A Petition
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the
Compassionate
The Venerable Chief and Leader, the Honorable Saddam
Hussein (May God Protect Him), President of the
Republic and Head of the Honorable Revolutionary
Command Council:
Struggling Comrade, I greet you. And I present
myself to you as a devoted citizen.
I implore you in the name of Ba'athist Justice to
hear my plight, which has deprived me of sleep night
and day. For I lost all hope and when I had no one
left to turn to except yourselves, I came to you
with my problem, which may be of some concern to
you.
Sir:
I, the undersigned, Assi Mustafa Ahmad, who returned
as a prisoner of war on August 24, 1990, am a
reserve soldier born in 1955. I participated in the
Glorious Battle of Saddam's Qadissiyat in the Sector
of Al-Shoush and was taken prisoner on March 27,
1982. I remained a prisoner until the day that the
decision to exchange prisoners of war was issued.
Then I returned to the homeland and kissed the soil
of the Beloved Motherland and knelt in front of the
portrait of our Victorious Leader and President
Saddam Hussein. In my heart I felt a tremendous
longing to return to my family. They would delight
in seeing me, and I would delight in seeing them,
and we would all be caught up in an overwhelming joy
that could not be described.
However, I found my home completely empty. My wife
and my kids were not there. What a catastrophe! What
a horror! I was told that the whole family had
fallen into the hands of the Anfal forces in the
Anfal operation conducted in the Northern Region,
under the leadership of Comrade Ali Hassan al-Majid.
I know nothing of their fate. They are:
1. Azimah Ali Ahmad, born 1955/ My wife.
2. Jarou Assi Mustafa, born 1979/ My daughter.
3. Faraydoun Assi Mustafa, born 1981/ My son.
4. Rukhoush Assi Mustafa, born 1982/ My son.
I have thus come to you with this petition, hoping
that you would take pity on me and inform me of
their fate. May God grant you success and protect
you. You have my thanks and respect.
[signature]
Former Prisoner of War
Reserve Soldier/Assi Mustafa Ahmad
Without home or shelter in Suleimaniyeh/
Chamchamal/Bekas Quarter/
Haji Ibrahim Mosque October 4, 1990
The Reply
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Republic of Iraq
Bureau of the Presidency
Reference No.: Sh Ayn/B/4/16565
Date: October 29, 1990
Mr. Assi Mustafa Ahmad
Suleimaniyah Governorate
Chamchamal District
Bekas Quarter
Haji Ibrahim Mosque
With regard to your petition dated October 4, 1990.
Your wife and children were lost during the Anfal
Operations that took place in the Northern Region in
1988.
Yours truly,
[signature]
Saadoun Ilwan Muslih
Chief, Bureau of the Presidency
A Note on Methodology
Introduction
Chapter One: Ba'athis and Kurds
Kurdish Autonomy and Arabization
Exploiting Kurdish Divisions
1985-1987: Open War
Chapter Two: Prelude to Anfal
The Chemical Threshold
The Spring 1987 Campaign: Village Destruction
andResettlement
Early Uses of al-Majid's Special Powers
Orders for Mass Killing
Defining the "National Ranks": The Census of October
17, 1987
Chapter Three: First Anfal: The Siege of Sergalou
and Bergalou, February 23-March 19, 1988
The March 16 Chemical Attack on Halabja
The Fall of the PUK Headquarters
Chapter Four: Second Anfal: Qara Dagh, March
22-April 1, 1988
The Exodus from Qara Dagh
Flight to Southern Germian
Chapter Five: Third Anfal: Germian, April 7-20, 1988
The Plan of Campaign: (1) Tuz Khurmatu
The Plan of Campaign: (2) Qader Karam and Northern
Germian
The Plan of Campaign: (3) Sengaw and Southern
Germian
The Collection Points
The Ambiguous Role of the Jahsh
Chapter Six: Fourth Anfal: The Valley of the Lesser
Zab, May 3-8, 1988
The Chemical Attacks on Goktapa and Askar
The Anfal Dragnet: East of Taqtaq
The Shwan Area
Zbeida's Story
The Fourth Anfal Collection Points 18
Chapter Seven: Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfals: The
Mountain Valleys of Shaqlawa and Rawanduz, May 15
-August 26, 1988
The PUK's Last Stand
Chapter Eight: The Camps
The Popular Army Camp at Topzawa
The Popular Army Camp at Tikrit
The Prisoners from Bileh and Halabja
The Women's Prison at Dibs
A Prison Camp for the Elderly
Deaths at Nugra Salman
Chapter Nine: The Firing Squads
Muhammad's Story
Ozer, Omar and Ibrahim
Mustafa's Story
Taymour's Story
Chapter Ten: Final Anfal: Badinan, August
25-September 6, 1988
Badinan on the Eve of the Final Anfal
"Apples and Something Sweet": The Chemical Attacks
of August 25 269
On-the-Spot Mass Executions
The Fort at Dohuk and the Women's Prison at
Salamiyeh
Chapter Eleven: The Amnesty and its Exclusions
Dispersal of the Camp Survivors
The Mujamma'a Dumping Operation
The Fate of the Christians and Yezidis
Chapter Twelve: Aftermath
Continued Village Clearances
Continued Mass Killings: Yunis's Story
Continued Mass Killings: Hussein's Story
The End of the "Exceptional Situation"
Chapter Thirteen: The Vanishing Trail
The Ba'ath Party: Alpha and Omega of the Anfal
Campaign
Appendices
Appendix A: The Ali Hassan al-Majid Tapes
Appendix B: The Perpetrators of Anfal: A Road-Map to
the Principal Agencies and Individuals
Appendix C: Known Chemical Attacks in Iraqi
Kurdistan, 1987-1988
Appendix D: Sample Mass Disappearances During Anfal,
by Region
Appendix E: Glossary of Arabic and Kurdish Terms
Preface & Acknowledgements
Occasionally, opportunity can grow out of tragedy.
For Middle East Watch, the opportunity to carry out
human rights research in northern Iraq for the first
time opened up unexpectedly, in the wake of the
tumultuous, heart-wrenching events of early 1991
familiar to most readers from their television sets.
As Iraqi government troops fell back in the face of
advancing allied troops and Kurdish peshmerga
fighters, returning along 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 force majeure. How long the
window of opportunity would stay open no one could
predict.
The debilitating uncertainty remains. For the Iraqi
Kurds, their future as an often-threatened minority
as well as their lives are at risk. As of this
writing, a severe economic squeeze, resulting from a
combination of UN 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 massed along a ceasefire
line could easily reconquer the region before the
West had a chance to come to the Kurds' aid.
For Middle East Watch, a driving consideration over
the past two years has been whether time would
permit adequate research to be conducted to obtain
reliable information that could both convince
international public opinion and, later, satisfy a
court of law. Although interim reports have
previously been released about the Anfal1,
with thepublication of this book, the first
objective has been accomplished. Although there is
persuasive evidence that virtually all are dead,
whether the fate of the many tens of thousands of
Kurdish civilians "disappeared" by government forces
during 1988 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 during 1988 alone. The phenomenon of the
Anfal, the official military codename 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 have
emerged, this name has seared itself into popular
consciousness -- much as the Nazi German Holocaust
did with its survivors. The parallels are apt, and
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, prior to October 1991, when Kurdish rebel
leaders unexpectedly found themselves temporary
masters of much of their traditional lands, there
were few hard facts for external organizations to
rely upon.
In its February 1990 report, Human Rights in Iraq,
Middle East Watch reconstructed what took place from
exile sources, with what in retrospect turned out to
be a high degree of accuracy. Even so, some of the
larger claims made by the Kurds seemed too fantastic
to credit. As it transpires, this has been a
humbling, learning process for all those foreigners
who followed 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.
With this latest report, painstakingly compiled over
eighteen months, Middle East Watch believes it can
now demonstrate convincingly a deliberate intent on
the part of the government of President Saddam
Hussein to destroy, through mass murder, part of
Iraq's Kurdishminority. The Kurds are indisputably a
distinct ethnic group2,
separate from the majority Arab population of Iraq,
and they were targeted during the Anfal as Kurds.
Two government instruments -- the October 1987
national census and the declaration of "prohibited
areas", covering more and more of the Kurdish
countryside like a crazy-patterned quilt -- were
institutional foundations of this policy. These
instruments were implemented against the background
of nearly two decades of government-directed "Arabization",
in which mixed-race districts, or else lands that
Baghdad regarded as desirable or strategically
important, saw their Kurdish population diluted by
Arab migrant farmers provided with ample incentives
to relocate, and guarded by government troops.
The Kurds bear arms as a matter of course, and have
regularly resorted to them when thwarted in their
demands for greater political and cultural autonomy.
Indeed, the Anfal cannot be understood without an
awareness of the half century of Kurdish armed
struggle against the central government of Iraq,
through various political regimes. In the early
1970s, the Ba'athists, still uncertain about their
hold on power, went much further than their
predecessors in recognizing those demands --offering
a substantial degree of self-government and
recognizing the Kurds' separate identity in a new
Provisional Constitution. That constitution is still
in force, and Baghdad still maintains the fiction
that "its" autonomous region, with its own Kurdish
administration, is in force. This puppet
administration sits in government-controlled Kirkuk,
and regularly denounces the "foreign-backed
usurpers" in the Kurdish rebel-run territory.
The logic of the Anfal, however, cannot be divorced
either from the Iran-Iraq War. After 1986, both the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP), the two major parties,
received support from the Iranian government and
sometimes took part in joint military raids against
Iraqi government positions; the KDP also had a rear
base inside Iran. That Baghdad was entitled to
engage in counterinsurgency action, to wrest control
over Iraq's northeast border region and much of the
mountainous interior from rebels, is undisputed.
What Middle East Watch contends is that, in doing
so, the central government went much further than
was required to restore its authoritythrough
legitimate military action. In the process, Saddam
Hussein's regime committed a panoply of war crimes,
together with crimes against humanity and genocide.
While many readers will be familiar with the attack
on Halabja, in March 1988, in which up to 5,000
Kurdish civilians died -- the incident caused a
brief international furor -- they may be surprised
to learn that the first use of poison gas against
the Kurds by the central government occurred eleven
months earlier. All told, Middle East Watch has
recorded forty separate attacks on Kurdish targets,
some of them involving multiple sorties over several
days, between April 1987 and August 1988. Each of
these attacks were war crimes, involving the use of
a banned weapon; the fact that noncombatants were
often the victims added to the offence.
By our estimate, in Anfal at least 50,000 and
possibly as many as 100,000 persons, many of them
women and children, were killed out of hand between
February and September 1988. Their deaths did not
come in the heat of battle -- "collateral damage" in
the military euphemism. Nor were they acts of
aberration by individual commanders whose excesses
passed unnoticed, or unpunished, by their superiors.
Rather, these Kurds were systematically put to death
in large numbers on the orders of the central
government in Baghdad -- days, sometimes weeks,
after being rounded-up in villages marked for
destruction or else while fleeing from army assaults
in "prohibited areas".
While a minority had been combatants, or else served
as a "backing force" for the rebel parties, the vast
majority of the dead were noncombatants whose death
resulted from the fact that they inhabited districts
declared off-limits by the Iraqi government.
Underlining the deliberate, preplanned nature of the
Anfal, those responsible for their murder by firing
squad were usually members of élite security units
unconnected to the forces responsible for the Kurds'
capture; in other words, while one hand would sweep,
the other would dispose of what the regime
considered to be the "garbage".
Two experienced field researchers, Jemera Rone and
Joost Hiltermann, assisted for part of the time by a
junior researcher, spent six months in northern Iraq
between April and September 1992, gathering
testimonial information about the Anfal (see
separate Note on Methodology). Previously, one
12-year old boy, Taymour Abdullah Ahmad, had been
the only known survivor of many accounts that Kurds
-- men, women and children -- had been trucked
southward to the Arabheartland of Iraq in large
numbers, and then disappeared. It was assumed they
had all been summarily executed, but there was no
proof. During their assignment, the Middle East
Watch team found and interviewed another seven
survivors of mass executions recalled in convincing
detail; five of them had been taken away and shot
during the six-month-long military campaign, two
shortly afterward.
To reach the point whereby we could safely assert
these conclusions, without fear of contradiction,
has not been easy. A division of Human Rights Watch,
Middle East Watch has already devoted more resources
to this ambitious project than any other undertaking
in its parent organization's fifteen-year history.
For those individuals and foundations that have
generously supported work on the Kurds Project, we
are deeply grateful. The publication of this book is
a landmark. But, the end is not yet in sight. Only
when those responsible -- both the government as a
whole and the individuals who masterminded and
carried out the Anfal -- are brought to justice will
the work end.
In the absence of an international criminal court
with jurisdiction to try those responsible for the
grave crimes enumerated above, three options present
themselves. The first is an Iraqi national court.
Under present circumstances, with President Saddam
Hussein and the Ba'ath Party still in power, it is
almost inconceivable that this course will be
realized. Second, there is the prospect of an ad hoc
international tribunal, charged by the United
Nations Security Council with hearing some or all of
the above offences, on the basis of evidence to be
gathered by a special commission of inquiry. While
such a proposal has been tabled at the Security
Council by the Clinton Administration, its
realization is fraught with uncertainty, subject to
the fluctuating politics of the major powers at the
United Nations.
Last, there is the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) at The Hague, the World Court. Part of the UN
system, the ICJ's raison d'être is to resolve
disputes between nations over breaches of
international agreements and treaties; in the case
of the Iraqi Kurds, the relevant treaty is the 1951
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide, to which Iraq and a further 107
states are parties. Importantly, Iraq has also
accepted the jurisdiction of the ICJ to hear cases
of genocide brought against itself by other state
parties with similar standing. In Middle East
Watch's judgement, this is potentially the most
fruitful channel through which to achieve justice
for the Anfal.
Pursuing this option does not involve abandoning the
other courses of action; indeed, they could
complement each other well, as the ICJ is empowered
to adjudicate only state, not individual,
responsibility. But, contrary to popular
misconceptions, the ICJ can be of practical benefit
to the Iraqi Kurds -- by, for instance, ordering
provisional measures of protection (a state party or
parties to the Genocide Convention would be acting
in effect on behalf of the Kurds), or by demanding
that the government pay damages, or reparations, to
the victims.
To date, only Bosnia and Herzegovina has ever
brought a case against another state under the
Genocide Convention. The ICJ swiftly granted
provisional protective measures, in March 1993, but
has yet to rule on the substance of the complaint.
Bringing a full-fledged case against Iraq, on behalf
of the Kurds, will thus be a momentous event in
international human rights law; one that it will be
imperative to win, and to win on strong legal and
factual grounds. The judgement will breathe life
into the moribund Genocide Convention, strengthen
respect for international law, and give pause to
tyrannical regimes around the world tempted to
undertake similar actions against a minority people.
How, then, has the evidence been gathered, and why
is Middle East Watch confident that a successful
action can be brought against the Iraqi government?
It was in late 1991 -- a month after the Iraqi
Kurdistan Front, a coalition of seven parties, had
established its authority in the rebel enclave --
that we decided to send our second mission to the
region (an earlier mission had produced an
authoritative survey of the endemic problem of
landmines, a serious hindrance to the resettlement
of refugees). This mission -- a joint venture with
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who had already
carried out groundbreaking work on Iraq's use of
chemical gas in 1988 during the Final Anfal -- would
enter Iraqi Kurdistan from Turkey. Its purpose was
to examine the scale of the phenomenon of mass
graves then being discovered by the Kurds in various
locations. The ten-day mission exhumed several mass
graves in and around the major Kurdish cities of
Erbil and Suleimaniyeh, containing victims of the
Amn, the main internal security force. The team
left just as a deadline for the renewal of Operation
Provide Comfort --the Turkey-based allied protection
operation -- expired (Ankara renewed permission at
the eleventh hour).
During the unsuccessful March 1991 uprising, huge
quantities of Iraqi government records were
captured, when local Kurds stormed the secret police
buildings that dominated every town and city. Much
was burned or destroyed in the haste, confusion and
panic that marked those days. The Kurds were mostly
seeking references to themselves, to discover how
much they had been infiltrated; few were thinking
about the Anfal -- despite the fact that it had
ended barely eighteen months earlier. Obtaining
access to these official records became a Holy Grail
for researchers: to have the opportunity to speak to
survivors of human rights violations, dig up the
bones of those who did not survive, and then read
the official account of what took place -- all while
the regime that carried out these outrages was still
in power -- was unique in the annals of human rights
research.
Together with the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya3
and Peter Galbraith of the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Middle East Watch discussed
with the Kurdish parties holding these documents
their transfer to the
United States,
for safekeeping and analysis. Uncertainty surrounded
the subject: Exactly how much had the Kurds seized;
how useful would the documents turn out to be; where
were the caches; and how could the logistical and
diplomatic hurdles to getting them out of the
country be overcome? Several visits to the region
were required before all the arrangements could be
made. In May 1992, some fourteen tons of documents
were finally transferred to the U.S., at the
initiative of Middle East Watch; at all times, the
material remained under our control. On arrival, the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee took charge of
the documents, entrusting them to a safe location
where they have been examined by a team led by
Middle East Watch (see Methodology section for a
description of how the work has been conducted.)
Primarily records of the Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh
(General Security Directorate), the Mudiriyat
al-Istikhbarat al-Askariyeh al-Ameh (General
Military Intelligence Directorate), and, to a lesser
extent, the Ba'ath Party these documents represent a
key ingredient in the understanding of the logic,
and realization, of the Anfal. Spanning the years
from the early 1960s to 1991, they will be crucial
in the building ofa legal case against the Iraqi
government. Between April 1992 and April 1993,
Middle East Watch took oral testimony from over 350
eyewitnesses or survivors of Anfal-related actions
by the authorities; this information forms the heart
of our understanding of the government's behavior.
Even on the basis of a partial examination, the
documents have filled in many gaps, corroborating
testimonial accounts and proving the witnesses'
general reliability.
From the material examined to date, it is evident
that detailed records had been kept of all Kurds
rounded-up, then sorted out and dispatched, either
to their deaths or to prison or resettlement camps.
When the overlord of Anfal, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who
was subsequently promoted to Defense Minister, met
with Kurdish leaders in May 1991 for abortive peace
negotiations, he knew what he was talking about.
Faced with the Kurds' demands for an explanation as
to what had happened to the disappeared -- a number
they put at 182,000 -- he exploded that the total
number (killed in the Anfal) "could not have been
more than 100,000." It was a telling order of
magnitude, not to mention an admission of guilt.
Somewhere in a Baghdad archive there exists, almost
certainly, a complete dossier of the missing Kurds:
some may still be alive, five years after their
capture. But, in our view, the vast majority
probably ended up in remote mass graves such as
those described in this report. Middle East Watch
calls on the Iraqi authorities to provide a full
accounting of those they abducted so that relatives
can mourn their dead and resume their lives.
Gradually it became clear from our field research
that although the Anfal -- when most disappearances
took place -- had lasted only six months, the main
campaign of village destruction and forcible
relocation of hundreds of thousands of persons
inhabiting the "prohibited areas" had covered a
two-year span, from March 1987 to April 1989. This
coincided with the period during which al-Majid held
extraordinary powers of life-and-death, as secretary
of the Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau. The campaign
was the culmination of twenty-five years of
Arabization, mass deportations and the destruction
of villages.
We also learned about variations in government
actions during different phases of the campaign. In
the Final Anfal during late August 1988, after the
ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War, we encountered one
of the few known cases in which government troops
massacred male villagers on the spot. (Elsewhere
male villagers disappeared en masse and arepresumed
to have been executed in clandestine locations.) The
remote former village of Koreme, in Dohuk
governorate, had been identified in February 1992 as
containing a mass grave. A second forensic
anthropological team, again in conjunction with PHR,
drawing on the expertise of Latin American
researchers, was sent to the region in May 1992.
After a month's fieldwork at Koreme and other sites,
their findings -- a detailed case study of the fate
of Anfal victims from one region --were published in
January 1993.
After a break during the winter of 1992/1993, field
research for this report resumed in March 1993,
enabling gaps in our knowledge to be filled in.
However, much remains to be done before all the
answers are given to the tragedy that befell the
Kurds. In the absence of disclosures from Baghdad,
there is a need, for instance, to come up with a
more precise estimate of the number of disappeared.
Some, but by no means all, of the killing sites are
known; extensive research work needs to be conducted
in areas of Iraq that remain under government
control. But time does not stand still, and the
Ba'athist regime's threat to the Kurdish enclave
remains as potent as ever. Behind a military cordon
running diagonally across northern Iraq -- a cordon
that has sealed off supplies of food, fuel, medicine
and other essentials to the Kurds for the past two
years -- the government has massed its troops. All
that apparently holds them back is the threat of
retaliation from the American, British and French
aircraft that daily patrol the region of Iraq north
of the 36th parallel. Every six months the ritual of
seeking Ankara's permission for the continuation of
Operation Provide Comfort is reenacted. Until now it
has always been granted; but, given Turkish negative
sentiment toward the Kurds, whether in
Turkey
itself or across the Iraqi border, it is unlikely
that Turkey will allow the Western allies to
maintain their protective shield over the budding
proto-state indefinitely.
Based on the evidence contained in this report,
Middle East Watch urges the international community
to recognize that genocide occurred in the
mountainous region of northern Iraq during 1988. The
legal obligations to act on the basis of this
information, to punish its perpetrators and prevent
its recurrence, are undeniable. These could be
pursued either through the International Court of
Justice or through the U.N. Security Council. The
Security Council is required under the Genocide
Convention to prevent genocidal action; moreover, in
July 1993, the Council had before it a draft
U.S.
proposal to establish acommission of enquiry into
Iraqi war crimes and genocide. For this purpose, the
U.S.
government, and other states with relevant
information, should disclose what knowledge they
have about the Anfal. Continued protection for the
Kurds is essential, if the strong threat of
reprisals from the Baghdad authorities is not to be
realized. But in the process of safeguarding the
status quo one should not lose sight of the
imperative that the Iraqi government provide a full,
public accounting of all those taken into the hands
of its forces before, during and after the Anfal.
While it would be unrealistic to expect President
Saddam Hussein to put himself and his closest aides
and relatives on trial, a successor government in
Baghdad should not shirk from its responsibility to
carry out a thoroughgoing investigation of these
enormous crimes, and prosecute all those involved --
to the full extent of the law.
The Iraqi Kurds must be permitted to live in peace
and security, free to speak their language, practice
their customs and associate as Kurds. The killings,
deportations, and widespread village clearances
detailed in the following pages must not be allowed
to happen again.
* * *
This report was written by George Black, a writer on
human rights and other international issues.4
However, bringing it to fruition was a collaborative
effort involving Mr. Black, Joost Hiltermann, the
Kurds' Project director at Middle East Watch, and
Jemera Rone, counsel at Human Rights Watch, the
parent organization.
Overall editorial responsibility for the report lies
with Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle
East Watch. Shorsh Resool, a researcher with Middle
East Watch, contributed to the editing process and
made important suggestions and corrections. Suzanne
Howard was responsible for preparing the manuscript
for publication. Document translation was handled by
a number of persons.
Field researchers were Dr. Hiltermann and Ms. Rone,
assisted by Mostafa Khezri, a consultant to Middle
East Watch. Their field work in 1992 and 1993
represents the heart of the information presented in
thefollowing pages. The tireless work of our Kurdish
interpreters in helping obtain this information is
appreciated. Middle East Watch also extends its
thanks to the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization in
Iraqi Kurdistan, including its branches in Erbil,
Suleimaniyeh and Dohuk; the Committee to Defend
Anfal Victims' Rights in Suleimaniyeh; and a number
of doctors, lawyers and other professionals in Iraqi
Kurdistan, who must remain anonymous for their own
safety. Special recognition is due to Mr. Resool,
for his pioneering work, under arduous conditions,
on the Anfal campaign in 1988-89, prior to joining
the staff of Middle East Watch.
Forensic research referred to in this report was
conducted by joint Middle East Watch/Physicians for
Human Rights (PHR) teams led, in December 1991, by
Eric Stover, and, in May-June 1992, by Ken Anderson.
Mr. Stover is executive director of PHR; Mr.
Anderson is director of Human Rights Watch's Arms
Project. Dr. Clyde Snow, a distinguished forensic
anthropologist, headed the scientific teams in both
of these missions and participated in another visit
to Iraqi Kurdistan, in February 1992.
Legal research on the standards by which the Ba'ath
regime should be judged on its actions in Iraqi
Kurdistan, from 1987-89, was undertaken by Professor
Lori Damrosch of Columbia University's Law School.
