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PREFACE
Anfal started when I was in my early teens. I was living in the city of Suleimanya with my parents. My three sisters and three brothers had already left home. My eldest brother and sister lived in the West. My other brothers were peshmarga (freedom fighters) in the mountains. My second sister was married and lived in Tikreet (Saddam Hussein’s birth place) and my third sister was finishing her medical degree in Mosul University. From February 1988, there were whispers about massive Iraqi strikes on the Kurdish countryside. There were talks of widespread gassing, bombing, military siege, demolition of villages, looting, and the capture and mass disappearance of civilian populations.
One night my father’s cousin came to tell us that some of the villagers had been brought to the Emergency Forces building in Suleimanya. The place acted as one of the numerous temporary holding centres during Anfal. Hundreds of civilians could be seen beyond the fences of the building. They looked pitiful, with tom clothes that were drenched in mud. He told us that people from the surrounding neighbourhoods went to ‘throw food at the prisoners.’ I carried this image in my head for years; people trapped in animal cages desperate for food and water. My father predicted that they will all be killed but I refused to believe him. For most of my life 1 resisted my father's pessimism about the world. It was years before I could accept that people are capable of such systematic cruelty.
In April, as news of the devastation continued, a woman came to tell us that she was harbouring my brother, Asos. My brothers were peshmarga in the Qaradagh region which became prey to the second Anfal offensive. In the chaos of a swift defeat they were separated from each other and Asos had sneaked back into town with some villagers. He had thought it best not to come home. He knocked on the door of an old friend from university who lived in a small town outside the city. This family gave refuge to my brother until the curfew, and house by house search of Suleimanya, a few weeks later. After this he managed to get forged papers and go to Tikreet. It was thought that this would be the safest place for him to hide. After a few weeks we heard from my brother Rebin who, after being mildly injured in the gas attack on Shanakhse, had made it to Iran. Soon Asos joined him there.
In August 1988 when Iraq signed the peace treaty with Iran, more than two weeks before Anfal came to an end, my father decided to leave Iraq and join my brothers in Iran. We travelled by mule, crossing through the mountainous ‘prohibited region’, guided by smugglers. We passed through dozens of deserted villages. It is the eerie silence of the abandoned houses and farms that I remember the most.
While living in Iran I heard many stories about Anfal and, at the age of 14,1 started taking notes about the campaign. I asked our friends and relatives, who had been in the midst of the operation, to write about their experiences in a notebook I dedicated for this purpose. This book was kept by a man, himself a survivor, and was never returned.
No one knew what exactly had happened to the captured civilians. Many people hoped that the villagers were either imprisoned or relocated to the Arab south which was the fashion in the sixties and seventies (Van Bruinessen 1988). Finally, during the short-lived 1991 popular uprising, the security and intelligence offices were raided in Iraqi Kurdistan and tons of documents were captured which revealed the truth about Anfal. The documents, alongside witness testimonies and mass grave sites, made it clear that the disappeared civilians had been executed in 1988.
In 1993,1 arrived in England and launched into learning English and catching up with my education (I had missed two years of schooling due to the post-first Gulf War chaos). I now realise that for a number of years I subconsciously blocked out many traumatic issues concerning my home country, in order to manage the tasks required for my adaptation in the new country. I continued my education and read philosophy and psychology at Oxford University. I went on to do an MA in philosophy at University of London in 1999. In 2001 I was fortunate to secure a scholarship to do a PhD on the mental health of Kurdish women refugees at University of Kent in Canterbury.
It was when I was doing my MA that my interest in Anfal was sparked once again. I gradually lost interest in philosophy and the abstract questions it dealt with. I became more interested in why violence happens in certain communities and what happens in the aftermath. While living in a peaceful democracy, I became acutely aware of the brutalisation of my community, the increased violence against women, and the social inequalities that were widespread. I wanted to know more about how communities can recover from violence and what steps can be taken towards the attainment of justice and equality.
Later, when I was interpreting for refugees and asylum seekers 1 met large numbers of young Iraqi Kurds who were illiterate or semi literate. This was strange considering how the majority of people in the 1970s and 1980s were graduates. At times, I even wondered if some people were claiming to be illiterate because they were wrongly advised by agents and smugglers that this would be beneficial. Soon I realised that some of these were the Anfal surviving children who were bom in the Kurdish villages before Anfal forever changed their lives.
I watched numerous documentaries about Anfal when the Kurdish satellite channels were launched in the late 1990s. These documentaries mainly consisted of interviews with survivors. They were like a window through which we heard the stories of a community brought to its knees by terror, death, torture and mass disappearance. As I listened to the men and women, who were incarcerated during Anfal, talking about the overcrowded prison halls, the shortage of clean water and food, the spread of epidemics and death, I found it hard to envisage what the women suffered and how they managed.
