfals." One factorapparently was "whether the [Iraqi] troops encounteredarmed resistance in a given area," something whichcharacterized "most, but not all, the areas marked by the


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killing of women and children." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide,pp. 13, 96.)

The hardest-hit area of all appears to have been the region

of southern Germian, abutting the Arab heartland of Iraq,which was targeted during the third Anfal (April 7-20, 1988).Southern Germian was apparently a special focus for "root-and-branch" genocide because it was the heartland of thePUK resistance and strongly supportive of the Kurdish PUKrebels. "Although males aged fifteen to fifty routinelyvanished from all parts of Germian," writes HRW/ME, "onlyin the south did the disappeared include significant numbers

of women and children. Most were from the Daoudi and Jaff-Roghyazi tribes," and they accounted for more than half the"disappeared" in the affected regions. Mass executionsinvolving "an estimated two thousand women and children"took place at a site on Hamrin Mountain, between the citiesof Tikrit and Kirkuk. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 115, 171.)

Taimour beinginterviewed.

One such execution left a survivor, a young boynamed Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, "the onlyeyewitness to the mass killing of women andchildren" (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 171). Hisaccount received extensive attention in the

western press, and describes scenes virtually identical to theEinsatzgruppen-style massacres of "battle-aged" maleswhich preceded the killing of women, children, and the

elderly from southern Germian. For a lengthy interview withTaimour, see "An Interview with the Anfal Survivor,Taimour".

Most members of the Kurdish community who remainedafter "battle-age" men had been "disappeared" were trucked


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off to resettlement camps to the south. To the extent thatwomen, children, and the elderly were killed in massexecutions, these were usually perpetrated after a period ofdetention in such camps. Those not slaughtered in this

fashion were usually transported to relocation camps whereconditions were squalid and unsanitary; thousands --especially children -- died from deprivation and neglect.

The infrastructure of life in Iraqi Kurdistan, meanwhile, wasleft almost totally destroyed by the Anfal campaign and itspredecessors. "By the time the genocidal frenzy ended, 90%of Kurdish villages, and over twenty small towns and cities,

had been wiped off the map. The countryside was riddledwith 15 million landmines, intended to make agriculture andhusbandry impossible. A million and a half Kurdish peasantshad been interned in camps. ... About 10% of the totalKurdish population of Iraq had perished [since 1974]."(Kendal Nezan, "When our 'friend' Saddam was gassing theKurds", Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998.)

How many died?

According to HRW/ME, "at least fifty thousand rural Kurds ...died in Anfal alone, and very possibly the real figure wastwice that number ... All told, the total number of Kurds killedover the decade since the Barzani men were taken fromtheir homes is well into six figures." "On the basis ofextensive interviews in Kurdistan and perusal of extant Iraqidocuments, Shoresh Resoul, a meticulous Kurdishresearcher ... conservatively estimated that 'between 60,000and 110,000' died during [al-]Majid's Kurdish mandate," i.e.,beginning shortly before Anfal and ending shortly afterwards.(Randal, After Such Knowledge ..., p. 214.) Other Kurdishestimates are even higher. "When Kurdish leaders met withIraqi government officials in the wake of the spring 1991


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uprising, they raised the question of the Anfal dead andmentioned a figure of 182,000 -- a rough extrapolation basedon the number of destroyed villages. Ali Hassan al-Majidreportedly jumped to his feet in a rage when the discussion

took this turn. 'What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000?'he is said to have asked. 'It couldn't have been more than100,000' -- as if this somehow mitigated the catastrophe thathe and his subordinates had visited on the Iraqi Kurds."(Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 14, 230.)

It is impossible to state with certainty what proportion of thevictims of Anfal were adult men and adolescent boys. The

most detailed investigation, conducted by HRW/ME,tabulated the number of "disappeared" from the variousstages of Anfal, based on field interviews with some 350survivors. The organization gathered the names of 1,255men, 184 women, and 359 children -- "only a fraction of thenumbers lost during Anfal." This would suggest that some 87percent of the adults "disappeared," all of whom wereapparently executed, were male; and that about 70 percentofallthose who "disappeared" were "battle-age" males. (See

Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 266-68.) These calculations donot, however, include the large number of Kurdish civilianskilled indiscriminately in chemical attacks and othergeneralized assaults.

Most recently, Kenneth Roth, director of Human RightsWatch, has referred to "100,000 Kurdish men and boysmachine-gunned to death during the 1988 Anfal genocide."

(Roth, "Show Trials Are Not the Solution to Saddam'sHeinous Reign", The Globe and Mail, 18 July 2003.)