Keith Highet of Curtis, Mallet et al provided
expert advice, as did Kenneth Roth, acting executive
director of Human Rights Watch.
Peter Galbraith, then senior advisor to the U.S.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Ambassador
Charles Dunbar, formerly of the U.S. Department of
State, also deserve Middle East Watch's warm thanks
for the unstinting assistance they provided to this
large undertaking.
Finally, Middle East Watch wishes to thank Susan
Meiselas for her enthusiasm, and commitment, to a
subject and people she has come to know well. Her
photographs and video recordings have been of great
benefit.
Andrew Whitley
Executive Director
Middle East Watch
New York
1 Hidden
Death: Land Mines and Civilian Casualties in Iraqi
Kurdistan
(October 1992; pp 67); Unquiet
Graves: The Search for the
Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan
(February 1992; pp 41); and The Anfal Campaign in
Iraqi Kurdistan:
The Destruction of Koreme
(January 1993; pp 116). The two latter reports were
published jointly with Physicians for Human Rights.
Human Rights in Iraq, a Middle East Watch
report published in February 1990, contained a long
chapter on the government's repression of the Kurds;
it is available from Yale University Press (New
Haven, 1990).
2
Anthropologically, they are an Indo-European people,
speaking a language that is related to Persian,
albeit with a large admixture of Arabic and Turkish,
varying according to the countries they inhabit.
3 Makiya is the
author, under his pseudonym, Samir al-Khalil, of
Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam
Hussein's Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990),
and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising
and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton,
1993).
4 Mr. Black's
most recent book, Black Hands of
Beijing,
(John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1993) is a history of
the Chinese democracy movement since 1976,
co-authored with Robin Munro of Asia Watch.
A Note on Methodology
The Methodological Approach to
Documentary, Testimonial and Forensic Evidence Used
in This Report
Testimonial Evidence
To a large measure this report is based on
testimonies obtained in Iraqi Kurdistan from
eyewitnesses to (and often victims of) Anfal-related
abuses. Two Middle East Watch researchers and an
assistant spent a total of six months in the Kurdish
areas on three separate missions between April 1992
and April 1993, conducting approximately 350
in-depth interviews. The methodology they used in
obtaining this testimonial evidence is described
below.
Prior to its first mission in April 1992, the
research team designed a questionnaire on the basis
of our understanding of Anfal, still limited at that
time, and following discussions with regional
experts and statisticians. This questionnaire was
constructed with a view to facilitating the
tabulation and quantification of data concerning the
forced displacement and/or disappearance of Kurds
during Anfal.
The team tested the questionnaire through a small
number of interviews shortly after its arrival in
the area, and immediately determined that the
questions did not take account of a number of
factors, including specific historical events that
are instrumental to understanding the circumstances
that surrounded Anfal, as well as the methodical
nature of the operation. The team then revised the
questionnaire drastically and began its research,
only making minor adjustments to the basic design in
the weeks that followed.
The purpose of the research was to find out as much
as possible about Anfal and about the people who
were said to have disappeared during and after the
operation. The research population was divided into
three groups: (1) direct eyewitnesses to
Anfal-related abuses; (2) persons active in
(para-)military units, either Kurdish guerrillas (peshmerga),
former military officers, or leaders (mustashars)
of the pro-governmentKurdish militias; and (3) staff
of local and international non-governmental
organizations and officials of the local Kurdish
administration, all of whom were intimately familiar
with the situation on the ground before, during and
after Anfal.
Because of the particular nature of Iraqi policy
vis-a-vis rural Kurds in the 1980s, most
eyewitnesses to Anfal were to be found in the large
housing complexes (mujamma'at) in the valleys
of northern Iraq. After the Iraqi government
withdrew from a large part of the Kurdish region at
the end of October 1991, villagers in some areas
began returning to their destroyed villages to farm
the lands and, sometimes, to rebuild their homes.
The research team visited as many of the complexes
as possible, as well as some of the (partially
rebuilt) villages. In all cases, the operative
question was: "Where can we find the Anfals?" (Anfalakan,
in Kurdish). Local residents would then guide the
team to a house where Anfalakan were said to be
living, and some initial questioning was done to
ascertain that the people were indeed "Anfals" and
not persons who had been relocated there from their
villages during earlier stages of village
destruction and had not been affected directly by
Anfal. This method had a snowball effect: one family
of Anfalakan would lead the team to another, until
the team felt it had exhaustively covered a
particular geographic area of Anfal.
Essentially, the team obtained eyewitness
testimonies in three different ways: (1) by visiting
places of residence randomly and asking for
Anfalakan (the most frequent method); (2) by
pursuing specific leads; and (3) occasionally, by
responding to unsolicited requests to be
interviewed. In the beginning, the sole criterion
employed in deciding whether or not a person should
be interviewed was whether the person was present in
a military-demarcated area during Anfal and had lost
relatives as a result of the campaign. In later
stages of the research, when clear patterns had
started to emerge, the search was more specifically
for persons from certain Anfal areas, i.e., those
about which the team had insufficient data, or those
where particularly egregious abuses, like chemical
weapons attacks, had taken place. In addition, a
number of interviews were conducted at that time
with people who had been in Anfal areas during Anfal
but whose families had managed to escape unhurt, as
well as with people who had experienced various
forms of human rights abuses in the periods
immediately preceding and following Anfal (1987 and
1989).
The team specifically sought out one sub-population
of eyewitnesses: those who had been arrested in
Anfal and taken to massexecution sites (then and now
in areas that are controlled by the Iraqi
government) from where they had managed to escape
and return to safety. The testimonies of these
execution survivors have proven crucial in the
effort of Middle East Watch to provide evidence that
the vast majority of those detained during Anfal,
whose fate is officially said to be unknown, were
actually killed. The team was able to locate seven
such Anfal survivors, as well as one person who had
survived an execution three months after Anfal. Some
of these survivors did not want their identities to
be known because, they said, they feared future
government reprisal. One of the eight, Taymour, had
already been interviewed by local Kurdish
television, as well as by foreign journalists on
numerous occasions. A second one, Hussein, had given
testimony to the UN Special Rapporteur on Iraq, Mr.
Max van der Stoel, during the latter's visit to the
area earlier in 1992. Four were located through
local peshmerga commanders who had heard of
their stories. The remaining two were found through
the testimony of one of the survivors who had been
in the same group as them at the time of the
execution.
Invariably, respondents were eager to tell the team
what had happened to them. In almost all cases,
these people had not been interviewed about their
experiences before. All freely gave their names, and
only some requested that their identities be
concealed for publication. Apart from the small
number of persons who requested that their names be
changed, all names referred to in this report are
genuine. The team taped most interviews on
audio-cassette and took photographs (slides) of the
respondents afterwards. In the case of important
interviews, the team asked the respondent's
permission to videotape either highlights or a full
second interview (as in the case of some of the
execution survivors). The team traveled with one or
more Kurdish interpreters at all times. These
persons were asked to provide literal translations
from English to Kurdish (Surani or Kurmanji
dialects) and back. In addition, some interviews
were conducted by team members directly in English
or in Arabic.
In virtually all cases, the team interviewed a
single person at a time, although close relatives
were often present during the interview. The
questions covered the following topics:
1. Personal history before Anfal (personal status,
family members, property, occupation, religious and
tribal affiliations, etc.)
2. Information concerning the village in which the
person was living before Anfal (location, size of
population, main tribe, main economic activity,
availability of goverment services and facilities,
etc.)
3. Military activity in and around the village
before Anfal, and government policies affecting the
inhabitants (presence of peshmerga,
government attacks, administrative and economic
blockade, casualties, 1987 population census, etc.)
4. Events during Anfal (nature of government attack,
circumstances of arrest, route of transport,
selection process, conditions of detention,
casualties, circumstances of release, etc.)
5. Living conditions after Anfal and attempts, if
any, to locate missing relatives.
Usually, topics 1 and 2 followed a fairly strict
question-and-answer format, while topics 3, 4 and 5
allowed for greater flexibility: the person was
asked to recount events as he or she remembered
them, and the team would (a) only ask questions for
clarification about specific dates, locations or
identities; or (b) pursue at some length a narrative
of particular interest to the project; or (c) probe
any contradictions that might appear in the
testimony, or between the testimony and a previous
one.
Due to the high incidence of illiteracy in rural
Kurdistan, as well as the local population's
particular way of marking time, the team encountered
considerable difficulty in its attempts to establish
exact dates for specific events, or particular
chronologies, on the basis of interviews with
individual villagers. Dates would often be related
to religious feasts, for example. On the whole,
though, after numerous interviews, the team was
satisfied that it had obtained an accurate picture
of the separate stages of Anfal and the events that
transpired within these stages. Some of these dates
have subsequently been substantiated in documents
captured by the Kurds from the Iraqi intelligence
agencies during the March 1991 uprising.
Generally, the team determined the accuracy of
individual accounts by virtue of their internal
consistency, their general consistency with the
overall patterns that emerged during the project,
including with other types of evidence, and their
specific consistency with a follow-upinterview
conducted, in a few cases, with the same respondent.
In the case of all interviews, the team tried to
obtain supporting evidence. This included personal
documents that were in the possession of the
respondents (for example, "movement permits" and
administrative orders), or an inspection of the site
described (e.g. a prison, or a village that had been
subjected to a chemical attack). As a result of this
procedure, a small number of interviews, or segments
thereof, were discarded or left unused, either
because the testimony was not deemed to be reliable
or sufficient supporting evidence was not
immediately available.
* * *
Documentary Evidence
In the March 1991 popular uprising in northern Iraq,
Kurdish civilians and members of the Kurdish
political parties stormed and took control of
offices of the Iraqi government and its agencies,
including the various intelligence agencies. Several
of these buildings were heavily damaged, or even
burned to the ground, but others survived unscathed.
The Kurds thus came into possession of the
inventories of many of these facilities. Matters
taken include large quantities of documents, logs
and registers, as well as audiotapes, videotapes,
films and photographs.
In the days before the uprising was crushed by
advancing Iraqi troops, the Kurdish parties
succeeded in removing the majority of the documents
they had captured from the towns to strongholds in
the mountains. In the spring of 1992, one of the two
largest parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK), agreed to a tripartite arrangement in which
Middle East Watch and the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee were the other two partners.
Under this arrangement, the PUK agreed to send the
documents in its possession to the United States for
research and analysis; the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee agreed to turn the documents into official
records of the U.S. Congress and store them in the
facilities of the U.S. National Archives; and Middle
East Watch agreed to conduct research on the
documents for human rights purposes, including the
pursuit of a genocide case before the International
Court of Justice at The Hague.
The PUK cache consists of fourteen tons of documents
contained in 847 boxes. The total number of pages
has been estimated at over four million. In May
1992, the PUK placed these documents in the
temporary custody of Middle East Watch and they were
then flown, in the presence of the director of
Middle East Watch, to the United States. In
Washington, D.C., the documents were then handed
over to the U.S. National Archives and placed in its
storage facilities, while remaining under the joint
custody of the PUK and Middle East Watch.
At the end of October 1992, a Middle East Watch-led
team of researchers began the task of screening,
cataloguing, and analyzing these documents.
Important documents were pulled out, photocopied and
translated, and a number of these have been included
in this report. The United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Iraq, Mr. Max van der Stoel, has also
made use of some of the documents found by Middle
East Watch, in his report to the U.N. Human Rights
Commission in March 1993.
The vast majority of the documents are from two main
locations: Suleimaniyeh governorate and its
districts; and Erbil governorate and its districts,
especially the qadha of Shaqlawa. Almost all
hail from the offices of Iraq's General Security
Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh) in
these locations, with a smattering of documents
belonging to the General Military Intelligence
Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Istikhbarat
al-Askariyeh al-Ameh) and the Ba'ath Party.
Generally, the documents are either file folders or
pages tied together with shoelaces between two hard
covers. There are also a number of bound ledgers.
Due to the conditions that prevailed at the time of
the uprising, especially in Suleimaniyeh, a number
of the documents have completely fallen apart, and
individual pages have been burned, trampled upon,
muddied, or, in many cases, torn. The majority of
the documents are in good order, however.
All documents, handwritten or typewritten, are in
good and legible Arabic. They cover a wide variety
of subjects that can most easily be divided into
three main categories:
(1) administrative matters concerning agency staff:
salaries, vacations, promotions, gun permits,
disciplinary actions, etc.
(2) Personal information: These are files containing
information on agency staff, ordinary citizens, or
suspected members of Kurdish resistance parties.
They include secret background checks, as well as
records of investigations and interrogations. A
number of files containvirtual life histories, some
concluding with execution orders and death
certificates.
(3) Reports on events in the area, and policy
statements: These two types of documents are often
mixed in together, and include reports on Amn
and military actions undertaken against the
peshmerga; reports on peshmerga activity
in a particular area; and official orders and
instructions that are being passed on down through
the ranks.
Although the three categories generally appear
separately in the documents, it does happen that a
copy of an important order concerning the
government's policy vis-a-vis the Kurds will appear
in a person's secret file. Sometimes, evidence of
abuse is either fragmentary and embedded in a larger
text that outwardly seems innocuous, or phrased in
such euphemistic terms that an untrained eye would
have difficulty in recognizing it. The task of the
Middle East Watch-led team, then, has essentially
been to sift through these tons of documents in
search of hidden nuggets.
* * *
Forensic Evidence
A team of forensic investigators was sent by Middle
East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights to Iraqi
Kurdistan in May-June 1992. The team consisted of
forensic investigators trained in forensic
anthropology, archeology, and law, who had carried
out exhumations of graves in several countries,
including Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and
Guatemala. It carried out exhumations of graves at
three sites in Iraqi Kurdistan: at the village of
Koreme, the village of Birjinni, and the cemetery of
a complex of Anfal survivors outside the city of
Erbil.
In its investigations, the team followed
internationally accepted standards set forth in the
United Nations "Model Protocol for a Legal
Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary
Executions" (the "Minnesota Protocol").1
The full results of the team's investigations
arefound in Middle East Watch and Physicians for
Human Rights, The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi
Kurdistan: The Destruction of Koreme, January
1993, and its methodology at each site is described
below.
Koreme Site:
The team undertook the exhumation of a mass grave at
the destroyed village of Koreme containing the
skeletal remains of twenty-six men and boys, all of
whom had died by gunfire at close range in a line
indicating execution by firing squad. The team
archaeologist directed the survey of the destroyed
village, mapping the village as it stood before
destruction, using standard archeological survey
techniques; in addition, the team archeologist
directed the collection and mapping of cartridge
casings to determine the pattern of weapons firing
at the execution site. The team's lead
anthropologist directed the exhumation of the
gravesite at Koreme, using standard exhumation
techniques to preserve the skeletons and other
artifacts. Investigations were carried out at the
morgue at Dohuk General Hospital to determine the
number of different individuals in the grave; sex,
age, and other identifying marks; and manner of
death. The team's lawyers directed interviews with
survivors and other villagers to give a narrative of
events corroborated by scientific evidence.
Birjinni Site:
The team carried out archeological surveys and
exhumations of graves at the destroyed village of
Birjinni which, according to surviving villagers,
had been bombed in August 1988 with chemical
weapons. The team archeologist carried out standard
surveys of the ruined village. The forensic
anthropologists exhumed the graves of persons
reported to have died from inhalation of chemical
agents. The team's lawyers conducted interviews with
surviving villagers to obtain their account of
events. In addition, the team took soil and other
samples from the craters where chemical weapons were
reported to have impacted. In 1993, the British
Ministry of Defense chemical weapons laboratory at
Porton Down reported discovering degradation
products of mustard gas and nerve agents in samples
taken from these sites. This is the first instance
of a chemical weapons attack being proved on the
basis of chemical residues left behind at the impact
site.
Erbil Site:
The team undertook exhumations at the graveyard of a
complex where survivors of the Anfal were taken. The
gravesite was surveyed by the archeological team in
order to make determinations of the ratio of adult
and child graves in the cemetery. The forensic
scientists exhumed three children's graves, one of
them reported to have been made by a survivor from
the village of Koreme and containing his infant
sister. The exhumation of that grave corroborated
his account, and contained the skeletal remains of a
girl about one-year old, with evidence of
malnutrition.
______
1 Manual on
the Effective Prevention and Investigation of
Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions,
1991.
Introduction
This report is a narrative account of a campaign of
extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. It
is the product of over a year and a half of
research, during which a team of Middle East Watch
researchers has analyzed several tons of captured
Iraqi government documents and carried out field
interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of
them survivors of the 1988 campaign known as Anfal.
It concludes that in that year the Iraqi regime
committed the crime of genocide.
Anfal--"the Spoils"--is the name of the eighth
sura of the Koran. It is also the name given by
the Iraqis to a series of military actions which
lasted from February 23 until September 6, 1988.
While it is impossible to understand the Anfal
campaign without reference to the final phase of the
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Anfal was not merely a
function of that war. Rather, the winding-up of the
conflict on Iraq's terms was the immediate
historical circumstance that gave Baghdad the
opportunity to bring to a climax its longstanding
efforts to bring the Kurds to heel. For the Iraqi
regime's anti-Kurdish drive dated back some fifteen
years or more, well before the outbreak of
hostilities between Iran and Iraq.
Anfal was also the most vivid expression of the
"special powers" granted to Ali Hassan al-Majid, a
cousin of President Saddam Hussein and secretary
general of the Northern Bureau of Iraq's Ba'ath Arab
Socialist Party. From March 29, 1987 until April 23,
1989, al-Majid was granted power that was
equivalent, in Northern Iraq, to that of the
President himself, with authority over all agencies
of the state. Al-Majid, who is known to this day to
Kurds as "Ali Anfal" or "Ali Chemical," was the
overlord of the Kurdish genocide. Under his command,
the central actors in Anfal were the First and Fifth
Corps of the regular Iraqi Army, the General
Security Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh)
and Military Intelligence (Istikhbarat). The
pro-government Kurdish militia known as the National
Defense Battalions, or jahsh, assisted in
important auxiliary tasks.1
But the integrated resources of the entire military,
security andcivilian apparatus of the Iraqi state
were deployed, in al-Majid's words, "to solve the
Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs."2
The campaigns of 1987-1989 were characterized by the
following gross violations of human rights:
· mass summary executions and mass disappearance of
many tens of thousands of non-combatants, including
large numbers of women and children, and sometimes
the entire population of villages;
· the widespread use of chemical weapons, including
mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin,
against the town of Halabja as well as dozens of
Kurdish villages, killing many thousands of people,
mainly women and children;
· the wholesale destruction of some 2,000 villages,
which are described in government documents as
having been "burned," "destroyed," "demolished" and
"purified," as well as at least a dozen larger towns
and administrative centers (nahyas and
qadhas);
· the wholesale destruction of civilian objects by
Army engineers, including all schools, mosques,
wells and other non-residential structures in the
targeted villages, and a number of electricity
substations;
· looting of civilian property and farm animals on a
vast scale by army troops and pro-government
militia;
· arbitrary arrest of all villagers captured in
designated "prohibited areas" (manateq
al-mahdoureh), despite the fact that these were
their own homes and lands;
· arbitrary jailing and warehousing for months, in
conditions of extreme deprivation, of tens of
thousands of women, children and elderly people,
without judicial order or any cause other than their
presumed sympathies for the Kurdish opposition. Many
hundreds of them were allowed to die of malnutrition
and disease;
· forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of
villagers upon the demolition of their homes, their
release from jail or return from exile; these
civilians were trucked into areas of Kurdistan far
from their homes and dumped there by the army with
only minimal governmental compensation or none at
all for their destroyed property, or any provision
for relief, housing, clothing or food, and forbidden
to return to their villages of origin on pain of
death. In these conditions, many died within a year
of their forced displacement;
· destruction of the rural Kurdish economy and
infrastructure.
Like Nazi Germany, the Iraqi regime concealed its
actions in euphemisms. Where Nazi officials spoke of
"executive measures," "special actions" and
"resettlement in the east," Ba'athist bureaucrats
spoke of "collective measures," "return to the
national ranks" and "resettlement in the south." But
beneath the euphemisms, Iraq's crimes against the
Kurds amount to genocide, the "intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group, as such."3
* * *
The campaigns of 1987-1989 are rooted deep in the
history of the Iraqi Kurds. Since the earliest days
of Iraqi independence, the country's Kurds--who
today number more than four million--have fought
either for independence or for meaningful autonomy.
But they have never achieved the results they
desired.
In 1970, the Ba'ath Party, anxious to secure its
precarious hold on power, did offer the Kurds a
considerable measure of self-rule, far greater than
that allowed in neighboring Syria, Iran or Turkey.
But the regime defined the Kurdistan Autonomous
Region in such a way as deliberately to exclude the
vast oil wealth that lies beneath the fringes of the
Kurdish lands. The Autonomous Region, rejected by
the Kurds and imposed unilaterally by Baghdad in
1974, comprised the three northern governorates of
Erbil, Suleimaniyeh and Dohuk. Covering some
14,000square miles -- roughly the combined area of
Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island -- this
was only half the territory that the Kurds
considered rightfully theirs. Even so, the
Autonomous Region had real economic significance,
since it accounted for fully half the agricultural
output of a largely desert country that is sorely
deficient in domestic food production.
In the wake of the autonomy decree, the Ba'ath Party
embarked on the "Arabization" of the oil-producing
areas of Kirkuk and Khanaqin and other parts of the
north, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them
with poor Arab tribesmen from the south.
Northern Iraq
did not remain at peace for long. In 1974, the
long-simmering Kurdish revolt flared up once more
under the leadership of the legendary fighter Mullah
Mustafa Barzani, who was supported this time by the
governments of Iran, Israel, and the United States.
But the revolt collapsed precipitately in 1975, when
Iraq and Iran concluded a border agreement and the
Shah withdrew his support from Barzani's Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP). After the KDP fled into
Iran, tens of thousands of villagers from the
Barzani tribe were forcibly removed from their homes
and relocated to barren sites in the desert south of
Iraq. Here, without any form of assistance, they had
to rebuild their lives from scratch.
In the mid and late 1970s, the regime again moved
against the Kurds, forcibly evacuating at least a
quarter of a million people from Iraq's borders with
Iran and Turkey, destroying their villages to create
a cordon sanitaire along these sensitive frontiers.
Most of the displaced Kurds were relocated into
mujamma'at, crude new settlements located on the
main highways in army-controlled areas of Iraqi
Kurdistan. The word literally means "amalgamations"
or "collectivities." In their propaganda, the Iraqis
commonly refer to them as "modern villages"; in this
report, they are generally described as "complexes."
Until 1987, villagers relocated to the complexes
were generally paid some nominal cash compensation,
but were forbidden to move back to their homes.
After 1980, and the beginning of the eight-year
Iran-Iraq War, many Iraqi garrisons in Kurdistan
were abandoned or reduced in size, and their troops
transferred to the front. In the vacuum that was
left, the Kurdish peshmerga--"those who face
death"--once more began to thrive. The KDP, now led
by one of Barzani's sons, Mas'oud, had revived its
alliance with Teheran, and in 1983 KDP units aided
Iranian troops in their capture of the border town
of Haj Omran. Retribution was swift: in a lightning
operation against the complexes that housed the
relocatedBarzanis, Iraqi troops abducted between
five and eight thousand males aged twelve or over.
None of them have ever been seen again, and it is
believed that after being held prisoner for several
months, they were all killed. In many respects, the
1983 Barzani operation foreshadowed the techniques
that would be used on a much larger scale during the
Anfal campaign. And the absence of any international
outcry over this act of mass murder, despite Kurdish
efforts to press the matter with the United Nations
and Western governments, must have emboldened
Baghdad to believe that it could get away with an
even larger operation without any adverse reaction.
In these calculations, the Ba'ath Party was correct.
Even more worrisome to Baghdad was the growing
closeness between the Iranians and the KDP's major
Kurdish rival, Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK). The Ba'ath regime had conducted
more than a year of negotiations with the PUK
between 1983-1985, but in the end these talks failed
to bear fruit, and full-scale fighting resumed. In
late 1986 Talabani's party concluded a formal
political and military agreement with Teheran.
