Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Search the FT Search. World Show more World. US Show more US. 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. They were breaking down doors and entering the houses searching for our men. They looked inside the chicken coops, water tanks, refrigerators, everywhere, and took all the men over the age of thirteen. The women cried and clutched the Koran and begged the soldiers not to take their men away.
They took the boy. He was in the fifth grade. They have never been seen again, and to this day the widows show visitors to the Qushtapa camp framed photographs of their husbands, sons and brothers, begging for information about their fate. Electrical power was cut off; the women were not allowed to leave, even to shop, and townspeople of Erbil smuggled in food secretly at night.
In a speech, President Saddam Hussein left little doubt what had happened to the Barzanis. Divisions within the Kurdish movement had deep roots, which were as much historical and tribal as doctrinal. The Barzan Valley's claim to leadership of the movement had long been couched in religious and mystical terms. This uncompromising attitude made the Barzanis bitter enemies among a number of neighboring tribes such as the Surchi and Zebari.
And after the debacle of these conflicts erupted into the open. The power of the Barzani half-brothers--or the "offspring of treason," as the Ba'ath regime now took to calling them--was quickly challenged by Jalal Talabani.
Formerly a lieutenant of the elder Barzani and a member of the KDP politburo, Talabani had long been critical of the "feudal" style of the tribally-based organization and now proposed to supplant it with a secular leftist movement rooted among urban intellectuals.
In , Talabani made the break formal with the creation of his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan PUK , and two years later open warfare broke out between the two rival groups. The bitter schism would plague them until the final two years of the Iran-Iraq War.
Other groups complicated the picture still further. In the same year, the Iraqi Communist Party also took up arms against the Baghdad regime and set up its headquarters to the north of the city of Suleimaniyeh, in the same valley as the PUK. Other, smaller groups operated locally under suffrance of the two main peshmerga organizations. This divide was linguistic as well as cultural: to the north and west of the river, the principal Kurdish dialect is Kurmanji; to the south, it is Sorani.
This in turn had two dimensions: first, to play on theacrimonious divisions between the leading Kurdish parties; and second, to recruit as many Kurds as possible into tribally-based pro-government paramilitary groups. Talabani had bitterly opposed the Barzanis' decision to facilitate Iran's Haj Omran offensive in July , and in September of that year he grew even more alarmed when further Iranian attacks penetrated the border area around the town of Penjwin--uncomfortably close to the PUK's own strongholds in Suleimaniyeh governorate.
Seizing the opportunity, Saddam Hussein offered the PUK leader a renewed commitment to Kurdish autonomy, hoping to win his seasoned guerrilla army permanently over to Baghdad's side. But if you oppose us, we will never forget it. And after the [Iran-Iraq] war is over, we will destroy you and all your villages completely.
The negotiations dragged on inconclusively for more than a year before they finally broke down in January While there were a number of reasons for the collapse of the talks, none was more important than Talabani's reported reiteration of Mullah Mustafa Barzani's unacceptable demand that the Kirkuk and Khanaqin regions, with their oilfields, be considered part of Kurdistan.
Tribal loyalties in much of Iraqi Kurdistan have loosened somewhat during the modern era. Where they remain strong, however, they have offered fertile soil for successive regimes to recruit militias in the drive to undermine Kurdish solidarity.
Known officially under Saddam Hussein as the Command of the National Defense Battalions Qiyadet Jahafel al-Difa' al-Watani , these paramilitary bands have long been derided by other Kurds as jahsh , or "donkey foals. In principle, each tribal group was supposed to produce its contingent of jahsh as a demonstration of loyalty to the regime; each unit's commander enjoyed the title of mustashar consultant or advisor. If tribal leaders did not agree to cooperate in forming jahsh units, then Amn threats would often be persuasive.
The Quwat al-Taware' Emergency Forces carried out intelligence and counter-terrorism activities in the cities under the control of the Ba'ath Party. The Mafarez Khaseh , meanwhile, or "special units" of Kurdish agents, were formed by hard-core collaborators and were an official part of Amn. All of these groups were heavily indoctrinated by the regime against their fellow Kurds. In an introductory seminar, one former jahsh commander recalled, militaryintelligence officers told the assembled mustashars that the peshmerga were neither Kurds nor Iraqis; under Islamic law, they were "infidels and shall be treated as such.
For obvious reasons the regime never fully trusted the jahsh's loyalties. Even though jahsh members were largely recruited from complexes, towns and villages under government control Zakho, for instance, is said to have had as many as 5, jahsh , their units were frequently rotated to prevent local sympathies from developing.
Mustashars knew that the regime was wary of any illicit contacts they might have with peshmerga commanders in the vicinity, and Amn files that Middle East Watch has examined contain extensive surveillance dossiers on jahsh leaders.
The early years of the war against Iran made it apparent that Kurdish conscripts made reluctant soldiers, and on a number of occasions groups of Kurds were released from military service and inducted into the jahsh instead. If an adult male Kurd had connections to his local mustashar , he would pull every possible string to evade military service and serve in the jahsh instead. Many of the mustashars found their new role appealing.