Who was responsible?

The tens of thousands of Anfal deaths, according toHRW/ME,


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did not come in the heat of battle -- as 'collateral damage,' inthe military euphemism. Nor were they the result of acts ofaberration by individual commanders whose excessespassed unnoticed or unpunished by their superiors. Rather,

these Kurds were systematically put to death in largenumbers by order of the central Iraqi government inBaghdad days or weeks after being rounded up in villagesmarked for destruction or while fleeing army assaults in"prohibited areas." ... Documentary materials captured fromthe Iraqi intelligence agencies demonstrate with great claritythat the mass killings, disappearances, and forcedrelocations associated with Anfal and the other anti-Kurdish

campaigns of 1987-89 were planned in a coherent fashion.Although power over these campaigns was highlycentralized, their success depended on the orchestration ofthe efforts of a large number of agencies and institutions atthe local, regional, and national level, from the office of thepresident of the republic down to the lowliest jahsh [pro-IraqiKurdish] unit. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. xvii, 9-10. Formore on the role of the pro-regime Kurdish forces, whichwere crucial in the Anfal roundups, see pp. 109-12, andKanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, pp. 143-45.)

Noam Chomsky called Saddam Hussein's Iraq "perhaps themost violent and repressive state in the world." (Quoted inMakiya, Cruelty and Silence, p. 273; see also the analysis ofIraqi conscription policies elsewhere on this site.) Atop thestate structure stood the murderous dictator. In classic"patrimonial" fashion, Saddam constructed a brutal one-party

regime consisting largely of his relatives from Tikrit andsurrounding areas. (For a powerful description of Saddam'srule-by-terror, see Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: ThePolitics of Modern Iraq.) The Ba'ath Party's "point man"during the worst of the atrocities in Iraqi Kurdistan was, asnoted, Ali Hassan al-Majid. After Anfal, he was transferred


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from his post, to become -- in August 1990 -- the governor ofIraqi-occupied Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein admires portraits of himself.

Saddam's dictatorship reached to the grassroots of Iraqisociety through the intertwined institutions of the Ba'athParty and the Iraqi army and security forces. At every level,its violence exhibited strong patriarchal overtones. JonathanRandal describes the "perverted form of male bonding"

evident in an internal purge that Saddam carried out in 1979,in which "surviving ministers and senior party officials [wereobliged] to join the firing squad which executed thecondemned men." The "pattern [was] repeated throughoutthe chain of command: from the lowliest secret-policeoperative on up they shared responsibility in the executions,thus enforcing loyalty and subservience to SaddamHussein." Such practices "were also useful in intimidating

anyone less inclined to terror and cruelty." (Randal, AfterSuch Knowledge ..., p. 208.)

The international community must accept a share of theblame for Saddam's genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. Forthe duration of the Iran-Iraq war -- which also witnessedmost of the horrors against the Kurds -- Saddam was


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considered an important bulwark against the spread ofIranian-style Islamic fundamentalism to the strategic and oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Accordingly, the Westsupplied and armed him throughout his campaigns against

both the Iranians and the Kurds, eventually providing thecritical intelligence information that allowed Iraq to emergevictorious in the war against Iran. In August 1988 -- with the

Anfal campaign nearly over, and in the wake of a year-and-a-half of vicious chemical attacks on civilian populations --"the United Nations Sub-Committee on Human Rights votedby 11 votes to 8 not to condemn Iraq for human rightsviolations. Only the Scandinavian countries, Australia and

Canada, together with bodies like the European Parliamentand the Socialist International, saved their honour by clearlycondemning Iraq." (Nezan, "When our 'friend' Saddam wasgassing the Kurds".)

The aftermath

Kurdish rebels seizecontrol in 1991.

In August 1990, the Iraqiregime finallyoverreached with itsinvasion of neighbouringKuwait, sparking the GulfWar, in which a U.S.-ledcoalition succeeded inexpelling the Iraqi

occupying forces. At thetail end of the war, in March 1991, the Kurdish population ofnorthern Iraq launched a general uprising against the Iraqiregime, and briefly managed to expel it from the region.When the Iraqis counterattacked, nearly half a million Kurdsfled to Turkey and Iran; the resultant humanitarian crisis led


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the members of the Allied coalition to declare a "safe haven"in the northern part of Iraqi Kurdistan. A coalition of sevenKurdish parties then established authority over the enclave,which exists to the present day -- despite the outbreak of

serious fighting between the PUK and KDP in May 1994,which killed an estimated 1,000 people. In September 1998,the two rebel groups forged a new power-sharing agreementbrokered by the UnitedStates.