By this time the Iraqi regime's authority over the
North had dwindled to control of the cities, towns,
complexes and main highways. Elsewhere, the
peshmerga forces could rely on a deep-rooted
base of local support. Seeking refuge from the army,
thousands of Kurdish draft-dodgers and deserters
found new homes in the countryside. Villagers
learned to live with a harsh economic blockade and
stringent food rationing, punctuated by artillery
shelling, aerial bombardment and punitive forays by
the Army and the paramilitary jahsh. In
response, the rural Kurds built air-raid shelters in
front of their homes and spent much of their time in
hiding in the caves and ravines that honeycomb the
northern Iraqi countryside. For all the grimness of
this existence, by 1987 the mountainous interior of
Iraqi Kurdistan was effectively liberated territory.
This the Ba'ath Party regarded as an intolerable
situation.
* * *
With the granting of emergency powers to al-Majid in
March 1987, the intermittent counterinsurgency
against the Kurds became a campaign of destruction.
As Raul Hilberg observes in his monumental history
of the Holocaust:
A destruction process has an inherent pattern. There
is only one way in which a scattered group can
effectively be destroyed. Three steps are organic in
the operation:
Definition
|
|
Concentration (or seizure)
|
|
Annihilation
This is the invariant structure of the basic
process, for no group can be killed without a
concentration or seizure of the victims, and no
victims can be segregated before the perpetrator
knows who belongs to the group.4
The Kurdish genocide of 1987-1989, with the Anfal
campaign as its centerpiece, fits Hilberg's paradigm
to perfection.
* * *
In the first three months after assuming his post as
secretary general of the Ba'ath Party's Northern
Bureau, Ali Hassan al-Majid began the process of
definition of the group that would be targeted by
Anfal, and vastly expanded the range of repressive
activities against all rural Kurds. He decreed that
"saboteurs" would lose their property rights,
suspended the legal rights of all the residents of
prohibited villages, and began ordering the
execution of first-degree relatives of "saboteurs"
and of wounded civilians whose hostility to the
regime had been determined by the intelligence
services.
In June 1987, al-Majid issued two successive sets of
standing orders that were to govern the conduct of
the security forces through the Anfal campaign and
beyond. These orders were based on the simple axiom
on which the regime now operated: in the
"prohibited" rural areas,all resident Kurds were
coterminous with the peshmerga insurgents,
and they would be dealt with accordingly.
The first of al-Majid's directives bans all human
existence in the prohibited areas, to be applied
through a shoot-to-kill policy. The second, numbered
SF/4008, dated June 20, 1987, modifies and expands
upon these orders. It constitutes a bald incitement
to mass murder, spelled out in the most chilling
detail. In clause 4, army commanders are ordered "to
carry out random bombardments, using artillery,
helicopters and aircraft, at all times of the day or
night, in order to kill the largest number of
persons present in these prohibited zones." In
clause 5, al-Majid orders that, "All 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, of which we should be duly notified."
Even as this legal and bureaucratic structure was
being set in place, the Iraqi regime became the
first in history to attack its own civilian
population with chemical weapons. On April 15, 1987,
Iraqi aircraft dropped poison gas on the KDP
headquarters at Zewa Shkan, close to the Turkish
border in Dohuk governorate, and the PUK
headquarters in the twin villages of Sergalou and
Bergalou, in the governorate of Suleimaniyeh. The
following afternoon, they dropped chemicals on the
undefended civilian villages of Sheikh Wasan and
Balisan, killing well over a hundred people, most of
them women and children. Scores of other victims of
the attack were abducted from their hospital beds in
the city of
Erbil,
where they had been taken for treatment of their
burns and blindness. They have never been seen
again. These incidents were the first of at least
forty documented chemical attacks on Kurdish targets
over the succeeding eighteen months. They were also
the first sign of the regime's new readiness to kill
large numbers of Kurdish women and children
indiscriminately.
Within a week of the mid-April chemical weapons
attacks, al-Majid's forces were ready to embark upon
what he described as a three-stage program of
village clearances or collectivization. The first
ran from April 21 to May 20; the second from May 21
to June 20. More than 700 villages were burned and
bulldozed, most of them along the main highways in
government-controlled areas. The third phase of the
operation, however, was suspended; with Iraqi forces
still committed to the war front, the resources
required for such a huge operation were
notavailable. But the goals of the third stage would
eventually be accomplished by Anfal.
In terms of defining the target group for
destruction, no single administrative step was more
important to the Iraqi regime than the national
census of October 17, 1987. Now that the springtime
village clearances had created a virtual buffer
strip between the government and the peshmerga-controlled
zones, the Ba'ath Party offered the inhabitants of
the prohibited areas an ultimatum: either they could
"return to the national ranks"--in other words,
abandon their homes and livelihoods and accept
compulsory relocation in a squalid camp under the
eye of the security forces; or they could lose their
Iraqi citizenship and be regarded as military
deserters. The second option was tantamount to a
death sentence, since the census legislation made
those who refused to be counted subject to an August
1987 decree of the ruling Revolutionary Command
Council, imposing the death penalty on deserters.
In the period leading up to the census, al-Majid
refined the target group further. He ordered his
intelligence officials to prepare detailed
case-by-case dossiers of "saboteurs'" families who
were still living in the government-controlled
areas. When these dossiers were complete, countless
women, children and elderly people were forcibly
transferred to the rural areas to share the fate of
their peshmerga relatives. This case-by-case,
family-by-family sifting of the population was to
become a characteristic feature of the decisions
made during the Anfal period about who should live
and who should die.
Last, but not without significance, the census gave
those who registered only two alternatives when it
came to declaring their nationality. One could
either be Arab or Kurdish--a stipulation that was to
have the direst consequences for other minority
groups, such as the Yezidis, Assyrians and Chaldean
Christians who continued to live in the Kurdish
areas.5
* * *
The Anfal campaign began four months after the
census, with a massive military assault on the PUK
headquarters at Sergalou-Bergalou on the night of
February 23, 1988. Anfal would have eight stages in
all, seven of them directed at areas under the
control of the PUK. The KDP-controlled areas in the
northwest of Iraqi Kurdistan, which the regime
regarded as a lesser threat, were the target of the
Final Anfal operation in late August and early
September, 1988.
The Iraqi authorities did nothing to hide the
campaign from public view. On the contrary, as each
phase of the operation triumphed, its successes were
trumpeted with the same propaganda fanfare that
attended the victorious battles in the Iran-Iraq
War. Even today, Anfal is celebrated in the official
Iraqi media. The fifth anniversary in 1993 of the
fall of Sergalou and Bergalou on March 19, 1988 was
the subject of banner headlines.
Iraqi troops tore through rural Kurdistan with the
motion of a gigantic windshield wiper, sweeping
first clockwise, then counterclockwise, through one
after another of the "prohibited areas." The First
Anfal, centered on the siege of the PUK
headquarters, took more than three weeks. Subsequent
phases of the campaign were generally shorter, with
a brief pause between each as army units moved on to
the next target. The Second Anfal, in the Qara Dagh
region, lasted from March 22 to April 1, 1988; the
Third, covering the hilly plain known as Germian,
took from April 7 to April 20; the Fourth, in the
valley of the Lesser Zab river, was the shortest of
all, lasting only from May 3 to May 8.
Only in the Fifth Anfal, which began on May 15 in
the mountainous region northeast of Erbil, did the
troops have any real difficulty in meeting their
objectives. Encountering fierce resistance in
difficult terrain from the last of the PUK
peshmerga, the regime called a temporary halt to
the offensive on June 7. On orders from the Office
of the Presidency (indicating the personal
supervisory role that Saddam Hussein himself played
in Anfal), the operation was renewed twice in July
and August, with these actions denominated Anfal VI
and Anfal VII. Eventually, on August 26, the last
PUK-controlled area was declared "cleansed of
saboteurs."
By this time, Iran had accepted Iraq's terms for a
ceasefire to end the war, freeing up large numbers
of Iraqi troops to carry the Anfal operation into
the Badinan area of northern Iraqi Kurdistan. The
Final Anfal began at first light on August 25, and
was over in a matter of days. On September 6, 1988,
the Iraqi regime made its de facto declaration of
victory by announcing a general amnesty for all
Kurds. (Ali Hassan al-Majid later told aides that he
had opposed the amnesty, but had gone along with it
as a loyal party man.)
Each stage of Anfal followed roughly the same
pattern. It characteristically began with chemical
attacks from the air on both civilian and
peshmerga targets, accompanied by a military
blitz against PUK or KDP military bases and
fortified positions. The deadly cocktail of mustard
and nerve gases was much more lethal against
civilians than against the peshmerga, some of
whom had acquired gas masks and other rudimentary
defenses. In the village of Sayw Senan (Second
Anfal), more than eighty civilians died; in Goktapa
(Fourth Anfal), the death toll was more than 150; in
Wara (Fifth Anfal) it was thirty-seven. In the
largest chemical attack of all, the March 16 bombing
of the Kurdish town of Halabja, between 3,200 and
5,000 residents died. As a city, Halabja was not
technically part of Anfal--the raid was carried out
in reprisal for its capture by peshmerga
supported by Iranian Revolutionary Guards--but it
was very much part of the Kurdish genocide.
After the initial assault, ground troops and
jahsh enveloped the target area from all sides,
destroying all human habitation in their path,
looting household possessions and farm animals and
setting fire to homes, before calling in demolition
crews to finish the job. As the destruction
proceeded, so did Hilberg's phase of the
"concentration" or "seizure" of the target group.
Convoys of army trucks stood by to transport the
villagers to nearby holding centers and transit
camps, while the jahsh combed the hillsides
to track down anyone who had escaped. (Some members
of the militia, an asset of dubious reliability to
the regime, also saved thousands of lives by
spiriting people away to safety or helping them
across army lines.) Secret police combed the towns,
cities and complexes to hunt down Anfal fugitives,
and in several cases lured them out of hiding with
false offers of amnesty and a "return to the
national ranks"--a promise that now concealed a more
sinister meaning.
* * *
To this point, Anfal had many of the characteristics
of a counterinsurgency campaign, albeit an unusually
savage one. And captured Iraqi documents suggest
that during the initial combat phase,
counterinsurgency goals were uppermost in the minds
of the troops and their commanding officers. To be
sure, Iraq--like any other sovereign nation--had
legitimate interests in combating insurgency. But
the fact that Anfal was, by the narrowest
definition, a counterinsurgency, does nothing to
diminish the fact that it was also an act of
genocide. There isnothing mutually exclusive about
counterinsurgency and genocide. Indeed, one may be
the instrument used to consummate the other. Article
I of the Genocide Convention affirms that "genocide,
whether committed in time of peace or in time of
war, is a crime under international law." Summarily
executing noncombatant or captured members of an
ethnical-national group as such is not a legitimate
wartime or counterinsurgency measure, regardless of
the nature of the conflict.
In addition to this argument of principle, many
features of Anfal far transcend the realm of
counterinsurgency. These include, first of all, the
simple facts of what happened after the military
goals of the operation had been accomplished:
· the mass murder and disappearance of many tens of
thousands of non-combatants--50,000 by the most
conservative estimate, and possibly twice that
number;
· the use of chemical weapons against non-combatants
in dozens of locations, killing thousands and
terrifying many more into abandoning their homes;
· the near-total destruction of family and community
assets and infrastructure, including the entire
agricultural mainstay of the rural Kurdish economy;
· the literal abandonment, in punishing conditions,
of thousands of women, children and elderly people,
resulting in the deaths of many hundreds. Those who
survived did so largely due to the clandestine help
of nearby Kurdish townspeople.
Second, there is the matter of how Anfal was
organized as a bureaucratic enterprise. Viewed as a
counterinsurgency, each episode of Anfal had a
distinct beginning and an end, and its conduct was
in the hands of the regular army and the jahsh
militia. But these agencies were quickly phased out
of the picture, and the captured civilians were
transferred to an entirely separate bureaucracy for
processing and final disposal. Separate institutions
were involved--such as Amn, Istikhbarat,
the Popular Army (a type of home guard) and the
Ba'ath Party itself. And the infrastructure of
prison camps and death convoys was physicallyremote
from the combat theater, lying well outside the
Kurdistan Autonomous Region. Tellingly, the killings
were not in any sense concurrent with the
counterinsurgency: the detainees were murdered
several days or even weeks after the armed forces
had secured their goals. Finally, there is the
question of intent, which goes to the heart of the
notion of genocide. Documentary materials captured
from the Iraqi intelligence agencies demonstrate
with great clarity that the mass killings,
disappearances and forced relocations associated
with Anfal and the other anti-Kurdish campaigns of
1987-1989 were planned in coherent fashion. While
power over these campaigns was highly centralized,
their success depended on the orchestration of the
efforts of a large number of agencies and
institutions at the local, regional and national
level, from the Office of the Presidency of the
Republic on down to the lowliest jahsh unit.
The official at the center of this great
bureaucratic web, of course, was Ali Hassan
al-Majid, and in him the question of intent is
apparent on a second, extremely important level. A
number of audiotapes were made of meetings between
al-Majid and his aides from 1987 to 1989. These
tapes were examined by four independent experts, to
establish their authenticity and to confirm that the
principal speaker was al-Majid. Al-Majid was known
to have a distinctive, high-pitched voice and the
regional accent of his Tikrit district origins; both
these features were recognized without hesitation by
those Iraqis consulted by Middle East Watch. As a
public figure who frequently appears on radio and
television in Iraq6,
his voice is well known to many Iraqis. One Iraqi
consulted on this subject pointed out that the
principal speaker on the many hours of recordings in
Middle East Watch's possession spoke with authority
and used obscene language. In contrast, he said:
"Others in those meetings were courteous and
respectful with fearful tones, especially when they
addressed al-Majid himself." Al-Majid, two experts
noted, was often referred to by his familiar
nickname, "Abu Hassan."
The tapes contain evidence of a bitter racial animus
against the Kurds on the part of the man who, above
any other, plotted their destruction. "Why should I
let them live there like donkeys who don't know
anything?" al-Majid asks in one meeting. "What did
we ever getfrom them?" On another occasion, speaking
in the same vein: "I said probably we will find some
good ones among [the Kurds]...but we didn't, never."
And elsewhere, "I will smash their heads. These kind
of dogs, we will crush their heads." And again,
"Take good care of them? No, I will bury them with
bulldozers."
Loyalty to the regime offered no protection from
al-Majid's campaigns. Nor did membership in the
pro-government jahsh. Al-Majid even boasted
of threatening militia leaders with chemical weapons
if they refused to evacuate their villages.
Ethnicity and physical location were all that
mattered, and these factors became coterminous when
the mass killings took place in 1988.
The 1987 village clearances were wholly directed at
government-controlled areas, and thus had nothing
whatever to do with counterinsurgency. If the former
residents of these areas refused to accept
government-assigned housing in a mujamma'a,
and took refuge instead in a peshmerga-controlled
area -- as many did -- they too were liable to be
killed during Anfal. The same applied to other
smaller minorities. In the October 1987 census, many
Assyrian and Chaldean Christians -- an
Aramaic-speaking people of ancient origin -- refused
the government's demands that they designate
themselves either as Arabs or Kurds. Those who
declined to be Arabs were automatically treated as
Kurds. And, during the Final Anfal in Dohuk
governorate, where most Christians were
concentrated, they were in fact dealt with by the
regime even more severely than their Kurdish
neighbors. Those few Turkomans, a Turkic-speaking
minority, who fought with the Kurdish peshmerga
were not spared, because they too were deemed to
have become Kurds.
Almost continuously for the previous two decades,
the Ba'ath-led government had engaged in a campaign
of Arabization of Kurdish regions. The armed
resistance this inspired was Kurdish in character
and composition. In 1988, the rebels and all those
deemed to be sympathizers were therefore treated as
Kurds who had to be wiped out, once and for all.
Whether they were combatants or not was immaterial;
as far as the government was concerned they were all
"bad Kurds", who had not come over to the side of
the government.
* * *
To pursue Hilberg's paradigm a little further, once
the concentration and seizure was complete, the
annihilation could begin. The target group had
already been defined with care. Now came the
definition of the second, concentric circle within
the group: those who were actually to be killed.
At one level, this was a straightforward matter.
Under the terms of al-Majid's June 1987 directives,
death was the automatic penalty for any male of an
age to bear arms who was found in an Anfal area.7
At the same time, no one was supposed to go before
an Anfal firing squad without first having his or
her case individually examined. There is a great
deal of documentary evidence to support this view,
beginning with a presidential order of October 15,
1987--two days before the census--that "the names of
persons who are to be subjected to a general/blanket
judgment must not be listed collectively. Rather,
refer to them or treat them in your correspondence
on an individual basis." The effects of this order
are reflected in the lists that the Army and Amn
compiled of Kurds arrested during Anfal, which note
each person's name, sex, age, place of residence and
place of capture.
The processing of the detainees took place in a
network of camps and prisons. The first temporary
holding centers were in operation, under the control
of military intelligence as early as March 15, 1988;
by about the end of that month, the mass
disappearances had begun in earnest, peaking in
mid-April and early May. Most of the detainees went
to a place called Topzawa, a Popular Army camp on
the outskirts of Kirkuk--the city where Ali Hassan
al-Majid had his headquarters. Some went to the
Popular Army barracks in Tikrit. Women and children
were trucked on from Topzawa to a separate camp in
the town of
Dibs;
between 6,000 and 8,000 elderly detainees were taken
to the abandoned prison of Nugra Salman in the
southern desert, where hundreds of them died of
neglect, starvation and disease. Badinan prisoners
from the Final Anfal went through a separate but
parallel system, with most being detained in the
huge army fort at Dohuk and the women and children
being transferred later to a prison camp in
Salamiyeh on the Tigris River close to Mosul.
The majority of the women, children and elderly
people were released from the camps after the
September 6 amnesty. But none of theAnfal men were
released. Middle East Watch's presumption, based on
the testimony of a number of survivors from the
Third and bloodiest Anfal, is that they went in
large groups before firing squads and were interred
secretly outside the Kurdish areas. During the Final
Anfal in Badinan, in at least two cases groups of
men were executed on the spot after capture by
military officers carrying out instructions from
their commanders.
The locations of at least three mass gravesites have
been pinpointed through the testimony of survivors.
One is near the north bank of the Euphrates River,
close to the town of Ramadi and adjacent to a
complex housing Iranian Kurds forcibly displaced in
the early stages of the Iran-Iraq War. Another is in
the vicinity of the archaeological site of Al-Hadhar
(Hatra), south of Mosul. A third is in the desert
outside the town of Samawah. At least two other mass
graves are believed to exist on Hamrin Mountain, one
between Kirkuk and Tikrit and the other west of Tuz
Khurmatu.8
While the camp system is evocative of one dimension
of the Nazi genocide, the range of execution methods
described by Kurdish survivors is uncannily
reminiscent of another--the activities of the
Einsatzkommandos, or mobile killing units, in
the Nazi-occupied lands of Eastern Europe. Each of
the standard operating techniques used by the
Einsatzkommandos is documented in the Kurdish
case. Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot
from the front and dragged into pre-dug mass graves;
others were shoved roughly into trenches and
machinegunned where they stood; others were made to
lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of
fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied
together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and
shot in the back so that they would fall forward
into it--a method that was presumably more efficient
from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers
then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of
corpses. Some of the gravesites contained dozens of
separate pits, and obviously contained the bodies of
thousands of victims. Circumstantial evidence
suggests that the executioners were uniformed
members of the Ba'ath Party, or perhaps of Iraq's
General Security Directorate (Amn).
By the most conservative estimates, 50,000 rural
Kurds died during Anfal. While males from
approximately fourteen to fifty wereroutinely killed
en masse, a number of questions surround the
selection criteria that were used to order the
murder of younger children and entire families.
Many thousands of women and children perished, but
subject to extreme regional variations, with most
being residents of two distinct "clusters" that were
affected by the Third and Fourth Anfals. Abuses by
zealous local field commanders may explain why women
and children were rounded up, rather than being
allowed to slip away. But they cannot adequately
explain the later patterns of disappearance, since
the detainees were promptly transferred alive out of
army custody, segregated from their husbands and
fathers in processing centers elsewhere, and then
killed in cold blood after a period in detention.
The place of surrender, more than place of
residence, seems to have been one consideration in
deciding who lived and who died. Amn
documents indicate that another factor may have been
whether the troops encountered armed resistance in a
given area--which indeed was the case in most, but
not all, of the areas marked by the killing of women
and children. A third criterion may have been the
perceived "political stance" of detainees, although
it is hard to see how this could have been applied
to children.
Whatever the precise reasons, it is clear from
captured Iraqi documents that the intelligence
agencies scrutinized at least some cases
individually, and even appealed to the highest
authority if they were in doubt about the fate of a
particular individual. This suggests that the
annihilation process was governed, at least in
principle, by rigid bureaucratic norms. But all the
evidence suggests that the purpose of these norms
was not to rule on a particular person's guilt or
innocence of specific charges, but merely to
establish whether an individual belonged to the
target group that was to be "Anfalized," i.e. Kurds
in areas outside government control. At the same
time, survivor testimony repeatedly indicates that
the rulebook was only adhered to casually in
practice. The physical segregation of detainees from
Anfal areas by age and sex, as well as the selection
of those to be exterminated, was a crude affair,
conducted without any meaningful prior process of
interrogation or evaluation.
* * *
Although Anfal as a military campaign ended with the
general amnesty of September 6, 1988, its logic did
not. Those who were released from prisons such as
Nugra Salman, Dibs and Salamiyeh, as well as those
who returned from exile under the amnesty, were
relocated to complexes with no compensation and no
means of support. Civilians who tried to help them
were hunted down by Amn. The mujamma'at
that awaited the survivors of the Final Anfal in
Badinan were places of residence in name alone; the
Anfalakan were merely dumped on the barren
earth of the Erbil plain with no infrastructure
other than a perimeter fence and military guard
towers. Here, hundreds perished from disease,
exposure, hunger or malnutrition, and the
after-effects of exposure to chemical weapons.
Several hundreds more--non-Muslim Yezidis, Assyrians
and Chaldeans, including many women and
children--were abducted from the camps and
disappeared, collateral victims of the Kurdish
genocide. Their particular crime was to have
remained in the prohibited majority Kurdish areas
after community leaders declined to accept the
regime's classification of them as Arabs in the 1987
census.
The regime had no intention of allowing the
amnestied Kurds to exercise their full civil rights
as Iraqi citizens. They were to be deprived of
political rights and employment opportunities until
Amn certified their loyalty to the regime.
They were to sign written pledges that they would
remain in the mujamma'at to which they had
been assigned--on pain of death. They were to
understand that the prohibited areas remained off
limits and were often sown with landmines to
discourage resettlement; directive SF/4008, and in
particular clause 5, with its order to kill all
adult males, would remain in force and would be
carried out to the letter.
Arrests and executions continued, some of the latter
even involving prisoners who were alive, in
detention, at the time of the amnesty. Middle East
Watch has documented three cases of mass executions
in late 1988; in one of them, 180 people were put to
death. Documents from one local branch of Amn
list another eighty-seven executions in the first
eight months of 1989, one of them a man accused of
"teaching the Kurdish language in Latin script."
The few hundred Kurdish villages that had come
through Anfal unscathed as a result of their
pro-government sympathies had no guarantees of
lasting survival, and dozens more were burned and
bulldozed in late 1988 and 1989. Army engineers even
destroyed the large Kurdish town of Qala Dizeh
(population 70,000) and declared itsenvirons a
"prohibited area," removing the last significant
population center close to the Iranian border.
Killing, torture and scorched-earth policies
continued, in other words, to be a matter of daily
routine in Iraqi Kurdistan, as they always had been
under the rule of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party.
But the Kurdish problem, in al-Majid's words, had
been solved; the "saboteurs" had been slaughtered.
Since 1975, some 4,000 Kurdish villages had been
destroyed; at least 50,000 rural Kurds had died in
Anfal alone, and very possibly twice that number;
half of Iraq's productive farmland had been laid
waste. All told, the total number of Kurds killed
over the decade since the Barzani men were taken
from their homes is well into six figures.
By April 23, 1989, the Ba'ath Party felt that it had
accomplished its goals, for on that date it revoked
the special powers that had been granted to Ali
Hassan al-Majid two years earlier. At a ceremony to
greet his successor, the supreme commander of Anfal
made it clear that "the exceptional situation is
over."
To use the language of the Genocide Convention, the
regime's aim had been to destroy the group
(Iraqi Kurds) in part, and it had done so.
Intent and act had been combined, resulting in the
consummated crime of genocide. And with this, Ali
Hassan al-Majid was free to move on to other tasks
demanding his special talents--first as governor of
occupied Kuwait and, then, in 1993, as Iraq's
Minister of Defense.
______
1 A derisive
Kurdish term for the National Defense Battalions,
the word jahsh means "donkey foals."
