Iraq’s crime of genocide, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds
Human rights watch
Yale University Press
Iraq's 1988 campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living within its borders resulted in the death of at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children. This book from Human Rights Watch investigates the so-called Anfal campaign and concludes that this campaign constituted genocide against the Kurds.
The book is the result of research by a team of Human Rights Watch/Middle East investigators who analyzed eighteen tons of captured Iraqi government documents (ten of these documents are reproduced in an appendix) and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the Anfal campaign. It confirms that the campaign was characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass summary executions and disappearance of many tens of thousands of noncombatants; the widespread use of chemical weapons, among them mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands; the arbitrary jailing and warehousing of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation and without judicial order; the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers to barren resettlement camps after the demolition of their homes; and the wholesale destruction of some two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations. The book is a searing indictment of the Iraqi government's carefully planned and executed program to destroy a people, harrowing in its detailed and objective recounting of crimes against innocents.
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Contents
Foreword to the 1995 Edition / XIII
Preface / XV
A Note on Methodology / XXIV
Abbreviations / XXX
Introduction / 1
Chapter 1. Ba'athists and Kurds / 17
Chapter 2. The prelude to Anfal / 34
Chapter 3. The First Anfal: The siege of Sergalou and Bergalou, 23 february - 19 march 1988 / 63
Chapter 4. The second Anfal: Qara Dagh, 22 march - 1 april 1988 / 77
Chapter 5. The third Anfal: Germian, 7 - 20 april 1988 / 88
Chapter 6. The fourth Anfal: The Valley of the Lesser Zab, 3 - 8 may 1988 / 115
Chapter 7. The fifth, sixth, and seventh Anfals: The Mountain Valleys of Shaqlawa and Rawanduz, 15 may-26 august 1988 / 131
Chapter 8. The camps / 141
Chapter 9. The firing squads / 160
Chapter 10. The final Anfal: Badinan, 25 august - 6 september 1988 / 177
Chapter 11 . The amnesty and its exclusions / 200
Chapter 12. The aftermath / 214
Chapter 13. The vanishing trail / 225
Epilogue / 231
Appendix A. The Ali Hassan al-Majid tapes / 253
Appendix B. The perpetrators of Anfal: A road map to the Principal agencies and individuals / 259
Appendix C. Known chemical attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan, 1987-1988 / 262
Appendix D. Sample mass disappearances during Anfal, by region / 266
Appendix E. Original Anfal documents / 269
Notes / 315
Glossary of Arabic and Kurdish terms / 359
Bibliography / 361
Index / 365
PREFACE
Occasionally, opportunity can grow out of tragedy. For Human rights watch / Middle east, the first opportunity to carry out human rights research in northern Iraq came unexpectedly, in the wake of the tumultuous, heart-wrenching events of early 1991 that are familiar to most of us from our television sets. As Iraqi government troops fell back in the face of advancing allied troops and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters returning with civilian refugees from the Turkish and Iranian borders, it became evident that Baghdad's long-standing ban on access to the Kurdish region by independent investigators had been broken by a force majeure. How long the window of opportunity would stay open no one could predict.
This debilitating uncertainty remains. For the Iraqi Kurds, their future as an often-threatened minority is at risk, as are their lives. At this writing, a severe economic squeeze, from a combination of United Nations sanctions against Iraq and an internal blockade imposed by government forces, threatens to produce mass starvation among the 3.5 million inhabitants of the Kurdish rebel-controlled enclave. Government troops amassed along a cease-fire line could easily reconquer the region before the West could come to the aid of the Kurds.
For the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, a driving consideration over the past two years has been whether there would be time to gather reliable information both to convince international public opinion and, later, to satisfy a court of law. Although interim reports have been released about the 1988 extermination campaign known as Anfal (see Bibliography), with the publication of this book, the first objective has been accomplished. There is persuasive evidence that virtually all the many tens of thousands Kurdish civilians who disappeared at the hands of government forces in 1988 are dead, yet whether their fate can be definitively settled anytime soon remains to be seen. Much depends on the future course of internal Iraqi politics.