I became further interested in women’s marginalised voices and, in particular, women’s experiences of violence and its aftermath while I was doing my PhD on the mental health of Kurdish women refugees. I wanted to know more about the women victims and survivors of Anfal - how they have coped with violence, loss and rupture, what support they have had access to and what role they have played in rebuilding Kurdistan after the No Fly Zone was set up to protect the Kurds in 1991, and a Kurdish parliament was selected for the first time in 1992. It was to answer these questions that I started this research. 1 was lucky to obtain a two-year post doctoral scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust to go back home and start searching for answers. Later, I managed to secure a one year scholarship from the Kurdistan Regional Government which helped me complete this research. A part of this research will also appear as a chapter in a book about forgotten genocides.¹¹
1 The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds: Chemical Weapons in the Service of Mass Murder (2011) Forgotten Genocides Essays on Oblivion, Denial and Memory. Rend Lemarchand (ed.) University of Pennsylvania Press.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a two year scholarship and to the Kurdistan Regional Government for a one year scholarship which made this research possible.
For the duration of this research I was a guest researcher at The Uppsala Programme for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Centre for Multiethnic Research. I am grateful to the Centre’s hospitality, and for the valuable support and encouraging conversations provided by Satu Grondahl, Kjell Magnusson, Laura Palosuo, Karen Brouneus, Paul Levine, Tomislave Dulic, Jasenka Trtak, Jelena Spasenic, and Ivana Macek.
Thanks to Humbold University and Zentrum Modemer Orient in Berlin for having me as a guest researcher in May-June 2009, during which I had interesting interactions with the research community there. Special thanks to Andrea Fischer-Tahir and Karin Mlodoch for priceless and stimulating debates about Anfal and the survivors.
I am also grateful to various organisations in Kurdistan that helped me during my data collection especially the Women's Education and Media Centre in Suleimanya and Sarqalla, Khatuzeen Centre in Erbil, New Life for Anfal women in Kirkuk, Anfal Centre in Duhok, Anfal Ministry in Erbil, and the Suleimanya Directorate for Anfal and Martyrs Affairs.
Special thanks to various guides and contacts who helped me in this process and some of whom indebted me with their warmth and hospitality while I stayed in their homes: Ikrama Ghaeb, Kawa Mahidi, Arif Qurbany, Jaza Mihammad, Fairooz Taha, and Ali Bandi.
I am grateful to friends and colleagues who read various parts of this book and provided valuable feedback, in particular Jennie Williams, Joost Hiltermann, John Hogan, Lucy Williams, John Hyman, Paul Segal, Laura Palosuo, Joel Hamilton, Goran Baba-Ali, and Tom Godfrey. Special thanks to Rob Cole who, despite our going through a divorce process, came in at the last moment and read the whole of this manuscript to check for coherence and repetition.
And friends who provided last minute crucial support and information, especially Goran Baba-Ali who tirelessly answered my numerous enquiries, Yasser Ashraf, Rebwar Saeed, Adalat Omar, Abdulkareem Haladni, Dlawar Ala’aldeen, and Shireen Drayee. Not to forget Janet and Tim Williams who gave me refuge in their house towards the end of this book and the long walks and good sea-view helped me manage this task better.
Most of all I would like to thank all the women and men who gave me their time and shared with me their experiences despite the difficulties this posed for some. Without their voices and their willingness to share so much of themselves this book would not be possible.
Introduction
Anfal is an under-researched catastrophe and there are limited sources available.¹ Generally speaking, these sources concentrate on establishing ‘the truth’ about Anfal using Iraqi government documents, forensic evidence, and witness testimonies. Few sources address the problems faced by women during Anfal. Even fewer¹ ² talk about life after Anfal, namely: the long-term consequences of mass violence, the effect of the change in women’s social status when they became sole breadwinners in their own families, the destruction of family structure and the farming community, the poverty, the fate of children and the possibility of women’s exploitation within their own communities while working as labourers, servants and factory workers. This is true, even though women and their children constitute the majority of the survivors.
This book provides an overview of Kurdish women’s experiences and their understandings of what happened to them during the different stages of Anfal and in the aftermath. It addresses the social and psychological consequences of violence, displacement, illness, poverty, and the disappearance of loved ones as experienced by the women. It gives voice to a poor and marginalised group whose stories, and lives, have been exploited by many sections of Kurdish society, including the government, media, researchers, employers, and others. It also investigates the survival strategies of women in the aftermath of genocide. It is hoped that this book will help inform policy and strategies designed to help this group of women, as well as women who have similar experiences in others parts of the world.
After establishing the historical context, and some basic facts about Anfal in Chapter 1, the rest of the book attempts to present the various ways women were affected by the campaign and how they survived. The situation of women who were captured by the army and were detained in prison camps is explored in Chapter 2. These were mainly women who lived in villages inland, away from Iraq’s borders with Iran and Turkey, and who were deprived of crucial support that could have secured their escape. The chapter outlines the women’s struggle with life in detention as they survived food deprivation, illness, birth, death of children, and the threat of sexual abuse.
The experience of internally displaced women who managed to escape and went into hiding (because of help provided by Kurdish collaborators and relatives, …
1 There are three main groups of sources, namely the Kurdish sources which include Qurbany (2003a, 2003b), Abdulrahman (1995), Kareem (1996), and Resool (2003); the English language sources including Middle East Watch (1993), Physicians for Human Rights (1993), Makiya (1993) and Power (2002); and articles published on the web.
2 Adalat Omar (2003,2007).
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