2 "Saboteurs" is
the term commonly applied by the Iraqi regime to the
Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas and their
civilian sympathizers.
3 As defined in
the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide (hereinafter the Genocide
Convention), 78 UNTS 277, approved by GA Res. 2670
on December 9, 1948, entered into force January 12,
1951.
4 Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1985 student edition),
p.267.
5 While the
Yezidis, a syncretic religious sect, are ethnic
Kurds, the Assyrians and Chaldeans are a distinct
ancient people in their own right.
6 Al-Majid has
served variously over the past five years as
Secretary General of the Ba'ath Party's Northern
Bureau, Interior Minister, Governor of
Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1990 and, as Defense
Minister.
7 Rural Kurdish
men carry personal weapons as matter of tradition,
regardless of their politics.
8 Other mass
graves have been found elsewhere in
Kurdish-controlled territory, containing the remains
of Amn executions before, during and after
the Anfal period.
1
Ba'athis and Kurds
"Black are his colors, black pavilion,
His spear, his shield, his horse, his armor, plumes,
And jetty feathers menace death and hell--
Without respect of sex, degree or age,
He razeth all his foes with fire and sword.
-- Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great,
Part One (IV,i)
"Each era is different. Everything changes. But
Saddam Hussein is worse than Tamburlaine of 600
years ago."
-- Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari of Goktapa, site of
chemical weapons attack, May 3, 1988.
It is a land of spring flowers and waving fields of
wheat, of rushing streams and sudden perilous
gorges, of hidden caves and barren rock faces. Above
all, it is a land where the rhythm of life is
defined by the relationship between the people and
the mountains. One range after another, the peaks
stretch in all directions as far as the eye can
travel, the highest of them capped year-round by
snow. "Level the mounts," so the old saying goes,
"and in a day the Kurds would be no more."
The Kurds have inhabited these mountains for
thousands of years. "The territories designated
since the 12th Century as Kurdistan," says one
scholar, "were inhabited since the most distant
antiquity and constitute one of the very first
settlements of human civilization. Jarmo, in the
valley of Chamchamal, at present in Iraq, is the
most ancient village of the Middle East. Here, four
thousand years before our era, man already
cultivated diverse grains (wheat, barley, lentils,
peas, etc.), plucked fruits (olives, almonds,
pistachios, figs), raised sheep and goats."1
Yet for all their antiquity, the Kurds have never
been able to form an independent political entity of
their own in modern times. Fromthe 16th to the early
20th centuries, their territories formed part of the
Ottoman and Persian empires. With the collapse of
the Ottoman empire after World War One, the Kurds
were to be granted their independence under the 1920
Treaty of Sèvres. But that promise evaporated as the
nationalist movement of Kamal Ataturk seized control
of the Kurdish lands in eastern Turkey and the Kurds
saw their mountain homeland divided once more among
four newly created states--Turkey, Syria, Iraq and
the Soviet Union, and one ancient land--Iran, or
Persia as it was then known.
Each of these states has balked at assimilating its
Kurdish minority, and each of the Kurdish groups has
rebelled against the authority of its new central
government. Of these traditions of rebellion, none
has been more persistent than that of the Iraqi
Kurds.2
There are larger Kurdish populations--some ten to
fifteen million Kurds live in Turkey and seven
million in Iran, compared to just four million in
Iraq.3
Yet a number of factors set the Iraqi Kurds apart
from their neighbors. They were proportionately the
largest ethnic minority in the region, at least
until the 1980s, accounting for fully 23 percent of
the total Iraqi population4.
The proportion of Kurds in Turkey may now be
fractionally higher, but this is not a consequence
of normal demographic trends. The relative decline
of the Iraqi Kurdish population is a political
matter. Hundreds of thousands have fled into exile;
tens of thousands more have been killed, above all
in 1988, in the course of the six-and-a-half month
long campaign of extermination known as Anfal.
The Iraqi Kurds have also been the victims of an
accident of geography, for vast oil reserves were
discovered in the 20th century on the fringes of
their ancestral lands. The Kurds have repeatedly
challenged the government in Baghdad for control of
these areas--especially the ethnically mixed city of
Kirkuk. And it is this contest for natural resources
and power, as much as any consideration of ideology
or deep-rooted ethnic animus, which underlies the
brutal treatment of the Kurds by the ruling Arab
Ba'ath Socialist Party.
Since the 1920s, the Iraqi Kurds have staged one
revolt after another against the central
authorities. Most of these rebellions had their
nerve center in a remote area of northeastern Iraq
called the Barzan valley, which lies close to the
Iranian and Turkish borders on the banks of the
Greater Zab river. From the early 1940s to the
mid-1970s, the idea of Kurdish rebellion was
inseparable from the name of a charismatic tribal
leader from that valley, Mullah Mustafa Barzani.
Barzani's only real success came in 1946, when Iraqi
and Iranian Kurds joined forces to found the Mahabad
Republic. But the Mahabad experiment lasted only a
year before it was crushed, and Barzani fled to the
Soviet Union with several thousand fighters in a
celebrated "long march."5
After the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958,
the Kurds encountered a familiar pattern under each
of the regimes that followed: first a period of
negotiations that invariably failed to satisfy
Kurdish demands for autonomy, and then, when the
talks broke down, renewed outbreaks of violence.6
Rural villages were bombed and burned andKurdish
fighters hunted down relentlessly. The name that
they adopted expressed accurately the condition of
their existence. They called themselves peshmerga--"those
who face death."
* * *
In 1988, during the final six months of Iraq's
eight-year long war with Iran, something terrible
occurred in the mountains of northern Iraq. At least
metaphorically, the regime of Saddam Hussein did
"level the mounts," in the sense of razing thousands
of villages, destroying the traditional rural
economy and infrastructure of Iraqi Kurdistan and
killing many tens of thousands of its inhabitants.
The outside world has long known of two isolated
episodes of abuse of the Iraqi Kurds in 1988. In
both instances, it was the proximity of the victims
to international borders, and thus to the foreign
media, that accounted for the news leaking out. In
the first, the March 16 poison gas attack on the
Kurdish city of Halabja, near the border with Iran,
the Iranian authorities made it their business to
show off the site to the international press within
a few days of the bombing. Even so, the illusion has
long persisted, fostered initially by reports from
the U.S. intelligence community, which "tilted"
strongly toward Baghdad during the 1980-1988
Iran-Iraq War, that both sides were responsible for
the chemical attack on Halabja.7
This is false: The testimony of survivorsestablishes
beyond reasonable doubt that Halabja was an Iraqi
action, launched in response to the brief capture of
the city by Iraqi peshmerga assisted by
Iranian Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran). The
thousands who died, virtually all of them civilians,
were victims of the Iraqi regime.8
The second well-publicized event was the mass exodus
of at least 65,000, and perhaps as many as 80,000,
Iraqi Kurdish refugees from the northern mountains
of the Badinan area into the Turkish borderlands,
during the final days of August.9
The reason for their flight was later conclusively
demonstrated to have been a further series of
chemical weapons attacks by the Iraqi armed forces.10
Since World War One, the use of poison gas in
warfare has been regarded as a special kind of
abomination. Chemical weapons were banned by the
Geneva Protocol of 1925, to which Iraq is a party,
and many countries subsequently destroyedtheir
stockpiles. While Iraq, and to a lesser extent Iran,
had broken the battlefield taboo on many occasions
since 1983, the Halabja and Badinan attacks marked a
new level of inhumanity, as the first documented
instances of a government employing chemical weapons
against its own civilian population.
Yet Halabja and Badinan are merely two pieces in a
much larger jigsaw puzzle, and they formed part of a
concerted offensive against the Kurds that lasted
from March 1987 until May 1989. 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.11
Middle East Watch has reached this conclusion after
over eighteen months of research. 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 1992, Middle East Watch researchers
interviewed in depth some 300 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 1993, 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. Dr. Snow's
first preliminary trip, to the
Erbil
and Suleimaniyeh areas, was in December 1991. 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 1988 on the
outskirts of the village of Koreme, in the Badinan
area.12
The third, and most ambitious, strand in our
research has been the study of captured Iraqi
intelligence archives. During 1991 and early 1992,
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 1991. Then, in May 1992,
Middle East Watch secured permission to examine and
analyse 847 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.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, the documents became
Congressional Records of the Committee.13
Analysis of the documents began on October 22, 1992,
and in many cases it has been possible to match
documentary evidence about specific villages or
campaigns with testimonial material from the same
locations.
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..."14
The trove of captured documents demonstrates in
astonishing breadth and detail how the Iraqi state
bureaucracy organized the Kurdish genocide. 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.15
The contents of these boxes are often charred as a
result of the March 1991 fighting, in which many
government buildings were torched. 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.
* * *
For those who survived the slaughter, the experience
can be summed up in a single word:
al-Anfal. 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 1992 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.D.
624). It was in the village of Badr, located in what
is now the Saudi
province
of Hejaz, that a group of Muslims numbering 319
routed nearly 1,000 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."16
In this sura, the Arabic word 'al-Anfal'
means 'spoils,' as in the spoils of battle. 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."
The sura continues with the revelation of
God's will to the angels:
"I am with you; so confirm the believers. I shall
cast into the unbelievers' hearts terror; so smite
above the necks, and smite every finger of them!"
That, because they had made a breach with God and
with His Messenger; and whosoever makes a breach
with God and with His Messenger, surely God is
terrible in His retribution. That for you; therefore
taste it; and that the chastisement of the Fire is
for the unbelievers."17
Although Saddam Hussein has often chosen in recent
years to wrap his campaigns in religious language
and iconography, Ba'athist Iraq is a militantly
secular state. The victims of the 1988 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.
* * *
Kurdish Autonomy and Arabization
Yet for all its horror, it would be wrong to say
that Anfal was entirely unprecedented, for terrible
atrocities had been visited on the Kurds by the
Ba'ath Party on many occasions in the past.
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 1968. 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
1968, 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
1920s, 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, 1970 was promising. It
recognized the legitimacy of Kurdish nationalism and
guaranteed Kurdish participation in government and
Kurdish language-teaching in schools.18
But it reserved judgment on the territorial extent
of "Kurdistan," pending a new census. 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 1977, by which
time the autonomy deal was dead.19
As before, Kurdish ideals were hostage to larger
political forces. In April 1972, the Ba'ath regime
signed a 15-year friendship treaty with the Soviet
Union; two months later it nationalized the Iraq
Petroleum Company; and with the October 1973
Arab-Israeli war,
Iraq's
oil revenues soared tenfold.20
In June of that year, with Ba'ath-Kurdish relations
already souring, the legendary guerrilla leader
Mullah Mustafa Barzani laid formal claim to the
Kirkuk oilfields. Baghdad interpreted this as a
virtual declaration of war, and in March 1974
unilaterally decreed an autonomy statute.
The new statute was a far cry from the 1970
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 1970-1974 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).21
Baghdad gave the Kurds two weeks to accept its terms22;
Barzani responded with a renewal of his dormant
armed revolt.
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.
Horrified by Iraq's new alignment with the Soviet
Union, the Israeli government and the U.S. 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 1975, 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.
"Covert action should not be confused with
missionary work," was Dr. Henry Kissinger's famous
remark on the affair.
In the eyes of the Ba'ath Party, Barzani's
collaboration with Iran, the United States and
Israel marked the Kurds down as Fifth Columnists.
"Those who have sold themselves to the foreigner
will not escape punishment," said Saddam Hussein,
who at this point was deputy chairman of Iraq's
Revolutionary Command Council, and the official
responsible for internal security matters.23
That attitude colored Ba'ath dealings with the Kurds
for the next two decades. Its culmination was the
campaign known as Anfal.
* * *
With the collapse of the Barzani Revolution, as
Kurds call it, the Iraqi regime shifted its
anti-Kurdish activities into a higher gear. 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 1975 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 1963.
Hundreds of Kurdish villages were destroyed during
the mid-1970s in the northern governorates of
Nineveh and Dohuk, and about 150 more in the
governorate of Diyala, the southernmost spur of
Iraqi Kurdistan, where there were also significant
oil deposits.24
Restrictions were imposed, and maintained over the
years that followed, on the employment and residence
of Kurds in the Kirkuk area.25
Arab tribespeople from southern Iraq were enticed to
move to the north with government benefits and
offers of housing. 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 1975 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. "They told
me I should stay there and become a farmer, but we
could not farm there: it was all desert."26
In November 1975, an Iraqi official acknowledged
that some 50,000 Kurds had beendeported to the
southern districts of Nasiriya and Diwaniya,
although the true figure was almost certainly
higher.27
This reference to "houses" is a little misleading,
for the new quarters were primitive in the extreme.
The relocated Kurds were simply driven south in
convoys of trucks, dumped in the middle of nowhere
and left to their own resources. "This is to prevent
you from going to Mustafa [Barzani] or Iran," one
villager remembers being told by a soldier.28
Many people died of heat and starvation; the
remainder survived at first in "shades"--crude
shelters fashioned from branches and thatch, or rugs
strung on a framework of poles. In time they managed
to build mud houses with the money that the men
earned as day-laborers in the nearest town.
In 1977-1978, under the terms of the 1975 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
(3.1 miles) into Iraq; later, it was extended to ten
kilometers, then to fifteen, and finally to thirty
(18.6 miles). 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 500, the great majority of
them in Sulemaniyeh.29
Again, official Iraqi statements convey some minimal
sense of the numbers involved: the Ba'ath Party
newspaper Al-Thawra admitted that 28,000
families (as many as 200,000 people) had been
deported from the border zone in just twomonths
during the summer of 1978.30
Deportees say that they were given five days to
gather up their possessions and leave their homes;
when that deadline had expired the army demolition
crews moved in.
This was no haphazard operation. A new bureaucratic
infrastructure was set up in August 1979 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.)31
Saddam Hussein's committee now began systematically
to redraw the map of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the border
clearances of the late 1970's marked the first
large-scale introduction of the mujamma'a, or
"complex" system of Kurdish resettlement camps.32
The mujamma'at (plural) were crudely built
collective villages, located near large towns or
along the main highways in areas controlled by the
Iraqi Army. 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, 1980,
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.
In these early years of the Iran-Iraq war, it was
the KDP--now commanded by Mullah Mustafa Barzani's
sons, the half-brothers Mas'oud and Idris--that was
the main object of Baghdad's attention.33
Since 1975, the KDP had been based at Karaj, outside
Teheran. 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 1975 spent nearly five years in their new
quarters in the southern governorate of Diwaniya.
But in 1980 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 1983, 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 30.
"We were all asleep when the soldiers surrounded the
complex at 3:00 a.m.," said oneBarzani woman who was
living in Qushtapa at the time.34
"Then, before dawn, as people were getting dressed
and getting ready to go to work, all the soldiers at
once charged through the complex. 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."
"I tried to hold on to my youngest son, who was
small and very sick," added another of the "Barzani
widows," as the women are now known. "I pleaded with
them, 'You took the other three, please let me have
this one.' They just told me, 'If you say anything
else, we'll shoot you,' and then hit me in the chest
with a rifle butt. They took the boy. He was in the
fifth grade."
Between five and eight thousand Barzani men from
Qushtapa and other other camps were loaded into
large buses and driven off toward the south. 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.35
For almost a year after the raid the Qushtapa camp
was sealed. 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. "Now that your men are gone, why don't you
come and stay with us?" one woman who remained
behind recalls being taunted by Amn agents.
In a 1983 speech, President Saddam Hussein left
little doubt what had happened to the Barzanis.
"They betrayed the country and they betrayed the
covenant," he said, "and we meted out a stern
punishment to them and they went to hell."36
The seizure and presumed mass killing of the Barzani
men was the direct precursor of what would be
repeated on a much larger scale five years later,
during the campaign known as Anfal.
* * *
Exploiting Kurdish Divisions
The Barzani half-brothers' KDP, however, was not the
only source of peshmerga resistance to the
regime. 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.37
Mullah Mustafa Barzani's charismatic, not to say
high-handed, style of leadership had alsoproduced a
steady stream of rivals within his party. And after
the debacle of 1975 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 1976, 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 1979 another of Mullah Mustafa's former senior
aides, Mahmoud Osman, joined forces with a breakaway
group of peshmerga from the PUK to form the
Kurdistan Socialist Party. 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.38
A clear geographical division quickly emerged. The
KDP remained the dominant force in the mountain
areas of Badinan in the far north, while the PUK
held sway to the east and south of the Greater Zab
river. (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.39
Hampered in its ability to solve the Kurdish problem
by force, the Iraqi regime leavened its repressive
policies with a calculated attempt at
divide-and-rule. 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.
Baghdad's best opportunity to drive a wedge between
the KDP and the PUK came with what was, on the face
of it, a menacing development in the Iran-Iraq War.
Talabani had bitterly opposed the Barzanis' decision
to facilitate Iran's Haj Omran offensive in July
1983, 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.40
Talabani vowed that his troops would fight
side-by-side with the Ba'ath Party to expel the
invaders from Iraqi soil. 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. Almost a decade later, one member of
the PUK team that negotiated with the Iraqi regime
recalled clearly the words of Tariq Aziz, a member
of the Revolutionary Command Council and later
Iraq's Foreign Minister. "He told us, 'If you help
us, we will never forget it. 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."41
It was not an empty threat.
The negotiations dragged on inconclusively for more
than a year before they finally broke down in
January 1985. 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.42
But although Saddam Hussein failed to cement a
lasting alliance with Talabani, he could
takesatisfaction in the fact that the PUK-KDP rift
was now deeper and more bitter than ever.
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."43
The jahsh have existed in some form since at
least the early 1960s, but their role has been
expanded several times since. 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.44
The ordinary jahsh came under the operational
command of military intelligence (Istikhbarat)
in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War and during
the Anfal campaign. But there were also two élite
forces of pro-government Kurds. 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."45
The duties of the rank-and-file jahsh were
broadly akin to those of similar militias in other
parts of the world.46
Poorly equipped with light weapons, they maintained
road blocks, patrolled the countryside, did advance
scouting work for the regular army, searched
villages for army deserters and draft dodgers, and
handed over suspected peshmerga to the
authorities. 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 5,000 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, 250,000 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. At 85 dinars
($255) a month for each paper soldier, it was easy
for a canny mustashar to amass a fortune. 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 1986 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 1986 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.47
* * *
1985-1987: Open War
After the collapse of the Ba'ath-PUK talks in
January 1985, the Iraqi regime found its control of
Kurdistan eroding once more. 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 mid-1980s, and their
inhabitants resettled in mujamma'at. But
hundreds of other ancient villages--perhaps as many
as 2,000--tried to integrate the counterinsurgency
war into the rhythms of their daily lives. In the
process, their communities were transformed.
The biggest threat to civilian morale came from
shelling. The Iraqi Army had divided up Kurdistan
according to a grid pattern and placed heavy
artillery at regular intervals with a range of up to
twenty-five miles. The guns pounded around the
clock, and it was impossible to predict which
targets would be hit on any given day. Routine farm
work became a potentially lethal game of chance;
sleep patterns were disrupted; the constant
uncertainty shredded everyone's nerves.
Helicopters regularly dropped troops and jahsh
into the villages to search for draft dodgers,
deserters and suspected peshmerga. A steady
stream of captured Kurds were taken away and
executed. Others died in the frequent attacks by
Soviet-supplied government MIGs and Sukhoi
fighter-bombers.
Since the time of the first Ba'ath regime in 1963,
Kurdish villagers had learned to protect themselves
against aerial attack by building primitive shelters
outside their homes. Now the pace of shelter
construction accelerated, their design becoming more
elaborate. Many were virtual underground rooms, high
enough to stand up in, covered with wooden planks or
corrugated iron sheeting and layers of dirt, stones
and branches. The more sophisticated had twisting
entrance tunnels to protect the occupants against
shrapnel and blast. Many whole villages moved into
nearby caves and rock overhangs and came to lead a
virtual nocturnal existence, emerging to tend their
animals and fields only when darkness fell.
Hamlets of three or four houses and small towns of
three or four thousand people practiced an enforced
self-sufficiency. Many villages elected their own
five-person councils (majlis al-sha'ab in
Arabic, or anjuman in Kurdish). As the
government withdrew its rudimentary public services
from rural areas, peshmerga teachers arrived
to staff theabandoned schools and itinerant
peshmerga paramedics tried to make up for the
clinics that had been closed. In most cases, the
villages had never had electricity or piped water,
and in this sense the regime's ability to inflict
additional hardship was limited. As before, the
Kurds drew their water from rivers, springs and
underground streams,48
and the more prosperous took their electrical power
from private generators. Commerce depended on
smuggling. Knowing every goat-path in the
surrounding hills, the villagers learned to evade
the government road-blocks that tried to enforce a
blockade on foodstuffs to peshmerga-controlled
areas. Only women were allowed past these
checkpoints. Sometimes younger boys could slip
through with the help of a bribe, but it was a risky
business, and some were arrested and disappeared on
suspicion of aiding the peshmerga.
By now the practical distinction between
peshmerga and ordinary civilians had blurred. In
principle at least, active peshmerga received
a salary from the organization to which they
belonged and served duty rotas of 15-20 days at a
time, with equal spells at home to work their lands.
But many of the military-age men (and even some of
the women) were also armed and organized into a
so-called Civil Defense Force (hezi bergri milli
or hezi peshjiri), whose main task was to
defend their villages and hold off the army until
peshmerga reinforcements could arrive. Light
arms could be bought without much difficulty from
the jahsh and it was common for households to
have more than one weapon.
The peshmerga, meanwhile, tried to keep the
regime off balance with their mixture of fixed and
mobile forces. Hundreds of the smallest guerrilla
units, or mafrazeh, roamed the countryside.
In mountainous areas, a mafrazeh could be as
small as five men; in the villages, fifteen was the
minimum number needed for successful defense. Above
the mafrazeh was the kird, and above
the kird the teep, which the Kurds
thought of as their equivalent of an army division.49
By the beginning of 1987, the only parts of Iraqi
Kurdistan over which Baghdad exercised effective
control were the cities, larger towns,complexes and
paved highways. Authority over the rural areas was
roughly divided between the KDP in the north and the
PUK in the south. While the regime had long vilified
the KDP as the "offspring of treason," it now saw
ominous signs that the PUK, too, was acting as the
military and political surrogate of a foreign power
with which Iraq was at war. Talabani's group would
henceforth be known officially as Umala Iran--"agents
of
Iran"--a
term reportedly coined by Saddam Hussein himself.50
Insulting though it may have been, the phrase was
grounded in fact, for since the latter part of 1986
Iranian-PUK collaboration had been a reality. While
the KDP had long enjoyed access to Iranian
sanctuaries, the PUK now felt that it had no
alternative but to do likewise. In landlocked
Kurdistan, the struggle could never succeed without
help from a friendly neighbor. "There was no way for
food and supplies to reach us, no help for our
wounded, no roads out of the territory that we had
liberated," claimed Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin, who
was deputy commander of the PUK at the time. "Iran
was our window to the world."
In October 1986, the PUK and the Iranian government
concluded a sweeping accord on economic, political
and military cooperation. Both parties agreed that
they would press the fight against the Iraqi regime
until Saddam Hussein was toppled, and both promised
to make no unilateral deals with Baghdad.51
If either party faced a serious military threat, the
other would open a second front to relieve the
pressure; Iran agreed to provide the PUK with arms,
financial support and medical aid, while
foreswearing the right to impose an Islamic regime
in Baghdad.52
The results of the accord were apparent almost at
once,on October 10, when a group of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards, or pasdaran accompanied
by Kurdish peshmerga, struck at the Kirkuk
oilfields, deep inside Iraqi territory. At the same
time, to Baghdad's evident fury, the Iranians
brokered a unity agreement between the PUK and the
KDP, putting an end to their longstanding rivalry.
The Teheran accords brought a radical shift in the
attitude of the Iraqi regime. Despite having the
upper hand in the war against Iran, the security
situation within its own borders had slipped badly.
Since the resumption of the war with the PUK in
1985, Kurdish affairs had been overseen by Muhammad
Hamza al-Zubeidi, head of the Northern Bureau of the
Ba'ath Party Organization. After a full-scale
security review of the region, al-Zubeidi had
reportedly been ordered to bring the situation under
control within six months; when that period elapsed
there was a six-month extension. But still the
situation continued to deteriorate, and in early
1987 Baghdad decided on harsher measures. From now
on, all those who still lived and farmed in the
Kurdish mountains would be considered as active
enemies of the state by virtue of nothing more than
their ethnicity and their physical presence in their
ancestral homeland.