Some were nobodies, elevated by the government to positions of real power. Others were traditional tribal leaders who discovered that the rich opportunities for graft as a mustashar more than made up for their declining influence among the local Kurds.
In addition to his fixedsalary, the mustashar was entitled to a small monthly cash payment for each man nominally under his command. Yet it was a common practice for many of these men--even the vast majority in some cases--to avoid active duty. On paper, the regime had, at the peak of their numbers, , Kurdish foot-soldiers at its disposal; in practice, only a fraction of that number genuinely bore arms.
In exchange for a signed jahsh ID that would protect them from military service, these Kurdish men were quite content for the mustashar to pocket their salary as well as his own. The brothers Omar and Hussein Surchi, for example, parlayed their earnings into a contracting and construction business that made them the richest men in Kurdistan.
While the government was prepared to tolerate practices like this for the sake of a mustashar's fealty, it acted ruthlessly toward any show of independence.
Several witnesses told Middle East Watch the story of a mustashar named Ja'far Mustafa, who was executed in for insubordination. The man was reportedly a fervent partisan of the Ba'ath regime, but would only agree to head up a jahsh contingent on condition that he be allowed to remain in his home area in the northern mountains of Badinan. In the order came through for Ja'far Mustafa's transfer, and he refused to move. During the standoff his defiance of Saddam Hussein was the talk of Iraqi Kurdistan.
But after a week he was executed in Baghdad, and his body then returned from the capital to his home, near the northern town of Mangesh, where it was publicly hanged for the second time. The two villages that he owned--Besifki and Dergijneek--were burned to the ground some time later. The warwith Iran, calculated to bring a swift victory, was dragging on interminably with heavy casualties on both sides.
Although the government had built a chain of small forts and larger fortresses throughout the Kurdish countryside, it was simply not feasible to keep large numbers of troops pinned down there. Several dozen Kurdish settlements, mainly in PUK-controlled areas near the Iranian border, were burned in piecemeal fashion in the mids, and their inhabitants resettled in mujamma'at.
But hundreds of other ancient villages--perhaps as many as 2,tried to integrate the counterinsurgency war into the rhythms of their daily lives. Sitting in the witness stand, she said that her friend Nashme told her "the whole town was hit with chemical weapons". Ms Mikhail later demanded compensation from foreign companies she said supplied the regime with chemicals allegedly used to gas Kurdish rebels.
During the proceedings, a defiant Saddam clutched the Qur'an and insisted that the judge address him as the "president of Iraq". The court has heard grim testimony from Kurdish witnesses who told of entire families killed in chemical weapons attacks against their villages. They said survivors plunged their faces into milk to end the pain from the blinding gas or fled into the hills on mules as military helicopters fired on them.
The Anfal campaign claimed the lives of 50,, Kurds. It aimed to crush independence-minded Kurdish militias and clear all Kurds from the northern region along the border with Iran. In , a ceasefire was agreed after secret talks were held. The ceasefire collapsed in July , after a suicide bombing blamed on IS killed 33 young activists in the mainly Kurdish town of Suruc, near the Syrian border.
The PKK accused the authorities of complicity and attacked Turkish soldiers and police. Since then, several thousand people - including hundreds of civilians - have been killed in clashes in south-eastern Turkey.
Turkey has maintained a military presence in northern Syria since August , when it sent troops and tanks over the border to support a Syrian rebel offensive against IS.
Those forces captured the key border town of Jarablus, preventing the YPG-led SDF from seizing the territory itself and linking up with the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to the west.
Dozens of civilians were killed and tens of thousands displaced. Turkey's government says the YPG and the PYD are extensions of the PKK, share its goal of secession through armed struggle, and are terrorist organisations that must be eliminated. Turkey's fear of a reignited Kurdish flame. Profile: The PKK. Before the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in most lived in the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, and in three, non-contiguous areas around Kobane, Afrin, and the north-eastern city of Qamishli.
Syria's Kurds have long been suppressed and denied basic rights. Some , have been denied citizenship since the s, and Kurdish land has been confiscated and redistributed to Arabs in an attempt to "Arabize" Kurdish regions. When the uprising evolved into a civil war, the main Kurdish parties publicly avoided taking sides. In mid, government forces withdrew to concentrate on fighting the rebels elsewhere, and Kurdish groups took control in their wake.
In March , they announced the establishment of a "federal system" that included mainly Arab and Turkmen areas captured from IS. The PYD says it is not seeking independence, but insists that any political settlement to end the conflict in Syria must include legal guarantees for Kurdish rights and recognition of Kurdish autonomy.
President Assad has vowed to retake "every inch" of Syrian territory, whether by negotiations or military force. His government has also rejected Kurdish demands for autonomy, saying that "nobody in Syria accepts talk about independent entities or federalism". They have historically enjoyed more national rights than Kurds living in neighbouring states, but also faced brutal repression. But it was not until that he launched a full armed struggle. In the late s, the government began settling Arabs in areas with Kurdish majorities, particularly around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and forcibly relocating Kurds.
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