During the March 1991uprising, Kurdish forces

managed to seize some fourmillion documents from Iraqiarchives in the region, andtransported these to safeareas. These documents,combined with theinvestigative missionsundertaken in the Kurdishzone by HRW/ME and other

organizations, allowed adefinitive reconstruction ofthe events of Anfal. AsHRW/ME noted, "To havethe opportunity to speak tosurvivors of human rights violations, to dig up the bones ofthose who had not survived, and then to read the officialaccount of what had taken place -- all while the regime that

had carried out the outrages was still in power -- was uniquein the annals of human rights research." (Iraq's Crime ofGenocide, p. xx.) In light of this mountain of documentation,eyewitness testimony, and forensic data, the organizationannounced its "confidence" that "concerning the crucial1987-1989 period ... the evidence is sufficiently strong to


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prove a case of genocidal intent on the part of the IraqiGovernment," and has called for the creation of a war-crimestribunal at the Hague such as those established forBosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Kosovo. (HRW/ME,

Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in ItsOwn Words[Human Rights Watch, 1994], p. x.)

A number of observers have noted the still-visible evidenceof gendercide among the Kurdish population of northernIraq. In September 1988, as Anfal was officially windingdown, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, "recalledtravelling westward from Sulaimaniyah ... and coming across

large groups of disconsolate women and children standingnext to their meager bundled belongings on the roadside.'They were obviously without menfolk. I suspected theauthorities meant me to see them.'" (Randal, After SuchKnowledge ..., p. 223.) In 1999, the Christian Aidorganization noted that "Many Kurdish households areheaded by widows -- their husbands have disappeared."("Working in Iraq: Christian Aid's Experience 1990-98".)Retired U.S. Brigadier-General Jeffrey Pilkington, who

commanded the relief campaign "Operation ProvideComfort" in 1993-94, reported from a trip to the Kurdish zonethat

The signs of almost total economic stagnation wereeverywhere. Fields were mostly bare -- for lack of fertilizer orinsecticide or because there was no market for the wheatgrown or no-one who could afford to buy it. Factories which

had employed hundreds of workers were now deserted. ...Many villages were populated by only women and children,the majority of men having been detained or killed.(Pilkington, "Beyond Humanitarian Relief: EconomicDevelopment Efforts in Northern Iraq", in Forced MigrationReview.)


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Likewise, the Iraq Assessment undertaken by the CountryInformation and Policy Unit of the British Home Office (April2000) stated that "there is an unusually high percentage ofwomen in the Kurdish areas, purportedly caused by the

disappearances of tens of thousands of Kurdish men duringthe Anfal Campaign. The Special Rapporteur reported thatthe widows, daughters, and mothers of the Anfal Campaignvictims are economically dependent on their relatives orvillages because they may not inherit the property or assetsof their missing family members." (On the plight of thewidows of the Anfal victims, see also Teresa Thornhill, "AnfalWidows: Saddam's Genocide," New Internationalist, no. 247

[September 1993].)

In March 2003, the United States launched its long-threatened invasion to overthrow the regime of SaddamHussein, which collapsed after only brief resistance,although substantial guerrilla resistance was continuing atthe time of writing. In the wake of the regime'sdisappearance, Iraqis across the country began digging upmass graves of those executed by Saddam's forces.

According to the Baltimore Sun(6 May 2003), "Human rightsgroups estimate up to 300,000 Iraqis disappeared over thepast 23 years, the vast majority of them men and teen-ageboys." However, Sunreporter Todd Richissin noted notedthat early exhumations showed that "Hussein's deadlysweeps took in mothers [and] sisters, too," in the words ofthe article's headline, which cited "female victims ... [found]in unexpected numbers." With regard to Anfal, it was a

poignant fact that, as of December 2003, "in the eightmonths since the Iraqi dictator was deposed, not a singleperson who disappeared during the Anfal military campaignof 1988 has returned alive." (Richard C. Paddock, "An AwfulTruth Sinks In", Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2003.)


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In December 2003, U.S. forces announced thecapture of a dishevelled Saddam (see photo),hiding in a hole at a farmhouse along theTigris River, within sight of one of his former

palaces. It was unclear what type of tribunalhe faced for his crimes, but there was now thepossibility of administering justice for some of his manyatrocities, including the genocidal ravages of the AnfalCampaign against Iraqi Kurds.

Note: New Zealand scholar and Gendercide Watch affiliateHeval Hylan has contributed a powerful dissertation on

"Genocide in Kurdistan" to this site.

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The Anfal Campaign

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