______
1 P.J. Braidwood,
Prehistoric Investigation in Iraqi
Kurdistan
(Chicago, 1960).
2 The definitive
work on the Kurds is Martin Van Bruinessen, Agha,
Shaikh and State: The Social and Political
Structures of
Kurdistan (London: Zed
Books, 1992). For a general historical and cultural
overview, see Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A
Concise Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Crane
Russak, 1992). A useful brief summary is David
McDowall, "The Kurdish question: a historical
review," in Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl,
eds., The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), especially
pp.24-30.
3 Izady, op cit,
p.117, gives the following figures: Turkey 13.65
million, Iran 6.6 million, Iraq 4.4 million.
4 According to
Izady, loc cit, Kurds made up fully 25 percent of
the Iraqi population in 1980, compared to 21.3
percent in Turkey. By 1990, he estimated the figures
were 23.5 percent and 24.1 percent respectively.
Other estimates are much lower, putting the Kurds at
only 16 or 17 percent of the Iraqi population.
5 The Kurds,
however, unlike other national liberation movements,
were never able to count on consistent Soviet
support.
6 Since the
revolution of July 14, 1958, there have been four
regimes in Baghdad: the military government of Abd
al-Karim Qasem and the "Free Officers" (1958-1963);
the first regime of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party
(February-November 1963); the governments of the
Arif brothers and Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz
(1963-1968); and the second Ba'ath regime (1968 to
the present). Saddam Hussein, one of the leaders of
the July 1968 coup, has been President of Iraq since
1979. The best general work on the period is Marion
Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since
1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (London:
I.B. Tauris, 1990). Other useful studies include
Phebe Marr, The Modern History of
Iraq
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1985) and CARDRI
(Committee against Repression and for Democratic
Rights in Iraq), Saddam's
Iraq: Revolution or Reaction?
(London: Zed Books, 1986).
7 Books on the
Iran-Iraq War have routinely echoed the
unsubstantiated report that both sides had used
chemical weapons in Halabja. This notion originated
in a study for the U.S. Army War College: Stephen C.
Pelletiere, Douglas V. Johnson II and Leif R.
Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and U.S. Security in the
Middle East (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic
Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1990). It
is repeated in a later book by Pelletiere, a former
U.S. intelligence officer, The Iran-Iraq War:
Chaos in a Vacuum (New York: Praeger, 1992).
This strongly pro-Iraqi work comments, "On May 23
(sic), in fighting over the town, gas was used by
both sides. As a result scores (sic) of Iraqi
Kurdish civilians were killed. It is now fairly
certain that Iranian gas killed the Kurds."
(pp.136-137)
The supposed
factual basis for this conclusion is that the
Halabja victims had blue lips, characteristic of the
effects of cyanide gas--which Iraq was not believed
to possess. Cyanide gas, a metabolic poison, would
indeed produce blue lips, but they are far from
being a specific indicator of its use. Nerve agents,
which are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors that cause
respiratory paralysis, would also turnvictims' lips
blue. Middle East Watch interview with Dr. Howard
Hu, Harvard School of Public Health, May 13, 1993.
On Iraq's proven use of nerve agents against the
Kurds during Anfal, see below footnote 10.
8 The Kurdish
researcher Shorsh Resool, author of a study of the
destruction of Kurdish villages (Destruction of a
Nation, privately published, April, 1990), has
assembled a list of the names of some 3,200 people
who died in the Halabja attack. More impressionistic
estimates have ranged as high as 7,000 (see below
p.108).
9 The most
frequently cited figure of 65,000 derives from Peter
W. Galbraith and Christopher Van Hollen, Jr.,
"Chemical Weapons Use in Kurdistan: Iraq's Final
Offensive," staff report to the U.S. Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, September 21, 1988.
Tens of thousands also sought refuge in Iran, either
fleeing directly from Iraq or else after passing
through Turkey.
10 See Galbraith
and Van Hollen, op cit. The February 1989 report by
Physicians for Human Rights, "Winds of Death: Iraq's
Use of Poison Gas Against its Kurdish Population,"
concluded that the injuries of refugees examined in
Turkey were consistent with exposure to sulfur
mustard (yperite). However, PHR noted, "Eyewitness
accounts of deaths beginning within minutes of
exposure...cannot be explained by mustard gas
alone." The mystery was laid to rest in April 1993,
when research on soil samples from the village of
Birjinni, the site of a 1988 chemical weapons
attack, showed the presence of trace elements of the
nerve agent GB, also known as Sarin. See PHR-Human
Rights Watch, "Scientific First: Soil Samples Taken
from Bomb Craters in Northern Iraq Reveal Nerve
Gas--Even Four Years Later," April 29, 1993.
11 Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide, 78 UNTS 277, approved by General Assembly
resolution 2670 on December 9, 1948, entered into
force January 12, 1951. The convention defines
genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group, as such." For a general discussion
of the issues, as well as a series of case studies,
see Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History
and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Helen
Fein, ed., Genocide Watch (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992).
12 The findings
of these missions are contained in two Middle East
Watch-Physicians for Human Rights reports:
Unquiet Graves: The Search for the Disappeared in
Iraqi Kurdistan, February 1992, and The Anfal
Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Destruction of
Koreme, January 1993.
13 While the U.S.
Defense Department has helped to expedite the
research of the documents by assigning technical
staff to the Iraqi Kurdistan project, Middle East
Watch and the PUK jointly retain full control over
the archive.
14 Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), p.8.
15 Amn,
whose technical functions are roughly equivalent to
those of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation,
originated in the mid-1960s in a secret unit of the
Ba'ath Party known as al-Jihaz al-Khas, the
"special apparatus." Its code name was Jihaz
Haneen, the "instrument of yearning." Saddam
Hussein personally supervised the restructuring of
the secret police that gave Amn its present
name and functions in 1973. See Samir al-Khalil, op.
cit., pp.5-6, 12-13. (Al-Khalil was the pseudonym
formerly adopted by the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya.)
16 The Iraqi
regime may have selected this sura to
legitimize its war on the Kurds by invoking a battle
between two regular armies, and against a
numerically stronger adversary. Makiya's article,
"The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi campaign to
exterminate the Kurds," (Harper's Magazine,
May 1992, pp.53-61), is an extract from his book,
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the
Arab World (New York: Norton, 1993). Makiya's
visit to northern Iraq also formed the basis for a
report by the British film-maker Gwynne Roberts,
"Saddam's Killing Fields," broadcast on BBC TV in
January 1992 and PBS Frontline, March 31,
1992.
Two other
overviews of the Anfal campaign have been published:
Raymond Bonner, "Always Remember," (The New
Yorker, September 28, 1992, pp.46-51, 54-58 and
63-65); and Judith Miller, "Iraq Accused: A Case of
Genocide," (The New York Times Magazine),
January 3, 1993, pp.12-17, 28, 31-33, 36). Miller's
article deals in some detail with the progress of
Middle East Watch's Iraqi Kurdistan documents
project.
17 A.J. Arberry
(trans.), The Koran Interpreted (New York:
Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1955),
p.198.
18 Indeed, the
July 1970 Provisional Constitution stated that "The
People of Iraq is formed of two principal
nationalities, the Arab nationality and the Kurdish
nationality. This Constitution shall recognize the
national rights of the Kurdish people and the
legitimate rights of all minorities within the unity
of Iraq." The Iraqi government's view of the
autonomy issue is set forth in Settlement of the
Kurdish Problem in Iraq (Baghdad: Ath-Thawra
Publications, c.1974).
19 Again,
interestingly, it was a census that defined the
geographical extent of the 1988 Anfal operation. See
below pp. 84-90. See also the comments of Ali Hassan
al-Majid on the size of the Arab population in
Kurdistan, appendix A, p.353.
20 According to
Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett (op cit p.172), Iraqi
oil revenues, a mere $575 million in 1972, rose to
$1.84 billion in 1973 and $5.7 billion in 1974.
21 The Israeli
scholar Amatzia Baram, in his fascinating book
Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of
Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89 (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1991), pp.61-62, shows how much of this
administrative reform illustrated the party's desire
to relate Iraq's modern history to the glories of
antiquity. Most strikingly, the province of Diwaniya
was renamed Qadissiya--after the decisive battle
between the Arab and Persian armies in A.D. 635. The
Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, it should be noted, was
officially referred to as "Saddam's Qadissiyah."
22 This was, as
McDowall (op cit) puts it, "autonomy by
ultimatum."
23 Speech of
September 24, 1973, in Saddam Husain, On Current
Events in Iraq (London: Longman, 1977),
pp.17-18, cited in al-Khalil,
Republic of Fear.
There is also some evidence that the Ba'ath Party
harbored a general racial hostility against the
Kurds for their kinship with the Persians. According
to al-Khalil, for example (op cit p.17), the Iraqi
government publishing house Dar al-Hurriyya
circulated a pamphlet in 1981 entitled Three Whom
God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and
Flies and written by Saddam Hussein's
father-in-law, Khairallah Tulfah, a former governor
of Baghdad. According to Tulfah, Persians are
"animals God created in the shape of humans"; Jews
are a "mixture of the dirt and leftovers of diverse
peoples"; and flies are a trifling creation "whom we
do not understand God's purpose in creating."
24 A helpful
guide to the scale of these village clearances is
Resool, Destruction of a Nation, op.cit.
Resool's figures, which Middle East Watch regards as
highly reliable, list 369 villages destroyed or
depopulated in the northern part of Iraqi Kurdistan,
and another 154 in Diyala governorate.
25 For example, a
directive from the headquarters of the General
Security Directorate (Amn), dated May 4, 1985
and coded K3/34478, expresses concerns about Kurdish
migration to the city of Kirkuk. The document orders
that no changes of residence in the governorate of
Al-Ta'mim (Kirkuk) will be allowed "until the
Northern Affairs Committee [of the Revolutionary
Command Council and security circles have given
their opinion. This is in order to carry out a
secret investigation of the person and the reasons
for his taking up residence in the above-mentioned
governorate."
26 Middle East
Watch interview, Qushtapa complex, May 3, 1992.
27 Reported in
The Times (London), November 27, 1975, as cited
in Martin van Bruinessen, "The Kurds Between Iran
and Iraq," Middle East Report, July-August
1986, p.27.
28 Middle East
Watch interview, Qushtapa complex, May 4, 1992.
29 Resool (op
cit) gives the following figures: 336 villages
destroyed in Suleimaniyeh (26 in 1977 and 310 in
1978); 120 in Erbil governorate (79 in 1977 and 41
in 1978); and the remainder scattered in the
governorates of Dohuk and Diyala. Additional
testimony gathered by Middle East Watch speaks of
124 villages destroyed around the town of Qala
Dizeh; and of 260-265 villages destroyed in the
entire governorate of Sulemainiyeh.
30 Al-Thawra,
September 18, 1978, cited in Van Bruinessen, op cit
p.24.
31 The Northern
Affairs Committee is the source of numerous Iraqi
government documents that Middle East Watch has
examined. It is also referred to (as the "Higher
Committee for Northern Affairs") by al-Khalil, in
Republic of Fear,
p.24. The Kirkuk-based Special Investigations
Committee, according to a former Iraqi military
intelligence officer interviewed by Middle East
Watch, consisted of four members--one each from the
Ba'ath Party, the General Security Directorate (Amn),
Military Intelligence (Istikhbarat) and the
foreign intelligence organization (Mukhabarat).
32 Other
resettlement camps--Urdugakan in Kurdish, or
Mu'askarat in Arabic, had been built during
the 1975 Arabization campaign to house newly arrived
Sunni Arabs from the south. This was especially true
of areas on the plain north of Dohuk that was
formerly occupied by the Kurdish Sleivani tribe.
33 Idris died of
a heart attack in 1987; Mas'oud Barzani remains the
supreme leader of the KDP.
34 Middle East
Watch interview, Qushtapa, May 4, 1992.
35 There is some
evidence that the Barzani men were kept alive in
captivity for at least a year before eventually
being killed. One Mukhabarat file contains a
sequence of thirty-nine presidential decrees issued
in 1983, numbered 998 to 1036, listing individuals
who have been sentenced to death in "cases of a
special nature." Later correspondence is appended,
and one handwritten comment asks "Are any of the
above-mentioned persons who have been sentenced to
death in our custody?" The reply, also handwritten
and dated April 9, 1985, says "None of the
above-mentioned persons who have been sentenced to
death are in our custody, with the exception of
the Barzani group who were living in our area prior
to their detention." [emphasis added]
According to a
surviving Barzani tribesman interviewed by Middle
East Watch in Salah al-Din on March 18, 1993, some
of the Barzani women and children were again rounded
up by government officials in 1986, trucked to the
Turkish border and ordered to leave the country.
After remaining on the border forsome time, they
returned to Qushtapa and it appears that no further
action was taken against them. A series of proposed
measures against the surviving Barzanis, including
stripping them of their Iraqi citizenship, are
detailed in Istikhbarat correspondence from
January 1986, reporting a ruling by the Northern
Affairs Committee of the Revolutionary Command
Council. NAC letter no.6740, classified
"confidential and personal" and dated January 16,
1986.
36 Al-Iraq,
September 13, 1983.
37 See, for
example, Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State,
pages 28, 231-232.
38 For general
background, see Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett,
pp.187-190, and Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and
State, pp.31-32 and 34-36. The picture was
further complicated by the presence in these areas
of a number of smaller groups, including Iranian
organizations such as the KDP-Iran and Komala, who
were conducting guerrilla war against the regime in
Teheran from Iraqi soil.
39 Kurdish is a
member of the Iranian language group, and has many
dialects in addition to Sorani and Kurmanji. See Van
Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State, pp.21-22,
citing D.N. MacKenzie, "The Origins of Kurdish,"
Transactions of the Philological Society, 1961,
pp.68-86.
40 By now Iraq
had used chemical weapons a number of times against
Iranian troops, but it is probable that the Penjwin
offensive marked their first use on Iraqi soil. See
Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The
Lessons of Modern War, Volume II: The Iran-Iraq War
(London and Boulder: Mansell-Westview, 1990), p.514,
and generally pp.506-518.
41 Middle East
Watch interview with Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin,
Washington, D.C., May 2, 1993.
42 Marr, op cit,
p.307.
43 The epithet is
in such common everyday use that it has lost much of
its pejorative force in the process. In the
Kurmanji-speaking areas of the north, the Kurdish
paramilitaries are also referred to as chatta--brigands
or bandits.
44 One former
mustashar described a 1987 conversation with the
head of Amn in Suleimaniyeh, a colonel by the
name of Khalaf. "He told me that I must carry a gun
for the government. He pressured me to join. He told
me, 'You did not participate in the [Iran-Iraq] war;
you must now become a mustashar.' He then
told me, 'If you don't join, your identification
card may be revoked.'" The later implications of
this threat turned out to be very grave, since
during Anfal the correct identification card could
be a matter of life or death. Middle East Watch
interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992.
45 In general,
Islamic law does not apply in Iraq, a secular
state--although some elements of Islamic law have
been incorporated into areas such as family law.
However, like the Anfal operation itself, this was
an entirely characteristic attempt by the Ba'ath
regime to legitimize its campaigns by wrapping them
in the language of religion.
46 There are
obvious parallels, for example, with Guatemala and
Peru. See Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in
Guatemala,
(August 1986) and Peru
Under Fire: Human Rights Since the Return of
Democracy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992).
47 According to a
dossier of destroyed villages compiled by the
Kurdistan Reconstruction and Development Society
(KURDS), Upper and Lower Besifki were destroyed in
1987 and Dergijneek in 1988. Both were in the
nahya of Al-Doski.
48 Some villages
had developed relatively sophisticated water-supply
and irrigation systems, channeling rivers to their
homes through mud-brick covered trenches called
karez.
49 Middle East
Watch interview with Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin,
Washington, D.C., May 2, 1993.
50 The tendency
to describe the regime's opponents with insulting
epithets was very common. One 17-year-old who was
executed by the regime was described in an official
Amn document, ordering the Suleimaniyeh
morgue to dispose of his body, as a
"fire-worshipper"--a derogatory reference to the
ancient Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism.
51 This was
another in the long line of broken promises to the
Kurds, who were certainly not consulted in July 1988
when Teheran accepted the UN ceasefire resolution in
the middle of the Anfal campaign.
52 Middle East
Watch interview with Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin,
Washington D.C., May 2, 1993.
2
Prelude to Anfal
"I will confute those vile geographers
That make a triple region of the world,
Excluding regions which I mean to trace,
And with this pen reduce them to a map,
Calling the provinces, cities, and towns
After my name...
-- Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
(IV, iv)
All of the tendencies that had been implicit in
earlier phases of Iraq's war on the Kurds reached
their culmination in 1987-1988 with the endgame of
the Iran-Iraq War and the campaign known as
al-Anfal. In the captured Iraqi documents that are
now being studied by Middle East Watch, the term
crops up with great frequency: villages are
"purified" in the course of "the Heroic Anfal
Operation"; the reason for the flight of villagers
into neighboring countries is given as "Anfal"; an
"Anfal" oilfield is inaugurated and a special "Anfal
Section" of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party created
in commemoration of the event; one of the government
contractors hired to work on the drainage of Iraq's
southern marshes is the "Anfal Company."1
It is evident from the documents, and from the
supporting testimony of those who survived Anfal,
that the resources of the Iraqi state were deployed
and coordinated on a massive level to assure the
success of the operation.
"Anfal" was the name given to a concerted series of
military offensives, eight in all, conducted in six
distinct geographical areas between late February
and early September, 1988. Overall command of the
operation was in the hands of the Northern Bureau of
the Ba'ath PartyOrganization, based in the city of
Kirkuk and headed, after March 1987, by the
"Struggling Comrade" Ali Hassan al-Majid.2
Kurdish villagers who survived the events of 1988
routinely refer to al-Majid as "Ali Anfal" or "Ali
Chemical."
Al-Majid's appointment was highly significant for a
number of reasons. Until 1987, military policy
against the peshmerga had been set by the
First and Fifth Corps of the Iraqi Army, based in
Kirkuk and Erbil respectively. Now, however, the
Ba'ath Party itself assumed direct charge of all
aspects of policy toward the Kurds. Al-Majid's
command also made the settlement of the Kurdish
problem the concern of Iraq's innermost circle of
power--the close network of family ties centered on
the city of Tikrit and the personal patronage of
President Saddam Hussein.
Saddam's father, whom he never knew, was a member of
Tikrit's al-Majid family, and Ali Hassan al-Majid
was the Iraqi president's cousin.3
Al-Majid, who was born in 1941, had humble origins,
and first made his reputation in 1968--as a mere
sergeant--as the bodyguard to Hammad Shihab
al-Tikriti, commander of the Baghdad army garrison
and one of the ringleaders of the Ba'ath coup in
July of that year. Al-Majid rose quickly in the
Tikrit circle and in 1979 played an important role
in the purge of the party leadership. During the
1983-1985 negotiations between the regime and the
PUK, Saddam Hussein appointed his cousin to head
Amn.
Even by the standards of the Ba'ath security
apparatus, al-Majid had a particular reputation for
brutality. According to the (admittedly subjective)
account of one former mustashar who had
frequent dealings with him, "He is more of a
risk-taker than Saddam Hussein, and he has no
respect for people. It was very difficult to work
with him. He was stupid,and only carrying out Saddam
Hussein's orders. In the past, he used to be a
police sergeant; today he is Minister of Defense.
Saddam Hussein, by contrast, is 'a snake with deadly
poison.' He pretends to be weak, but at any chance
he will use his poison....In tough cases, in which
he needs people without a heart, he calls upon Ali
Hassan al-Majid."4
The main military thrust of Anfal was carried by
regular troops of the the First and Fifth Corps,
backed up by units from other corps as they became
available from the Iranian front.5
The elite Republican Guards took part in the first
phase of Anfal; other units which saw action
included the Special Forces (Quwat al-Khaseh),
commando forces (Maghawir) and Emergency
Forces (Quwat al-Taware')--the Ba'ath
Party-controlled urban counterterrorism squads.
Finally, a wide range of support
activities--entering population centers ahead of
regular army units, burning and looting villages,
tracking down fleeing villagers and organizing their
surrender--were handled by the Kurdish paramilitary
jahsh.
But the logic of Ali Hassan al-Majid's campaign
against the Kurds went far beyond the six-month long
military campaign. From a human-rights perspective,
the machinery of genocide was set in motion by
al-Majid's appointment in March 1987 and its wheels
continued to turn until April 1989. Within weeks of
al-Majid's arrival in Kirkuk, it was apparent that
the Iraqi government had decided to settle its
Kurdish problem onceand for all, and that the
resources of the state would be used in a
coordinated fashion to achieve this goal. A
sustained pattern of decrees, directives and actions
by the security forces leaves no doubt that the
intent of the Iraqi government was to destroy
definitively the armed organizations of the Kurdish
resistance and to eradicate all remaining human
settlements in areas that were disputed or under
peshmerga control--with the exception of those
inhabited by the minority of tribes whose loyalty to
Baghdad was indisputable. If anything stood in the
way of these goals in 1987, it was logistical
shortcomings--above all, the fact that a large
proportion of the troops and materiel that would be
required for Anfal were still tied down on the
Iranian war front.
* * *
It was Iraq that launched the war in 1980, and Iraq
that maintained the initiative for much of the eight
years that the conflict lasted.6
Nonetheless, the Iranians did succeed in putting
Iraq on the defensive on a number of occasions. In
July 1983, Iranian troops had seized the important
border garrison town of Haj Omran, east of the town
of Rawanduz. But the highpoint of the war from
Iran's point of view was its Val Fajr 8 offensive of
February 1986; this included a surprise attack that
seized the marshy Fao peninsula, thereby blocking
Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf.
Fresh from its success in Fao, which inflicted huge
losses on the Iraqi Army (and reinforced the
U.S.
"tilt" toward Baghdad), Iran reopened its second
front in the north, in the rugged mountains of Iraqi
Kurdistan. For more than six years, the Iraqi regime
had ceded de facto control overmuch of the rural
north to the peshmerga; now foreign troops
threatened to occupy more and more border territory,
diverting much-needed forces from the southern front
around Basra. As the October 1986 raid by Iranian
pasdaran suggested to nervous Iraqi officials,
the vital Kirkuk oilfields, almost a hundred miles
from the border, were no longer immune.
There is debate among scholars as to the precise
threat that Iraq faced from Iran at this late stage
of the war. Certainly, Iran's huge Karbala 5
offensive against Basra's Fish Lake in January 1987
marked its final use of the "human wave" tactic of
hurling tens of thousands of troops--most of them
poorly trained basij7--against
fixed enemy targets. The resulting casualty levels
were simply not sustainable, as Teheran now
acknowledged. On February 12, Iranian troops
returned to the Haj Omran area with a small
offensive codenamed Fatah 4--although some believe
that this was less a real attack than a diversionary
action for propaganda purposes.8
But three weeks later, on March 4, a new and more
alarming Iranian assault, this one codenamed Karbala
7, managed to penetrate eight miles into Iraqi
territory east of Rawanduz with a joint military
force which this time included peshmerga of
the KDP and the PUK. The Iraqi regime was infuriated
by these renewed signs of collusion, particularly
since they now involved both rival Kurdish parties.9
On March 13, in a rare interview with a foreign
reporter, Iraqi cabinet minister Hashim Hassan
al-'Aqrawi commented, "The Iranians are trying to
use these people to carry out dirty missions, and
since they know the geography of the area and its
ins and outs, the Iranians use them merely as guides
for the Khomeini Guards andthe Iranian forces." The
Kurds--or at least Talabani's PUK--even began to
talk openly of dismembering the Iraqi state.10
On March 14 or 15, Saddam Hussein presided over a
five-hour meeting of the Armed Forces General
Command. Ali Hassan al-Majid was also reportedly in
attendance. Any outsider's account of what took
place in such a secretive meeting must be highly
speculative, but according to at least two accounts,
the Iraqi president told his senior officers that he
feared a "defeat by attrition."11
On March 18, the Revolutionary Command Council and
the Ba'ath Party's Regional Command jointly decided
to appoint al-Majid, the president's cousin, as
Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the
Ba'ath Party Organization. His predecessors, Sa'adi
Mahdi Saleh and Muhammad Hamza al-Zubeidi, had
allowed the Kurdish problem to fester for too long;
al-Majid would not repeat their mistakes.