Allegations about enormous abuses against the Kurds by government security forces had been circulating in the West for years before the events of 1991; Kurdish rebels had spoken of 4,000 destroyed villages and an estimated 182,000 disappeared persons in 1988 alone. The phenomenon of the Anfal the official military code name used by the government in its public pronouncements and internal memoranda was well known inside Iraq, especially in the Kurdish region. As all the horrific details emerge, this name has seared itself into the popular consciousness much as the Nazi German Holocaust has in the world's consciousness. The parallels are apt and are often chillingly close.
Fragmented by their mountainous geography, their own political fractiousness, and the divide-and-rule policies of regional governments at the time, few Kurds appreciated the highly organized and comprehensive nature of the Anfal. And for obvious reasons, before October 1991, when Kurdish rebel leaders unexpectedly found themselves the temporary masters of much of their traditional lands, there were few hard facts for external organizations to rely on.
In its February 1990 report, Human Rights in Iraq, HRW/Middle East reconstructed what had taken place from exile sources, with what in retrospect turned out to be great accuracy. Even so, some of the larger claims made by the Kurds seemed too fantastic to credit. In fact, the process of discovery has been a humbling lesson for the foreigners who follow Kurdish affairs from abroad. Western reporters, relief workers, human rights organizations, and other visitors to Iraqi Kurdistan have come to realize that the overall scale of the suffering inflicted on the Kurds by their government was by no means exaggerated.
…
Andrew Whitley
Executive director (1990-1994)
Human rights watch / Middle east
Foreword to the 1995 editionThis book is the result of almost three years of research carried out by Human rights watch / Middle east (formerly known as Middle east watch) in northern Iraq and at the National archives in Washington, D. C., in 1991 - 94. It combines findings from forensic missions (conducted jointly with Physicians for Human rights), eyewitnesses, extensive interviews, and the study of eighteen metric tons of Iraqi state documents in arguing that the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq constituted genocide.
Between 1992 and 1994, HRW / Middle east published five reports about the Anfal campaign. Genocide in Iraq combines and expands on the information provided in the first three reports: one on land mines, one on mass graves, and the third on two villages that suffered during the Anfal campaign one endured a mass execution, the other a chemical attack. An earlier version of the book was published in the summer of 1993 by the Middle East division under the same title. Appendix E of the present edition includes the documentary evidence of genocide that was published in February 1994 in Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words.
Since publication of Bureaucracy, Human Rights Watch has made substantial progress in the analysis of the Iraqi state files. By the end of May 1994, it had screened close to 70 percent of the documents for evidence of genocide and other human rights abuses by the government of Iraq against its Kurdish population during the 1980s. The project has been scheduled to be completed by the end of September 1994.
Joost R. HiltermannIraqi documents project director
Human rights watch / Middle east
Human rights watch / Middle east
Iraq’s crime of genocide, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds
Yale university press
Human Rights Watch and Yale University Press express
Research into the Anfal campaign was made possible by grants from
Herbert and Marion Sandler, George and Susan Soros,
Rosalind Whitehead, and Medico International.
Human Rights Watch and Yale University Press express their appreciation to the
J. M. Kaplan Fund for making this joint publishing program possible.
Copyright © 1995 by Human Rights Watch.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for
the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Iraq's crime of genocide was first published in different form
by Human Rights Watch, copyright © July 1993.
Human Rights Watch / Middle East was established in 1989 to monitor
and promote the observance of internationally recognized human rights
in the Middle East and North Africa.
Set in Times Roman by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by Book Crafters, Inc, Chelsea, Michigan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Iraq's crime of genocide: the Anfal campaign against the Kurds /
Human rights watch / Middle east.
p. cm. (Human Rights Watch books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Kurds Iraq. 2. Iraq ethnic relations. 3. Massacres Iraq.
4. Genocide Iraq. I. Human rights watch/Middle east. II series.
DS70.8.K8I37 1995
305.89159-dc20 94-34779
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on production guidelines for book
Longevity of the Council on library resources.
10 987654321
Jacket illustration: Widows observe the excavation of a gravesite
in 1992 near Koreme, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Copyright © Susan Meiselas, Magnum Photos, Inc.
ISBN 0-300-06427-6 (alk. paper)