In essence, the disagreements among scholars of the
Iran-Iraq War are academic--at least as far as the
Kurds are concerned. Saddam Hussein may indeed have
foreseen a slow defeat as a result of Baghdad's
existing policies; alternatively, he may have seen
Iran's stalled Fish Lake offensive in January as a
turning point in Iraq's favor, and an opportunity to
press home his advantage. Either way, it is apparent
that he decided that exceptional measures were
necessary to settle the Kurdish problem, that
troublesome sideshow of the Iran-Iraq conflict, once
and for all.
Ali Hassan al-Majid's extraordinary new
powers--equivalent in the Autonomous Region to those
of the president himself--came into effect with
decree no. 160 of the Revolutionary Command Council,
dated March 29, 1987. Al-Majid was to "represent the
Regional Command of the Party and the Revolutionary
Command Council in the execution of their policies
for the whole of the Northern Region, including the
Kurdistan Autonomous Region, for the purpose of
protecting security and order, safeguarding
stability, and applying autonomous rule in the
region." The decree went on to explain that,
"Comrade al-Majid's decisions shall be mandatory for
allstate agencies, be they military, civilian and
security." His fiat would apply "particularly in
relation to matters that are the domain of the
National Security Council and the Northern Affairs
Committee." A second order by Saddam Hussein, issued
on April 20, 1987, gave al-Majid the additional
authority to set the budget of the Northern Affairs
Committee.
Al-Majid's "decisions and directives" were to be
obeyed without question by all intelligence
agencies--including military intelligence (Istikhbarat)--and
by all domestic security forces; by the Popular Army
Command (Qiyadat al-Jaysh al-Sha'abi); and by
all military commands in the northern region. Decree
160 and its riders leave no room for doubt: simply
put, Ali Hassan al-Majid was to be the supreme
commander, the overlord, of all aspects of Anfal.
* * *
Almost a year would pass before that campaign began.
But within weeks of al-Majid's appointment, the
logic of Anfal was fully apparent. Its legal
framework was set in place; new standing orders were
issued to the security forces; and a two-month wave
of military attacks, village destruction and forced
relocations was unleashed--a rough draft, as it
were, of the larger campaign ahead. "I gave myself
two years to end the activity of the saboteurs,"
al-Majid later told his aides.12
And with the first warm days of spring and the
melting of the snow in the mountains, al-Majid
embarked on his brutal three-stage process of
"village collectivization"--in other words, the
wholesale destruction of hundreds of Kurdish farming
villages and the relocation of their residents into
mujamma'at.
Even his top military commanders were shocked by the
brutality of what he had in mind. He later confided
to aides:
When we made the decision to destroy and
collectivize the villages and draw a dividing line
between us and the saboteurs, the first one to
express his doubts to me and before the President
was [former Fifth Corps commander] Tali'a al-Durri.
The first one who alarmed me was Tali'a al-Durri. To
this day the impact of Tali'a is evident. He didn't
destroy all the villages that I asked him to at
thattime. And this is the longest-standing member of
the Ba'ath Party. What about the other people then?
How were we to convince them to solve the Kurdish
problem and slaughter the saboteurs?13
The timetable for the three phases of al-Majid's
campaign is clearly spelled out in a number of
official documents, notably including a letter from
the General Staff of the jahsh to the command
of the Fifth Army Corps, dated April 13, 1987. This
appears to be in response to a verbal order from the
Fifth Corps commander concerning "final obligations
in winding up [illegible] procedures for the
termination of sabotage in the Northern Region,
[and] the manner and the priorities of implementing
the evacuation and demolition of security-prohibited
villages." The first phase of the operation would
begin on April 21 and end on May 20; the second
would start immediately on May 21 and continue until
June 20.14
Military and security maps were "redlined," with
clear boundaries drawn to denote areas "prohibited
for security reasons." Amn set up a special
"prohibited villages committee" to oversee the
forbidden areas. Within the zones designated for
phases one and two, the order was clear and
explicit: "All prohibited villages will be
destroyed."15
A former military intelligence (Istikhbarat)
officer who later crossed over to the PUK told
Middle East Watch of a meeting in Kirkuk that
spring, attended by the governors of Erbil, Kirkuk,
Dohuk and Suleimaniyeh, the commanders of the First
and Fifth Army Corps, divisional military commanders
and senior Ba'ath Party officials. Ali Hassan
al-Majid, speaking in characteristically irascible
tones, gave orders that "no house was to be left
standing" in the Kurdish villages on the Erbil
plain. Only Arab villages would be spared.16
At a later meeting in
Erbil,the
witness heard al-Majid repeat these orders, and back
them up with a personal threat: "I will come and
observe," he said, "and if I find any house intact,
I will hold the section commander responsible."
After receiving these orders, the former
Istikhbarat officer said, "I got two IFAs [East
German-built military trucks] full of explosives
from a warehouse in Erbil. I commandeered 200
bulldozers from civilians of Erbil--by force, with
no payment. We started destroying mud villages with
bulldozers, and dynamiting the cement structures. We
used military engineers for this." The troops went
in at dawn; wells were filled in and electricity
supplies torn out, leaving only the poles standing.
After the engineering work was completed,
Istikhbarat would inspect the affected villages
by helicopter. If any structure was found to be
still standing, the sectional commander would be
ordered to return and finish the job, and would risk
disciplinary action. It was an extraordinarily
thorough enterprise, and the evidence is visible all
over Iraqi Kurdistan, with many villages not so much
demolished as pulverized.
No farming of any sort was to continue in the
destroyed areas. Government aircraft would conduct
regular overflights to detect any unauthorized
farming, and local security committees would be held
responsible for any violations. Stringent
restrictions were imposed on all grain sales in the
Kurdish areas, as well as on agricultural trade
across governorate boundaries.
Al-Majid also reportedly issued specific rules of
engagement at the Erbil meeting. The army should
only open fire in cases of active resistance, he
ordered. But if resistance were encountered, the
entire village population was to be killed in
reprisal. In the event, there was no resistance,
since the villages selected for the 1987 clearances
were on or near the main roads and under government
control. Only during Phase III of the campaign would
the troops venture into peshmerga-held
territory.
* * *
The Chemical Threshold
Even before the first stage of the village
clearances got underway, the Iraqi regime had
crossed a new barrier in its war against the Kurds.
Throughout the early weeks of al-Majid's rule, the
peshmerga--and in particular the PUK--kept up
a steady rhythm of military actions. In earlyApril
the PUK launched its most ambitious drive to date in
the Jafati Valley, which runs southeast from Dukan
Lake. The valley was home to the PUK's national
headquarters, and thousands of peshmerga
congregated there for the assault. In a matter of
hours they had overrun dozens of small military
posts and taken hundreds of prisoners.
The government's response was not long in coming.
"Our leadership received information that the Iraqis
were going to use chemical weapons," said a PUK
peshmerga who fought in this campaign:
They issued instructions on what to do in case of a
chemical attack. We were instructed to put wet
cloths on our faces, to light fires, or to go to
places located above the point of impact. In the
beginning, the government used chemical artillery
shells. This was in the Jafati and Shahrbazar
valleys [on April 15], one or two nights after our
victory. We didn't realize they were chemicals. The
sound was not as loud as the ordinary shelling, and
we smelled rotten apples and garlic.... Uncounted
numbers of shells fell on us, but they had little
effect.17
This was not the case the following day, however, in
the villages of Balisan and Sheikh Wasan. These two
settlements lie scarcely a mile and a half apart, in
a steep-sided valley south of the town of Rawanduz.
The Balisan valley was home to the PUK's third
malband, or regional command.18
Yet few peshmerga were present on the
afternoon of April 16, since most had been taking
part in the military action in the Jafativalley, on
the far side of
Dukan
Lake. Instead, their families would be made to
suffer the repercussions.
Balisan itself was a sizeable village, which until
April 1987 had some 250 households (about 1,750
people)19
of the Khoshnaw tribe, as well as four mosques, a
primary school and an intermediate school. As the
crow flies, it lay some twelve miles east of the
town of Shaqlawa; Sheikh Wasan, a smaller settlement
of about 150 houses, lay nestled in the hills a
little way to the northeast. The valley was
long-time peshmerga country; the Barzani
movement had controlled it from 1961-74, and the
PUK, through its third malband, since the
outbreak of the war with Iran in 1980. Since about
1983, the Balisan Valley had been a "prohibited
area," with government checkpoints attempting with
only partial success to prevent the entry of
foodstuffs and supplies. Food rations had been
suspended, and government teachers withdrawn from
the schools. Iraqi aircraft made frequent harassment
attacks, to which the villagers responded by hiding
away in deep, dark caves in the surrounding
mountains. But ground troops had never managed to
penetrate the valley.
In the drizzly late afternoon of April 16, the
villagers had returned home from the fields and were
preparing dinner when they heard the drone of
aircraft approaching. Some stayed put in their
houses; others made it as far as their air-raid
shelters before the planes, a dozen of them, came in
sight, wheeling low over the two villages to unload
their bombs. There were a number of muffled
explosions.
Until this moment no government had ever used
chemical weapons against its own civilian
population. But the plummeting enlistment rate among
Iranian volunteers over the previous year, when
poison gas was widely used on the battlefield, was
vivid testimony to the Iraqi government of the power
of this forbidden weapon to instil terror. More
gruesome yet was the decision to record the event on
videotape.
The Iraqi regime had long conducted its
record-keeping in meticulous fashion. (Those in
neighboring countries say, only half-jokingly, that
the Iraqis are the "Prussians of the
Middle East.")20
From the grandest decree to the most trivial matter,
all the business of the security forces was recorded
in letters and telegrams, dated, numbered and
rubber-stamped on receipt. Even when an original
command carried a high security classification,
abundant numbers of handwritten or typed copies were
later prepared, to be handed down the chain of
command and filed, the writers apparently confident
that prying eyes would never see these secrets. In
the mid-1980s, the Iraqi security services developed
a fascination for video technology as a valuable new
form of record-keeping. The actions of the security
forces were now to be routinely documented on tape:
village clearances, executions of captured
peshmerga, even chemical weapons attacks on
civilians.
The official videotape of the Balisan Valley
bombing, reportedly made by a member of the jahsh,
shows towering columns and broad, drifting clouds of
white, gray and pinkish smoke. A cool evening breeze
was blowing off the mountains, and it brought
strange smells--pleasant ones at first, suggestive
of roses and flowers, or, to others, apples and
garlic. Other witnesses still say there was the less
attractive odor of insecticide. But then, said one
elderly woman from Balisan, "It was all dark,
covered with darkness, we could not see anything,
and were not able to see each other. It was like
fog. And then everyone became blind." Some vomited.
Faces turned black; people experienced painful
swellings under the arms, and women under their
breasts. Later, a yellow watery discharge would ooze
from the eyes and nose. Many of those who survived
suffered severe vision disturbances, or total
blindness, for up to a month. In Sheikh Wasan,
survivors watched as a woman staggered around
blindly, clutching her dead child, and not realizing
it was dead. Some villagers ran into the mountains
and died there. Others, who had been closer to the
place of impact of the bombs, died where they stood.21
One witness, a peshmerga, told MiddleEast
Watch that a second attack followed an hour later,
this one conducted by a fleet of helicopters.22
The few fighters who had been at home when the raid
occurred were taken by the PUK for treatment in
Iran,
fearing that they would not survive a visit to an
Iraqi hospital. (The presence of peshmerga in
the village is, one should add, quite irrelevant
from a legal point of view. By their very nature,
chemical weapons make no distinction between
civilian and military targets, and their use is
outlawed under any circumstances.)23
The following morning, ground troops and jahsh
entered Balisan, looted the villagers' deserted
homes and razed them to the ground. The same day, or
perhaps a day later--having presumably left
sufficient time for the gas to dissipate--army
engineers dynamited and bulldozed Sheikh Wasan. But
the surviving inhabitants had already fled during
the night of the attack. Some made their way to the
city of Suleimaniyeh, and a few to Shaqlawa. But
most headed southeast, to the town of Raniya, where
there was a hospital. They were helped on their way
by people from neighboring villages, some of
which--including Barukawa, Beiro, Kaniberd and
Tutma--had also suffered from the effects of the
windborne gas.
The people of Beiro sent tractor-drawn carts to
Sheikh Wasan, and ten of these vehicles, each
carrying fifty or sixty people, left for Raniya. At
the complex of Seruchawa, just outside the town, the
tractors stopped to bury the bodies of fifty people
who were already dead. The refugees who reached
Raniya spent one night there. Local doctors washed
their wounds and gave them eye-drops, but these did
nothing to ease the effects of the gas on their
vision. The refugees spent a restless night, and the
hospital at Raniya was full of the sound of weeping.
The next morning, agents from Amn --and some
witnesses say also from military intelligence (Istikhbarat)--
arrived at the hospital. They ordered everyone out
of bed and into a number of waiting Nissan Coasters
that were parked outside.24
These would take them to the city of Erbil for
medical care, the villagers were told; however, they
were warned later that day that they would only be
given treatment if they told the doctors that their
injuries were the result of an attack by Iranian
airplanes.25
At about 9:00 that morning, exhausted and bedraggled
people in Kurdish dress began to stream into the
emergency room of the Republic Hospital in Erbil.
One witness counted four packed coasters, each with
twenty-one seats, and seven other vehicles--both
cars and pickup trucks. Others placed the number of
arrivals at perhaps 200, of all ages, men, women and
children. They were all unarmed civilians. Four were
dead on arrival. The survivors arriving from Ranya
told the doctors that they had been attacked with
chemical weapons. Despite their burns, their
blindness and other, more superficial injuries,
those who had survived the journey from the Balisan
Valley were generally still able to walk, although
some were unconscious.
Even with the assistance of doctors who rushed
across from the nearby Maternity and Pediatric
Hospital, the facilities were not sufficient to deal
with such a large-scale emergency. There were far
from enough beds to deal with so many victims; many
of the patients were laid on the floors, and the
occupants of three of the four coasters were obliged
to wait in the parking lot while the preliminary
triage was done and the first treatment carried out.
On examination, the doctors found that the victims'
eyes were dried out and glued shut. Having some
rudimentary notion of how to treat chemical victims,
they applied eye drops, washed their burns and
administered injections of atropine, a powerful
antidote to nerve agents.
The doctors had been at work on their patients for
about an hour when the head of the local branch
office of Amn arrived, an officer by the name
of Hassan Naduri. The staff of the Erbil Republic
Hospital, and especially the municipal morgue which
was attached to it, had a great deal of prior and
subsequent experience of Amn. The city housed
not only themunicipal office of the secret police
agency, but also Amn's headquarters for the
Erbil governorate and its operational command for
the entire "autonomous region" of Iraqi Kurdistan.
For several years the Republic Hospital morgue had
received a steady flow of corpses from both Amn
offices. Hospital records examined by Middle East
Watch give details of approximately 500 bodies
received from Amn between 1968-1987--although
there is no reason to suppose that this was more
than a very incomplete record.
These deaths were recorded in the form of letters of
transmittal from Amn, and the agency's
bureaucracy appears to have been scrupulously
efficient. Two copies of each letter of transmittal
were sent to the morgue; the doctor on duty was
required to sign one of these and then return it to
Amn. Hospital staff also kept a second,
secret ledger of their own, entitled "Record Book of
Armed Dead People from
Erbil."
This covered a three-year period beginning in June
1987; the final entry was dated June 25, 1990. The
entries were cross-referenced to the number of the
relevant Amn transmittal letter. In
interviews with Middle East Watch, hospital staff
also estimated that they made out some 300 death
certificates, on orders from Amn, for named
individuals whose bodies were never made available
to them. This practice began in 1987.
There appears to have been no single standard
procedure: Corpses arrived at the Erbil morgue in a
number of different ways. Sometimes the staff would
receive a telephone call from Amn, often in
the middle of the night, telling them that they
should prepare to receive the body or bodies of
"executed saboteurs" and ordering them to issue
death certificates. Individual hospital porters were
hand-picked for the task of handling the bodies,
presumably because they enjoyed the trust of the
Amn agents. On some occasions the corpses
arrived in pickup trucks or station wagons, covered
with blankets. At other times, hospital ambulances
would be summoned to collect the bodies from the
Amn headquarters in Einkawa, a Christian suburb
of
Erbil,
or from a nearby military base. Although some showed
signs of having been beaten to death, most appeared
to have been executed by firing squads; they had
multiple gunshot wounds, sometimes as many as
thirty, and had their hands and upper arms bound
behind them,as if they had been tied standing to a
post.26
The eyes were blindfolded with articles of clothing
such as a Kurdish cummerbund or headscarf. The
bodies had been stripped of their wristwatches, IDs
and other personal possessions.
However the bodies arrived, the entire operation was
shrouded in secrecy, and morgue staff were ordered
(under threat of death) neither to contact the
relatives of the deceased nor to divulge their names
to anyone else in the hospital. Doctors on duty in
the morgue were not allowed to touch or examine the
bodies; their duty was merely to furnish death
certificates. If the cadavers arrived during
daylight hours, the entire area around the morgue
would be cordoned off by Amn guards and other
hospital personnel warned away from the area. Amn
personnel would even take charge of the morgue's
freezer facilities until municipal employees arrived
to take the corpses away for secret burial in the
paupers' section of the
Erbil
cemetery. If an especially large number of corpses
was involved, a bulldozer would be commandeered from
a local private contractor to dig a mass grave. The
morgue staff were forbidden to wash the bodies or
otherwise prepare them for burial facing Mecca, as
Islamic ritual demands. "Dogs have no relation to
Islam," an Amn officer told one employee.27
When Hassan Naduri arrived at the Republic Hospital
on the morning of April 17, 1987, every doctor in
the hospital was busy dealing with the emergency.
The officer was accompanied by two other Amn
agents; a large number of guards also remained
outside in the hospital courtyard. According to some
witnesses, Hassan Naduri was accompanied by Ibrahim
Zangana, the governor of Erbil, and by a local
Ba'ath Partyofficial known only by his first name,
Abd-al-Mon'em. The Amn officers questioned
the hospital guards, demanding to know where the new
patients were from and who the doctors were who were
treating them. They then repeated these questions to
the medical personnel, and demanded to know what
treatment was being given. With these questions
answered, Capt. Naduri telephoned Amn
headquarters for instructions. After hanging up, he
ordered that all treatment cease immediately. He
told the doctors to remove the dressings from their
patients' wounds. The doctors asked why. The captain
responded that he had received orders from his
superiors to transfer all the patients to the city's
Military
Hospital. At first, the hospital staff demurred, but
the three Amn agents drew their pistols and
ordered them to stop what they were doing at once.
Otherwise they would be taken off to Amn
headquarters themselves.
After a second phone call, this time ostensibly to
the Military Hospital, a number of ambulances or
trucks arrived and took the patients away, together
with those who had remained, for a full hour now, in
the three parked coasters. Later that day, the
doctors telephoned the Military Hospital to check on
the condition of their patients. But they had never
arrived there, and the doctors never saw any of the
survivors of the Balisan Valley chemical attack
again. They heard later that loaded military
ambulances had been seen driving off in the
direction of Makhmour, to the southwest of Erbil.
In fact, a handful of survivors told Middle East
Watch, the Balisan Valley victims were taken to a
former police station that was now an Amn
detention center, a stark white cement building in
the Arab quarter of the city, near the Baiz casino.
There was a chaotic scene on arrival, as Amn
agents attempted to sort out the detainees by age
and sex, and in the confusion several people managed
to escape. At least one woman fled leaving her
children behind. Those who remained were thrown into
locked cells, guarded by uniformed agents--some
dressed all in green and others all in blue. Here
they were held for several days with neither food,
blankets nor medical attention.
Hamoud Sa'id Ahmad is an employee of the municipal
morgue attached to Erbil's Republic Hospital, a
dignified middle-aged man who has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca. Over the next few days, he was
summoned on a number of occasions to the Amn
jail in the city's Teirawa quarter and ordered to
pick up bodies and prepare them for burial. Over a
three-day period he counted sixty-four bodies.
Arriving to collect them, he saw other prisoners
wandering around in the prison courtyard building.
Some hada clear fluid oozing from their mouths;
others had dark, burn-like marks on their bodies,
especially on the throat and hands. He saw men,
women and children in detention, including several
nursing babies in their mothers' arms. The bodies,
kept in a separate locked cell, bore similar marks.
None showed any signs of gunshot wounds. Most of the
dead appeared to be children and elderly people. An
Amn official told Ahmad that "they are
saboteurs, all saboteurs we attacked with chemical
weapons." An ambulance driver told Ahmad that he
recognized one of the dead as a Republic Hospital
employee from Sheikh Wasan.
Family members waiting outside the jail for news
said that the detainees were being held as hostages,
to compel their peshmerga relatives to
surrender. On the last of his three visits, Ahmad
saw two large buses pull up outside the prison,
their windows sealed with cloths. Later in the day,
a female prisoner managed to whisper to him, "Do you
know what the buses were doing here? They took all
the men away, to the south, like the Barzanis [in
1983]." The men were never seen alive again.28
After the mass disappearance of the men, the
surviving women and children were taken out during
the night and driven off in the direction of
Khalifan, three hours to the northeast of Erbil. At
a place called Alana, they were dumped in an open
plain, on the banks of a river, and left to fend for
themselves. They were reunited here with the Balisan
Valley villagers who had fled to Suleimaniyeh. These
people reported that they had been detained there in
a converted hospital that was guarded by Amn
agents and off limits to civilians. (There is no
independent account of what happened to their
menfolk, some of whom also disappeared.)
At Alana, the mother who had escaped from the Amn
jail in Erbil was reunited with her children. She
recognized families from the villages of Kaniberd
and Tutma, as well as from Sheikh Wasan and Balisan,
who told her that many children had died in this
place of hunger, thirst and exposure. (With the
exception of a few villages, the entire Balisan
Valley had been evacuated in terror: Ironically, as
we shall see, their flight mayhave saved thousands
of lives during the following year's Anfal
campaign.) Eventually, sympathetic Kurdish residents
of the town of Khalifan took some of the survivors
into their homes--"in their arms and on their
backs"--and cared for them until they regained their
health and strength. Other survivors ended up in the
squalid government complex of Seruchawa, where so
many of their fellow villagers had fled on the night
of the chemical attack. When the elderly mullah
of Balisan went to Ba'ath Party officials at
Seruchawa to plead for an improvement in conditions
in the complex, he was told contemptuously, "You're
not human beings."29
* * *
On the basis of interviews with four survivors, and
with a number of medical and morgue personnel in
Erbil, it is possible to give a rough estimate of
the numbers who died as a result of the chemical
bombing of Balisan, Sheikh Wasan and neighboring
villages.
·
Twenty-four deaths in Balisan, as a direct result of
exposure to chemical weapons; these people were
buried in a mass grave in the village;
·
103 deaths in Sheikh Wasan, including about fifty
buried in a mass grave in the complex of Seruchawa.
The dead included thirty-three children aged under
four, another twenty-eight aged 5-14, and nine
elderly people, aged 60-85;30
·
Eight or nine deaths in the hospital at Raniya;
·
Four dead on arrival at the Erbil Emergency
Hospital;
·
Between sixty-four and 142 deaths in the Amn
detention center in Erbil, of untreated injuries
sustained in the chemical bombing, aggravated by
starvation and neglect. These included two elderly
womennamed Selma Mustafa Hamid and Adila Shinko, and
a nine-year old girl, Howsat Abdullah Khidr;
·
Two busloads of adult men and teenage boys,
disappeared from the Amn detention center in
Erbil and presumed by Middle East Watch to have been
executed later. A number of witnesses place the
number at between seventy and seventy-six:
twenty-two men from Balisan, fifty from Sheikh Wasan
and four from other nearby villages. Among these
were Muhammad Ibrahim Khidr, aged eighteen, and
Mohsen Ibrahim Khidr, aged twelve, the two youngest
sons of the mullah of Balisan;
·
"Many children" dumped on the barren plain near
Khalifan.
Allowing for some overlap, Middle East Watch
calculates that at least 225, and perhaps as many as
400, civilians from the Balisan Valley died as a
direct or indirect result of the Iraqi air force's
chemical attack on their villages on April 16, 1987.
The Sheikh Wasan and Balisan attacks are significant
for a number of reasons. First, they are the
earliest fully documented account of chemical
attacks on civilians by the Iraqi regime. Second,
they offer concrete evidence of the security forces'
intent, on the orders of higher authority, to
disappear and murder large numbers of civilian
non-combatants from areas of conflict in Iraqi
Kurdistan. In this sense, like the mass abduction of
the Barzani men in 1983, the Balisan Valley
disappearances directly prefigure Anfal--although
with the crucial difference that women and children
were directly targeted. Similarly, the treatment of
those who survived the actual bombing, in particular
their separation by age and sex, their illegal
confinement without food or medical care, and the
dumping of women and children in barren areas far
from their homes, foreshadowed many of the
techniques that were employed on a much vaster scale
during the 1988 campaign. The Balisan Valley episode
also illustrates the central role that would be
played in the extermination campaign by the General
Security Directorate--Amn. The events at
Erbil's Republic Hospital additionally constitute
the gravest possible violation of medical
neutrality.
* * *
The regime was far from finished with these
rebellious valleys, however. Amidst the thousands of
pages of secret Iraqi intelligence reports on
air-raids and village burnings, Middle East Watch
researchers discovered one that contained an
intriguing detail. It is a brief report from Amn
Erbil, dated June 11, 1987, on a recent airstrike on
five villages in the Malakan Valley, a few miles to
the east of Balisan and Sheikh Wasan. In the course
of the attack, it noted, "thirty persons lost their
eyesight." Two of the victims were named. Here was
an unmistakable fingerprint, for there is only one
kind of weapon that characteristically causes
blindness, and that is poison gas.31
During a subsequent field-trip to Iraqi Kurdistan,
it proved possible to interview one of the blinded
survivors--one of many occasions on which a precise
match could be made between documentary and
testimonial evidence.
The man's name was Kamal, and he was living in
Choman, a destroyed town on the road from Rawanduz
to
Iran.32
An active peshmerga, Kamal had already
experienced chemical warfare in the Jafati Valley,
and his account of the April 15 attack there is
included above at pp.59-61. Hearing the news of the
devastating attack on the Balisan Valley the next
day, he rushed back to his family in the nearby
village of Upper Bileh. He found that they had taken
refuge in some caves in the mountains. It was
bitterly cold, and Kamal persuaded them to return
cautiously to their homes.
At 6:00 a.m on May 27, his wife woke him to warn him
that the village was under attack.
"We knew it was chemicals because the sound [of the
explosions] was not loud. There were many bombs. I
told my family that it wasn't a chemical attack
because I didn't want to scare them, but they knew
what it was. So we began burning the branches we had
stored for animal feed, and they made a very strong
fire. We also soakedcloths and headscarves at the
spring. My aged father was there. The attack was so
intense that we were unable to leave the village;
that was why we lit the fires. There was a separate
spring for the women, and I told everyone, men and
women, to jump into the water. The attack lasted
until 10:00 a.m., and I sent my brother to the
malband to get medical help. By sunset the
situation was getting worse. Several people had gone
blind.
After sunset we crossed the stream and moved to a
rocky area outside the village. Our situation was
very bad. We had all been affected by the chemicals.
We had trouble seeing and we were short of breath.
We had nosebleeds and fainting spells. We sent
someone to the surrounding villages to fetch water,
and I offered to pay them whatever they asked for.
But the villagers were afraid to come, thinking that
the chemicals were contagious. But people from
Kandour village, who are very brave people, came to
bring us milk.33
In the meantime, my brother and a companion had
reached the malband, but on the way back they
collapsed because they had lost their sight. People
from other villages sent mules to bring them back.
They were carrying some medicine and eyedrops
provided by the malband. When morning came,
no one had died, but things were very bad. The third
malband sent us a doctor and money to buy
horses that could carry us to Iran. The women with
us were in a terrible state, and we had to
spoon-feed them. The small children were hardly
breathing. We went to Malakan, where it was colder.
We thought it would be better because of the fresh
air. Then we reached the Sewaka area. There were
people there who raised animals and they took pity
on us. They wept a lot and gave us food. Next
morning we left for Warta. We had to cover our faces
because the bright light hurt us like needles stuck
into our eyes."34
On the third night, the caravan of survivors reached
the lower slopes of Qandil Mountain, a towering peak
of almost 12,000 feet on the Iranian border south of
Haj Omran. Once they reached Iran, they were given
medical care. All of them lived through the ordeal
but one--Kamal's eighteen-month old nephew.
* * *
The Spring 1987 Campaign:
Village Destruction and Resettlement
Five days after the Balisan Valley chemical attack,
the infantry troops and bulldozers went to work on
hundreds of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan. According
to Resool's authoritative survey, the army
obliterated at least 703 Kurdish villages from the
map during the campaigns of 1987. Of these, 219 were
in the Erbil area; 122 in the hilly plain known as
Germian, to the southeast of Kirkuk; and 320 in
various districts of the governorate of
Suleimaniyeh. Badinan, too was hit, although less
severely, with the Kurdistan Reconstruction and
Development Society (KURDS), a local relief agency,
listing fifty villages that were destroyed in Dohuk
governorate. Most of the villages destroyed during
Ali Hassan al-Majid's "first and second phases" lay
along the main roads and were under government
control. Their removal had the effect of physically
severing the peshmerga-controlled rural areas
from the rest of the country.
For destruction on this scale, the Iraqi state had
to deploy vast resources. Yet there were important
differences between the village clearances of spring
1987 and the Anfal campaign of the following year.
The most important concerned the treatment of
residents of the villages destroyed by the army. The
1987 campaign offered them clear, if unpalatable
alternatives; Anfal did not.
The inhabitants of Narin, for example, a village in
the nahya of Qara Tapa in the southern part
of Germian, were relocated in 1987 to theRamadi
area, in central Iraq.32
The villagers of nearby Zerdow were warned that
their turn was next. They left their homes and moved
in with relatives in nearby towns or villages. Some
were resettled in the newly opened complex of
Benaslawa, six miles from Erbil on the site of an
old Kurdish village. They were not punished
otherwise, although Zerdow itself was razed to the
ground with bulldozers a few days later. One family
interviewed by Middle East Watch lost its livestock,
furniture and food stores in the destruction of
Zerdow, but was paid compensation of 1,000 dinars
($3,000 at the then-official exchange rate). Later,
the family was able to build a house in Benaslawa
with a 4,500 dinar loan from the state Real Estate
Bank.
This was a typical pattern. The villagers were not
physically harmed; some token compensation was paid,
although it might be withheld if a family refused to
accept relocation in the towns or complexes; there
was some advance notice of the regime's intent to
destroy the village (even if this was not always
respected in practice). The villagers of Qishlagh
Kon, for example, in the Germian nahya of
Qader Karam, were told by soldiers that they had
fifteen days to evacuate; in fact, the army moved in
and razed their homes well before the expiry of this
deadline. According to one man from this village,
army troops swept through the area populated by the
Kurdish Zangana tribe in April 1987, bulldozing and
dynamiting between seventy and one hundred villages
along the main road, spread out over three adjacent
nahyas--Qader Karam, Qara Hassan and Qara
Hanjir.33
Many of the villagers were offered an explicit
choice by the soldiers or jahsh. "Go to the
saboteurs or join the government," was the message
delivered to one Qader Karam village of the Jabari
tribe. No neutrality was to be allowed, and a
person's physical location would henceforth be taken
as proof of their political affiliation. Coming over
to the government's side was spoken of as "returning
to the national ranks," a phrase that appears in
official documents with increasing frequency from
early 1987 onward. Previous political loyalties were
irrelevant to this new drawing of battle lines, and
so was the size of the settlement. Several nahyaswere
cleared of their population and/or destroyed during
the spring 1987 campaign, including Naujul,
Qaradagh, Qara Hanjir, Koks and Sengaw. Shwan
followed in September. In the northernmost
governorate of Dohuk, the nahya of Kani Masi
was evacuated and destroyed, apparently in
retaliation for a six-day takeover by KDP forces.
Some of these nahyas were towns of several
thousand people.
Even a strong jahsh presence offered no
protection, if the town lay within a designated area
of army operations. As Ali Hassan al-Majid later
told a meeting of senior Ba'ath Party officials, "I
told the mustashars that the jahsh
might say that they liked their villages and would
not leave. I said I cannot let your villages stay
because I will attack them with chemical weapons.
And then you and your family will die."34
For all the scale of the destruction, it is apparent
from one batch of official Iraqi files, found in the
Amn offices in Erbil and Shaqlawa, that the
regime was far from satisfied with the "first stage"
of its village clearance program. A watchful, almost
apprehensive tone creeps into many government
documents from this period. Among the questions put
to people surrendering to the authorities from
peshmerga-controlled areas was one that asked,
"How are the people affected economically and
psychologically by the elimination of the villages
and other policies?"35
On April 20, Amn Erbil warns its branches
that the new campaign of village destruction may
provoke demonstrations to mark the 14th anniversary
of the bombing of Qala Dizeh on the 24th. On the
same day the Erbil Security Committee, presided over
by Governor Ibrahim Zangana, warns that "saboteurs"
may attack government installations as a reprisal
against the deportation of villagers from the
"prohibited areas" (manateq al-mahdoureh). On
April 22, Governor Zangana predicts that the PUK may
even try to bring in the International Committee of
the Red Cross to observe the clearances. Three days
later, on April 25, Amn Erbil issues an alert
warning of peshmerga reprisal raids on Arab
villages; it also complains that government forces
destroying the village of Freez have come under
attack from "saboteurs" and that air-cover has
failed to materialize as requested. By May 20, the
director of Amn Shaqlawa iscomplaining to
Erbil that the "saboteurs" have been able to exploit
the unpopularity of the campaign; in particular he
expresses irritation that no complexes have been
made ready for the villagers who are to be
relocated, and that many of them have been obliged
to remain in the open air, exposed to the elements.36
* * *
Early Uses of al-Majid's Special Powers
In these early months of Ali Hassan al-Majid's rule,
the Ba'ath Party tightened the noose around the
population of rural Kurdistan through a series of
sweeping decrees and administrative orders.37
·
On April 6, all "saboteurs" lost their property
rights. "By the authority vested in us by the
Revolutionary Command Council's decree number 160 of
March 29, 1987," writes al-Majid himself, "we have
decided to authorize the chairmen of the security
committees [Ru'asa' al-Lijan al-Amniyeh] in
the northern governorates to confiscate the real and
personal property of the saboteurs, provided that
their properties are liquidated within one month of
the date of issuance of the confiscation decree."38
·
On April 10, al-Majid suspended the legal rights of
the residents of villages prohibited for security
reasons. "His Excellency has given instructions not
to hear cases brought by the population of
security-prohibited villages," writes deputy
secretary Radhi Hassan Salman of the Northern Bureau
Command, "and likewise those brought by the
saboteurs, no matter what their character, as well
as to freeze all claims submitted previously."39
·
On May 1, al-Majid began to order the execution of
first-degree relatives of "saboteurs." It had long
been the policy of the regime to detain and punish
the families of active Kurdish peshmerga,
often by destroying their homes. But al-Majid now
ordered their physical elimination, at least on an
occasional exemplary basis. These orders evidently
remained in force throughout the Anfal campaign and
for some time afterwards. For example, a handwritten
note dated November 20, 1989, signed "Security
Chief, Interrogating Officer," and originating in
Amn headquarters in the city of Suleimaniyeh,
gives details of a case in which an Iraqi citizen
has petitioned the authorities for news about his
disappeared parents and brother.
The security chief's letter informs the unnamed
recipient (who is addressed only as "Your
Excellency,") that the missing parents, Qoron Ahmad
and his wife Na'ima Abd-al-Rahman, were "liquidated"
in Baghdad on May 19, 1987. Their son, Hushyar
Ahmad, "a member of the group of Iranian saboteurs,"
was executed by hanging on July 12, 1987 by order of
the Revolutionary Court (mahkamat al-thawrah).
What is significant here is the reason for the
killing of the man's parents. It was ordered, the
document explains, "in compliance with the order
from the StrugglingComrade Ali Hassan al-Majid,
member of the Regional Command [of the Ba'ath Party]
that was relayed to us by letter no. 106309 of the
Security Directorate of the Autonomous Region,
marked 'Secret and to be Opened Personally,' and
dated May 1, 1987, regarding the liquidation of
first-degree relatives of criminals."
Another letter on Amn Suleimaniyeh
letterhead, numbered S-T: 21308, dated September 16,
1989 and classified "Top Secret," describes the
public execution by firing squad of five "criminals"
with a "connection to the internal organizations of
the agents of Iran." The execution had been carried
out on October 24, 1987 in the presence of
intelligence and Ba'ath Party officials.40
Some time afterwards, "it was decided that three
families of the criminals...should be executed in a
discreet manner." The authority for their execution
was given by letter number 6806, dated December 12,
1987, from the Northern Bureau Command.
·
Wounded civilians could now also be executed,
according to a hand-written communication (no. 3324)
of May 14 from the Security Director of the city of
Halabja, in southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan, to Amn
Suleimaniyeh. This note gives details of an
operation against the city's Kani Ashqan
neighborhood, and makes reference to a cable (no.
945), dated the previous day, from the Command of
the Fifth Army Corps. "It was by order of the
Commander of the First Army Corps, on the
recommendation of Comrade Ali Hassan al-Majid, to
execute the wounded civilians after confirming their
hostility to the authorities with the Party
Organization, the Security andPolice Departments and
the Intelligence Center, and to utilize backhoes and
bulldozers to raze the neighborhood of Kani Ashqan."41
* * *
Orders for Mass Killing
The full extent of the Iraqi regime's intentions,
however, are spelled out with brutal clarity in two
directives issued by al-Majid's office in June 1987.
Both documents lay out, in the most explicit detail,
a prohibition on all human life in designated areas
of the Kurdish countryside, covering more than 1,000
villages, to be applied through a shoot-to-kill
order for which no subsequent higher authorization
is required.
The first is a personal directive, numbered 28/3650,
signed by Ali Hassan al-Majid himself and dated June
3, 1987. Addressed to a number of civilian and
military agencies, including the Commanders of the
First, Second and Fifth Army Corps, the Security
Directorate (Amn) of the Autonomous Region,
the Istikhbarat and Mukhabarat, it
states the following:
1. It is totally prohibited for any foodstuffs or
persons or machinery to reach the villages that have
been prohibited for security reasons that are
included in the second stage of collecting the
villages. Anyone who so desires is permitted to
return to the national ranks. It is not allowed for
relatives to contact them except with the knowledge
of the security agencies.
2. The presence of the people from relocated areas
who are from villages prohibited for security
reasons includedin the first stage until June 21,
1987, is prohibited for the areas included in the
second stage.42
3. Concerning the harvest: after the conclusion of
winter, which must end before July 15, farming will
not be authorized in [the area] during the coming
winter and summer seasons, starting this year.
4. It is prohibited to take cattle to pasture within
these areas.
5. Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces
must kill any human being or animal present within
these areas. They are totally prohibited.
(emphasis added)
6. The persons who are to be included in the
relocation to the complexes will be notified of this
decision, and they will bear full responsibility if
they violate it.
These orders were evidently relayed later to the
lower echelons in the chain of command. They are
repeated word for word, for example, in a letter
(no. 4754), dated June 8, 1987, from Amn
Erbil to all its departments and local offices.
Three days after al-Majid's directive, on June 6,
Radhi Hassan Salman, deputy secretary of the
Northern Bureau Command, issued a series of general
instructions to all army corps commanders, "aimed at
ending the long line of traitors from the Barzani
and Talabani clans and the Communist Party, who have
joined ranks with the Iranian invader enemy with a
view to enabling it to acquire territory belonging
to the cherished homeland." Salman ordered increased
combat readiness, improved intelligence and a
heightened state of alert among all units, whileat
the same time betraying a certain anxiety about
renewed peshmerga attacks designed "to cut
the chain of command."43
The most important document of all, however, was
issued on June 20, 1987. Issued by the Northern
Bureau Command over Ali Hassan al-Majid's signature,
and additionally stamped with the seal of the RCC's
Northern Affairs Committee, this directive, coded
SF/4008, amended and expanded the June 3
instructions in a number of very important
ways--including a direct incitement to pillage, in
clear violation of the rules of war, and the baldest
possible statement of a policy of mass murder,
ordered by the highest levels of the Iraqi regime.
From the repeated references to it in official
documents throughout 1988, it is apparent that
directive 4008 remained in force as the standing
orders for the Iraqi armed forces and security
services during the Anfal campaign and beyond. For
example, a letter from Amn Suleimaniyeh,
dated October 29, 1988, makes reference to the
directive as the basis for "the execution of 19
accused, executed by this directorate because of
their presence in the security-prohibited villages."
It is quite apparent that al-Majid's demand for the
summary killing of people arrested in the prohibited
areas caused some consternation among those who were
charged with carrying out his orders. Throughout
1987 and 1988, high-level Iraqi officials issued a
steady stream of ill-tempered clarifications of
clause 5 of directive SF/4008--the paragraph that
concerns executions. "The security agencies should
not trouble us with queries about clause 5,"
complains a Northern Bureau letter of December 1987;
"the wording is self-explanatory and requires no
higher authority."44
Instructions from Amn Erbil, dated November
22, 1988, insist that clause 5 must be "implemented
without exception."
The full text of directive SF/4008 reads:
June 20, 1987
From: Northern Bureau Command
To: First Corps Command, Second Corps Command, Fifth
Corps Command45
Subject: Procedure to deal with the villages that
are prohibited
for security reasons
In view of the fact that the officially announced
deadline for the amalgamation of these villages
expires on June 21, 1987, we have decided that the
following action should be taken with effect from
June 22, 1987:
1. All the villages in which subversives, agents of
Iran and similar traitors to Iraq are still to be
found shall be regarded as out of bounds for
security reasons;
2. They shall be regarded as operational zones that
are strictly out of bounds to all persons and
animals and in which the troops can open fire at
will, without any restrictions, unless otherwise
instructed by our Bureau;
3. Travel to and from these zones, as well as all
agricultural, animal husbandry and industrial
activities shall be prohibited and carefully
monitored by all the competent agencies within their
respective fields of jurisdiction;
4. The corps commanders shall carry out random
bombardments using artillery, helicopters and
aircraft, at all times of the day or night in
order to kill the largest number of persons present
in those prohibited zones, keeping us informed
of the results; [emphasis added]
5. All 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, of which we should be duly
notified; [emphasis added]
6. Those who surrender to the governmental or Party
authorities shall be interrogated by the competent
agencies for a maximum period of three days, which
may be extended to ten days if necessary, provided
that we are notified of such cases. If the
interrogation requires a longer period of time,
approval must be obtained from us by telephone or
telegraph or through comrade Taher [Tawfiq] al-Ani;
7. Everything seized by the advisers [mustashars]
and troops of the National Defense Battalions shall
be retained by them, with the exception of heavy,
mounted and medium weapons.46
They can keep the light weapons, notifying us only
of the number of these weapons. The Corps commanders
shall promptly bring this to the attention of all
the advisers, company commanders and platoon leaders
and shall provide us with detailed information
concerning their activities in the National Defense
Battalions. [emphasis added]
For information and action within your respective
fields of jurisdiction. Keep us informed.
[Signed]
Comrade
Ali Hassan al-Majid
Member of the Regional Command
Secretary General of the Northern Bureau
cc: Chairman of the Legislative Council;
Chairman of the Executive Council;
Party Intelligence;
Chief of the Army General Staff;
Governors (Chairmen of the Security Committees) of
Nineveh,
al-Ta'mim, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Suleimaniyeh, Erbil
and Dohuk;
Branch Secretaries of the above-mentioned
governorates;
General Directorate of Military Intelligence (Istikhbarat);
General Directorate of Security (Amn);
Director of Security of the Autonomous Region;
Security Services of the Northern Region;
Security Services of the Eastern Region;
Security Directors of the governorates of Nineveh,
al-Ta'mim,
Diyala,
Salah al-Din, Suleimaniyeh, Erbil and Dohuk.
Ali Hassan al-Majid evidently insisted on a high
degree of personal control of even the smallest
details of the campaign. For example, one order
issued in the middle of the Anfal operation
indicates that no town or village may be searched
without his express personal approval.47
Nonetheless, the list of institutions to whom his
June 20 directive was copied gives some hint of the
bureaucratic scope of the effort and the large
number of civilian, party, military and security
agencies involved in its execution.
* * *
Defining the "National Ranks":
The Census of October 17, 1987
After June 20, the village destruction campaign
temporarily abated. Although it had also targeted
areas near the smaller roads that criss-cross Iraqi
Kurdistan, its most striking effect was to remove a
broad swathe of formerly government-controlled
villages close to the highway that runs from Mosul
to Erbil, Kirkuk and Tuz Khurmatu, before turning
east through Kifri, Kalar, Peibaz and Darbandikhan.
For the time being, the Iran-Iraq War deprived the
regime of the military muscle that would have been
required to press the campaign any further. But the
political and bureaucratic logic of the spring 1987
clearances--as well as the incipient logic of
Anfal--became apparent during the second half of the
year. This was to effect a sharp division between
the "national ranks" and thegenerally more
mountainous peshmerga-controlled regions to
the east and north. These were the "prohibited
areas" (manateq al-mahdoureh) and their
inhabitants, regardless of age or sex, would be
regarded without exception as "saboteurs."
They would, however, be given one last chance to
change sides. As al-Majid's June 3 directive stated,
it was still possible for Kurds to "return to the
national ranks" --in other words to move to the
cities, towns or mujamma'at and align
themselves with the regime. To keep a close track,
family by family, of how the two sides lined up, the
Iraqi regime had an ideal instrument to hand, in the
form of a national census. Iraq had carried out five
censuses in the half-century since its independence.
The results of the most recent, conducted in 1977,
were classified as "secret." Designed to be held
every decade, another was due in 1987. It was
scheduled for October 17.
As the census date drew near, the authorities
repeatedly insisted on improving security and
intelligence measures to inhibit any contact or
movement between the two sides, other than on the
regime's terms. Amn Erbil ordered renewed
vigilance on the complexes of Benaslawa, Daratou and
Kawar Gosek, which all housed villagers relocated
during the spring 1987 campaign.48
Orders were issued to seize and destroy tractors,
since these might help the "saboteurs" skirt the
economic blockade of the prohibited areas. The
tractor owners in question were to receive "the
maximum exemplary punishment."49
On September 6, Ali Hassan al-Majid chaired a
meeting of senior Ba'ath Party officials to discuss
preparations for the census. Case by case,
individual by individual, the make-up of the two
sides was to be refined in the most legalistic
fashion. "Subversives who repent" were to be allowed
to return to the fold right up to the day of the
census. No such returnees would be accepted after
October 17, however, "even if they surrender their
weapons." At the same time, al-Majid regarded it as
unacceptable for thefamilies of unrepentant
saboteurs to remain in government-controlled areas.
These people were to be physically removed and
forced to join their saboteur kin in the prohibited
areas.
This general policy had been in effect for at least
two years.50
But al-Majid now demanded a full inventory of all
such cases from the security committees of each of
the northern governorates. This list was to reach
his desk not later than September 15. As soon as it
was complete, "the families in question should be
expelled to the regions where their subversive
relatives are, with the sole exception of males aged
between 12 and 50 inclusive, who should be
detained."51
The local security agencies appear to have
cooperated with alacrity. Middle East Watch has
examined dozens of individual expulsion orders by
Amn Erbil, for example, during this pre-census
period. One typical case in mid-September 1987 gives
the full names, addresses, dates of birth and
residence permit numbers of eighty women, children
and old men aged from 51-89, taken from their homes
and summarily expelled "to thoseregions where the
saboteurs are present."52
A single male relative born in 1949 is mentioned as
having been detained "to receive the proper
sentence."
Most strikingly of all, the Northern Bureau Command
ordered that:
Mass seminars and administrative meetings shall be
organized to discuss the importance of the general
census, scheduled to take place on October 17, 1987.
It shall be clearly emphasized that any persons who
fail to participate in the census without a valid
excuse shall lose their Iraqi citizenship. They
shall also be regarded as army deserters and as such
shall be subject to the terms of Revolutionary
Command Council decree no. 677 of August 26, 1987.
The importance of this provision can scarcely be
overstated, for RCC decree 677 stipulated that, "The
death sentence shall be carried out by Party
organizations, after due verification, on any
deserters who are arrested, should the period of
their flight or delinquency exceed one year or
should they have perpetrated the crime of desertion
more than once." [emphasis in original]53
Failure to register under the census, in other
words, could in itself be tantamount to the death
penalty.
The results of the 1987 census were never publicly
divulged. Employees of the government census office
in Suleimaniyeh told Middle East Watch that they
estimated it to have been only 70% accurate--no
doubtbecause large expanses of Iraqi Kurdistan, as
well of the rebellious southern marshes, could not
be included. Most residents of the "prohibited
areas" opted to stay where they were; some,
especially in the more remote parts of the Badinan
region, said they never even learned that the census
was taking place, despite a vigorous campaign
conducted over government radio and television.
The instructions were quite different from those of
the five previous censuses. Those who were not
included in the census would no longer be considered
Iraqi nationals, the official broadcasts announced;
they would cease to be eligible for government
services and food rations. Only two options were
offered by the census: one could either be an Arab
or a Kurd--nothing else. These ethnic lines were
drawn with great rigidity. A number of official
documents from 1988 and 1989 transmit orders from
Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid to the effect
that any citizen may become an Arab by simple
written application. By contrast, anyone wishing to
be considered a Kurd will be subject to the
destruction of their homes and deportation to the
Autonomous Region.
People could be counted only if they made themselves
accessible to the census-takers. For anyone living
in a prohibited area, this meant abandoning one's
home. Inclusion in the census involved registering
oneself as the resident of a government-controlled
town or mujamma'a. (The only hope of evading
this regulation was to bribe an official--a
time-honored means of survival in Iraq, which
continued to apply even during Anfal.) Villages that
had been destroyed in earlier army operations--the
Arabization drive of 1975, the border clearances of
the late 1970s, or the spring 1987 campaign--no
longer existed as far as the government in Baghdad
was concerned. Some inhabitants of the border zone
had returned illegally to their homes to rebuild,
but the census would not count them. The remainder
were now in complexes.
As a partial indication of the scale of this
exclusion, government statisticians provided Middle
East Watch with figures for Suleimaniyeh, one of the
four governorates in the Autonomous Region of Iraqi
Kurdistan. The 1977 census had counted 1,877
villages in Suleimaniyeh; by the time of the 1987
census, this number was down to just 186. Almost
1,700 villages had thus disappeared from the
official map. Of these, several hundred had been
destroyed during the border clearances of the 1970s
and at various stages of the war against Iran. Most
of their inhabitants had been resettled in the nine
complexes that were also listed in the 1987census.
The remaining villages were simply not counted,
because they now lay in "prohibited areas" of
peshmerga influence.
Once the population count was complete, the
consequences of not registering soon became
apparent. Shelling and aerial bombing intensified.
When families went to the nearest town to seek their
food rations, said one man from a village near Qara
Dagh, they were told that they could now forget
about them. "You are Iranians," officials said, "Go
to the Iranians for your food rations!"54
The same was true of villagers seeking marriage
licenses or government permits for other civil
transactions.
On October 18, the day after the census, Taher
Tawfiq, secretary of the RCC's Northern Affairs
Committee, issued a stern memorandum to all security
committees in Kurdistan, reminding them that aerial
inspection would ensure that Directive no.4008 of
June 20 was being carried out "to the letter." Any
committee that failed to comply would "bear full
responsibility before the Comrade Bureau
Chief"--that is to say, Ali Hassan al-Majid.55
Several other documents from late 1987 insist, in a
tone of distinct irritation, that paragraph 5
(mandating summary execution after interrogation)
does not require the authorization of higher
authority on a case-by-case basis. The Northern
Bureau should no longer be troubled by these
requests, since the standing orders are quite
explicit.
The blockade of the north was now to be made even
more systematic. On September 29, al-Majid agreed to
a set of harsh new proposals from an ad-hoc
committee chaired by Taher Tawfiq and including
Khaled Muhammad Abbas, head of Eastern Sector
Istikhbarat, Farhan Mutlaq Saleh, head of
Northern Sector Istikhbarat, and
Abd-al-Rahman Aziz Hussein, director of Amn
for the Autonomous Region. The group complained that
food, medicines, fuel and other supplies were still
getting through to the "saboteurs." Accordingly,
security would be steppedup at checkpoints; many
grocery stores in the towns would be closed down;
the secret police would monitor the stocks in all
restaurants, bakeries and cafes; and a strict ban
would be enforced on the sale of all agricultural
produce from prohibited areas. Food rations would be
cut back to the minimum necessary for human
survival. The loyalty of all workers in the food
distribution sector would be evaluated.56
Under this bitter regime, the inhabitants of the
prohibited areas struggled to survive. During Ali
Hassan al-Majid's first eight months in office, the
groundwork for a "final solution" of Iraq's Kurdish
problem had been laid. Its logic was apparent; its
chain of command was set in place. But the events of
1987 were "just a preliminary step," a former
Istikhbarat officer explained, "because the war
was still going on. The Iraqi government was not so
strong and many troops were tied up on the front.
They postponed the anger and hate in their
hearts"--but only until the beginning of 1988, when
the major winter offensive that Baghdad had feared
failed to materialize, and Iran's fortunes on the
battlefield began rapidly to decline.
______
1 The marshes
have been the object of a vast engineering scheme
designed to bring the rebellious south under the
control of the central government in Baghdad. The
regime's treatment of the Shi'a inhabitants of the
south, including the Ma'dan, or Marsh Arabs,
is detailed in the Middle East Watch report,
"Current Human Rights Conditions among the Iraqi
Shi'a," March 1993.
2 The Northern
Bureau is one of four regional bureaus of the
Ba'ath, and is quite separate from the Northern
Affairs Committee of the Revolutionary Command
Council. Other party bureaus have responsibility for
the South, the Center, and the capital city of
Baghdad. This division of Iraq into security zones
is mirrored by the four-bureau organization of
Amn and military intelligence (Istikhbarat).
3 The family tree
is shown in Simon Henderson, Instant Empire:
Saddam Hussein's Ambition for Iraq (San
Francisco: Mercury House, 1991), p.87. Other notable
cousins of Saddam's include the former Defense
Minister Adnan Khairallah, who died in a helicopter
crash in 1989, and Hussein Kamel Majid, Minister of
Industry and Military Industry.
4 Middle East
Watch interview with former mustashar, Zakho,
September 1, 1992. In 1989 al-Majid was appointed as
Minister of the Interior, and then, after the August
1990 invasion, as governor of Kuwait. He is now
Iraq's Defense Minister, and continues to be
implicated in actions of the grossest brutality.
According to an eyewitness, Majid personally shot to
death some 25-30 detainees in Basra Prison on April
3 or 4, 1991. The dead included six children. See
Middle East Watch, "Current Human Rights Conditions
Among the Iraqi Shi'a," March 5, 1993.
5 The Iraqi Army
has seven regular corps in all. The term "special
forces" requires some explanation. In the U.S. armed
forces and others built on the U.S. model, these are
light infantry forces designed to conduct irregular
missions such as guerrilla warfare and covert
operations. Iraq's special forces, by contrast, are
mobile elite infantry units, armed with the best
available weapons and often supported by tank
battalions. Growing out of the Iran-Iraq War, they
have been compared to the German Stosstruppen
of World War One. See "Iraqi Order of Battle: Ground
Troops," in Desert Shield Factbook
(Bloomington, IN: GDW, 1991), pp.50-59.
6 The basic texts
on the war include Edgar O'Ballance, The Gulf War
(London: Brassey's, 1988); Dilip Hiro, The
Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict
(New York: Routledge, 1991); Shahram Chubin and
Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (Boulder:
Westview Press, second revised edn., 1991); and
Cordesman and Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War,
Volume II. Most of these books share the defect
of neglecting the temporary revival of Iran's
fortunes in the final year and a half of the
war--without which it is difficult to understand the
relationship between the first Gulf War and the
Anfal campaign. A useful corrective is Richard Jupa
and James Dingeman, Gulf Wars: How
Iraq Won the First and Lost the
Second. Will There Be a Third?
(Cambria, CA: 3W Publications, c.1991), pp.1-9.
7 The basij,
or Mobilization Unit, were virtually untrained
volunteers under pasdaran supervision. They
were integral to Iran's conception of an "Islamic
warfare" that depended more on faith than on
technology and conventional military skills. See
Chubin and Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War,
pp.42-49.
8 See, for
example, Cordesman and Wagner, op cit, p.257.
9 The KDP and PUK
eventually reached formal military and political
agreements to collaborate in November 1987, and in
1988 formed the Iraqi Kurdistan Front. Five smaller
parties later joined the Front.
10 According to
comments by Naywshirwan Mustafa Amin in an April
1987 interview with Le Monde, one option
under consideration by the PUK was "the severance of
Iraq into a number of small states: Shi'a, Kurdish
and Sunni." Cited in Baram, op. cit., p.127.
11 Cordesman and
Wagner, op. cit., pp.259-260. O'Ballance also
echoes this view, but provides less detail.
12 Audiotape of a
conversation between Ali Hassan al-Majid and unnamed
Ba'ath Party aides, January 22, 1989.
13 Ibid. For the
full text, see appendix A, pp.351-352.
14 Special
National Defense Forces General Staff (Operations)
to Fifth Corps Command, Erbil: letter no. 28/573,
dated April 13, 1987 and classified "Top Secret and
Confidential." The town of Makhmour lies some
thirty-five miles southwest of Erbil.
15 Minutes of
Shaqlawa Security Committee meeting, April 4, 1987.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Zakho, June 24, 1992.
17 Middle East
Watch interview, Choman, March 23, 1993. There was
also reportedly a chemical attack on April 15, 1987
on the KDP headquarters in Zewa, a largely
depopulated area close to the Turkish border.
18 The PUK had
four malbands altogether. The first, based in
the Qara Dagh mountains, was responsible for
political and military affairs in the governorate of
Suleimaniyeh. The second, in the Jafati Valley, was
in charge of operations in Kirkuk (al-Ta'mim). The
third and fourth, based in the Balisan Valley and
the adjoining Smaquli Valley, shared responsibility
for the PUK's work in Erbil. Later, the third and
fourth malbands were merged; under the
PUK-KDP unity agreements, a new fourth malband was
opened in Zewa, the KDP headquarters on the Turkish
border, to handle operations in the governorate of
Dohuk.
19 Population
figures for Balisan and Sheikh Wasan are derived
from Resool's dossier of destroyed villages,
although villagers interviewed by Middle East Watch
suggested that Balisan may have been even larger,
with perhaps as many as 525 households. Officials of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
assume an average household size of seven persons in
Kurdish villages.
20 Not
coincidentally, the Iraqi intelligence agencies were
mainly equipped and trained by their East German
equivalents. It may well be that the files of the
former Staatssicherheitsdienst (Stasi) will
shed further light on this relationship.
21 The symptoms
described by villagers are generally consistent with
the effects of mustard gas--although reports that
some victims died immediately suggest that nerve
agents may also have been used, since mustard gas,
even in high concentrations, is not usually lethal
for at least half an hour. See Physicians for Human
Rights, loc. cit..
22 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, March 16, 1993.
23 In an
interesting, if indirect confirmation of the May 16
attack, an undated handwritten note from Amn
Shaqlawa also mentions that sixteen Iranian
Revolutionary Guards (pasdaran) were present
during a bombing raid on the villages of Balisan,
Sheikh Wasan and Tutma. The pasdaran are
reported to have "made fires which saved their
lives"--a reference which cannot conceivably apply
to anything but an attempted defense against poison
gas. A separate Amn Shaqlawa document in the
same file, dated May 20, 1987, notes that three
members of the PUK Politburo are reported to have
been injured by gas during "the latest military
attacks in Kurdistan."
24 These
workhorse vehicles are ubiquitous in Iraq. They are
commonly known simply as "coasters," and are
referred to by that name throughout this text.
25 Middle East
Watch interview, Balisan, April 30, 1992.
26 This is
consistent with the procedures of an Iraqi firing
squad, as recorded on a videotape that has been
viewed by Middle East Watch. Five prisoners in
Kurdish clothes are blindfolded, tied to posts and
machinegunned with almost luxurious excess by a line
of troops with AK-47s. The firing continues long
after it is obvious that the prisoners are dead.
Even then, a uniformed officer delivers the coup de
grace to each man with a pistol. There is a pause.
Finally, another officer moves down the line,
discharging his pistol into the fallen bodies. This
particular execution was carried out in a public
square in front of a large crowd, and was greeted
with applause from party and security dignitaries in
the front row.
27 This account
is based on Middle East Watch interviews in Erbil,
April 23-25, 1992.
28 The bodies of
those who died in custody were exhumed from the
Erbil cemetery in September 1991, and reburied in a
ceremony that was recorded on videotape. In the
course of later exhumations Hamoud Sa'id Ahmad
discovered the body of his own brother, who was
killed by Amn in a separate incident in April
1988. Ahmad was interviewed by Middle East Watch in
Erbil, April 25, 1992. For additional detail, see
Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human Rights,
Unquiet Graves: The Search for the Disappeared in
Iraqi Kurdistan, February 1992.
29 Middle East
Watch interview with Sheikh Qader Sa'id Ibrahim
Balisani, Balisan, April 30, 1992.
30 A handwritten
list of 103 dead and forty-eight injured villagers
was given to Middle East Watch in 1992 by the
Inspection Committee of Oppressed Kurds, a human
rights group in Erbil.
31 Amn
Erbil governorate to Amn Shaqlawa, letter no.
Sh Sh/4947, dated June 11, 1987, and classified
secret. Exposure to mustard gas causes prolonged
temporary blindness or vision impairment, and dozens
of survivors interviewed by Middle East Watch
described being blind for at least a month after a
chemical attack.
32 Middle East
Watch interview, Choman, March 23, 1993.
33 Kandour is one
of the five villages named in the Amn report
on the May 27 attack. The others are Malakan,
Talinan and Upper and Lower Bileh.
34 The symptoms
described by Kamal are entirely consistent with
exposure to mustard gas.
32 There are two
basic administrative divisions within each Iraqi
governorate: the qadha and the smaller
nahya. The nahya of Qara Tapa belongs to
the qadha of Kifri. The examples of Narin and
Zerdow are drawn from a Middle East Watch interview,
Benaslawa complex, July 7, 1992.
33 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, July 23, 1992.
34 Audiotape of a
meeting between Ali Hassan al-Majid and senior
Ba'ath Party officials, Kirkuk, May 26, 1988.
35 June 1987
statement by a "returnee to the national ranks,"
found in Amn files.
36 Since few
villages were destroyed in the Shaqlawa area at this
time, other than those in the Balisan Valley, it is
possible that this may refer to the dumping of the
survivors of the chemical attack, at Alana. See
above p.68-69.
37 The power
structure of the Ba'ath Party is complex, and a full
grasp of the chain of command in the anti-Kurdish
campaigns depends on understanding the nuances that
distinguish several overlapping bodies. As one
national branch of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party,
the Iraqi Ba'ath has a Regional Command--of which
Ali Hassan al-Majid had been a member since 1986.
Within Iraq, the highest executive body is formally
the Revolutionary Command Council, which did not
include al-Majid--although in practice ultimate
power is wielded by Saddam Hussein himself and a
largely Tikrit-based group of loyalists from the
military and security sectors, many of them related
to the president. Al-Majid is a key member of this
fraternity.
The RCC in turn
has a number of regionally based committees,
including its Northern Affairs Committee. Saddam
Hussein was secretary of this committee at the time
of the 1970 autonomy manifesto. In 1987-1988, the
post was held by Taher Tawfiq, who, as an RCC
member, was thus technically al-Majid's
superior--although the temporary special powers
granted to al-Majid under decree 160 superseded
this. Al-Majid himself was Secretary General of the
Ba'ath Party Northern Bureau; to complicate matters
further, the Northern Bureau Command was a
parallel but separate entity, under Taher Tawfiq.
The Northern Bureau and Northern Bureau Command are
clearly distinguished where necessary in the text.
38 Northern
Bureau letter S Sh/18/2396, April 6, 1987.
39 Northern
Bureau Command letter no. 1/2713, April 10, 1987.
40 The principle
of collective implication in executions, including
an insistence that party members form part of the
firing squads, is a well-established element of
Ba'ath Party rule. The most notorious example of
this was the televised purge of two dozen senior
Ba'ath officials and military officers, including
several members of the Revolutionary Command
Council, in July 1979--a month after Saddam Hussein
had assumed the presidency. In front of a roomful of
their peers, the condemned men make ritual
confessions on charges of treason in front of a
roomful of their peers and are then whisked away to
be killed. A tearful Saddam implores--and thus
effectively orders--other senior Ba'athis to take
part in the execution squad. See al-Khalil,
Republic of Fear,
pp.70-72. Also Chibli Malat, "Obstacles to
Democratization in Iraq: A Reading of
Post-Revolutionary Iraqi History through the Gulf
War," unpublished paper, 1992--which differs from
al-Khalil in other important respects about the
nature of the Ba'ath's exercise of power.
41 This exemplary
collective punishment, according to a former
resident interviewed by Middle East Watch in Halabja
on June 11, 1992, was meted out in retaliation for
an anti-government demonstration. Some 1,500 homes
were reportedly destroyed.
42 By now it
appears that the two phases originally envisioned
(April 21-May 20 and May 21-June 20) have been
collapsed into one single operation. In this order,
the "second stage" is clearly intended to begin on
June 21.
43 Northern
Bureau Command letter reference no. 28/3726, dated
June 6, 1987 and classified "highly confidential and
personal." This document is reproduced in the
"Report on the situation of human rights in Iraq,
prepared by Mr. Max Van der Stoel, Special
Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, in
accordance with Commission resolution 1992/71,"
February 19, 1993, p.77.
44 Northern
Bureau Command directive no. 855, classified
"confidential and personal for addressee only,"
December 29, 1987.
45 This is only
one of numerous copies of directive SF/4008 which
Middle East Watch has found in Iraqi government
files, addressed to different agencies.
46 In other
words, the Kurdish paramilitary jahsh, whose
ranks had been greatly expanded in the period
immediately following Ali Hassan al-Majid's
appointment, according to a Middle East Watch
interview with a former mustashar, Zakho,
August 30, 1992. This clause of decree SF/4008, with
its reference to booty, may offer some hint of the
connection between the coming campaign and the
concept of Anfal in the Koranic sense (see
above, pp.31-32). Army documents reviewing the Anfal
campaign make further reference to the approved role
of the jahsh in seizing booty. See p. 289.
47 Northern
Bureau Command letter no. 3321, July 6, 1988, cited
in Amn Suleimaniyeh circular to all security
directorates (number illegible), July 16, 1988.
48 This letter
also urged that "saboteurs should be dealt with
strongly, like the Iranian enemy." Amn Erbil
governorate to all branches, letter no. Sh.S1/13295
of October 15, 1987, classified "secret and personal
to be opened by addressee only."
49 Letter no.
542, classified "secret and confidential" and dated
(month illegible) 30, 1988, from Suleimaniyeh
governorate Committee to Fight Hostile Activity to
all local Committees to Fight Hostile Activity.
50 It is
mentioned, for example, in a letter from the Special
Office of the Army Chief of Staff to Second Corps
Command, no. RAJ/1/13/1/5033 of June 14, 1985; order
no. 4087 of December 22, 1986 from the Security
Committee of Erbil governorate; and communique no.
4151 of the RCC Northern Affairs Committee, dated
June 15, 1987.
51 The only
exception was for "families which comprise martyrs
[i.e. those killed in battle], missing persons,
captives, soldiers or fighters in the National
Defense Battalions [jahsh]. In those
instances, only the mother is to be expelled,
together with any subversive sons." The summary
conclusions of the September 6 meeting are included
in a cable, reference 4350, dated September 7, 1987,
from the Northern Bureau to all regional security
committees. These instructions evidently received
very wide distribution. Middle East Watch has also
found a second version of this document, in the form
of a letter, number 2/237, classified "secret,
urgent and immediate" and dated September 19, 1987,
from the Shaqlawa district security committee to a
number of local party and police agencies. Although
in other respects identical, it gives the ages of
those to be detained as "17 to 50." Whatever the
final regulation on minimum age may have been--12,
15 or 17--it is apparent from survivor testimonies
that the separation of those to be killed during
Anfal depended less on birth certificates than on a
quick visual inspection of the prisoners. See below
p.212.
52 Amn
Erbil to Erbil Police Directorate, letters nos. 9475
and 9478, September 16 and 17, 1987, classified
"secret." The 44 families are broken down as
follows: Agents of Iran (PUK)--22; Offspring of
Treason (KDP)--7; Treacherous Communist Party--8;
Socialist Party--3; unknown affiliation--4.
53 RCC decree
no.10 of January 3, 1988 modified some aspects of
decree 677, but maintained this clause intact. Both
were signed by Saddam Hussein as Chairman of the
Revolutionary Command Council. Two additional
comments are pertinent here. First, the census gave
the regime a means of detecting deserters, a
perennial problem for the Iraqi military. Second,
and more important, it specified that executions of
deserters would be carried out by agents of the
Ba'ath Party itself--a hint, perhaps, of the
identity of the executioners during the Anfal
campaign.
54 Middle East
Watch interview, Naser complex, July 28, 1992. The
existence of a subsidized food system was a key
element of the national economy during the Iran-Iraq
War and a significant source of political control
for the regime.
55 Northern
Bureau Command, letter no.1216, dated October 18,
1987, classified "secret and confidential," to all
Security Committees and Security Directorates in the
Governorates of the Autonomous Zone and the
Governorates of Diyala and Salah al-Din.
56 A copy of the
findings of Tawfiq's committee on the blockade was
found attached to a letter from the head of the
economic section of the Interior Ministry, Erbil,
reference no.248, dated November 14, 1987.
3
First Anfal--The Siege of Sergalou
and Bergalou, February 23--March
19, 1988
"I will, with engines never exercised,
Conquer, sack and utterly consume
Your cities and your golden palaces,
And with the flames that beat against the clouds
Incense the heavens and make the stars to melt,
As if they were the tears of Mahomet
For hot consumption of his country's pride.
-- Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two,
(IV, i)
"It was like the Day of Judgment; you stand
before God."
-- survivor of the poison gas attack on Halabja,
March 16, 1988.
The nerve center of Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan lay deep in the mountains of
Suleimaniyeh governorate in southeastern Iraqi
Kurdistan. The organization's most important
facilities were all housed here, in the long, narrow
Jafati valley, so called because its inhabitants
belonged to the important Jaf tribe. The PUK's top
command, its politburo, had its headquarters in the
small village of Yakhsamar. Nearby Bergalou ("Lower
Valley"), a temporary settlement, was home to the
PUK's radio station and its main field hospital.
Talabani's deputy commander, Naywshirwan Mustafa
Amin, had also taken up residence here, and in
Talabani's absence abroad it was he who commanded
the PUK during Anfal. Nearby Sergalou ("Upper
Valley") was home to the PUK's second malband,
or regional command, responsible for peshmerga
operations in the governorate of Kirkuk. Other
villages such as Maluma and Zewa were important
additional links in the chain of command.
Sergalou was a village, almost a small town, of some
500 households (3,500 people), a half-hour by car on
an all-weather gravel road from the nearby nahya
of Surdash. Although the houses were of mud and
stone, they boasted cement floors, and almost every
home hadits own water supply from springs. An hour
away on foot, the
village
of Haladin, another sizeable place of some 350
households surrounded by vineyards, housed an
additional contingent of PUK fighters. "[The valley]
was as important to the peshmerga as Baghdad
is to the government," was how one local trader put
it.1
Hemmed in by steep mountains, this was a classic
guerrilla stronghold protected by difficult terrain.
But it had another strategic significance, too, for
it lay just a few miles east of the vital Dukan Dam
and hydroelectric power station at the head of the
lake of the same name--an important source of
electricity for the cities of Suleimaniyeh and
Kirkuk.2
Seizing the Dukan Dam was a crucial element of the
PUK's plan to liberate large expanses of Kurdistan
on an accelerated timetable. The goal was to take
the cities of Ranya, Koysinjaq and Qala Dizeh (see
map on p.92), thus encircling the lake and
establishing a new front line along the Haibat
Sultan mountain range, between Koysinjaq and the
western shore. But that plan, which was ready to be
executed in February 1988, was not to be realized.
Since 1985, and the breakdown of negotations between
the PUK and the Iraqi government, the entire Jafati
valley had been "redlined" as a "prohibited area."
Attacks by aircraft and artillery occurred
frequently, with shelling on an almost daily basis.
But the PUK headquarters was well-defended, and all
of the men and even some of the women in Sergalou,
Yakhsamar and Haladin were organized into an armed
self-defense force. Government checkpoints on the
surrounding roads did a largely ineffective job of
imposing the economic blockade.
The chemical weapons that had been used to such
demoralizing effect against Iranian troops had also
been brought into play repeatedly against the PUK
redoubt during the previous summer. For an hour on
the afternoon of June 8, 1987, chemical shells from
a truck-mountedmultiple rocket-launcher, or
rajima, rained down on Bergalou, Haladin and the
nearby village of Sekaniyan ("Three Springs"). The
rajima was a constant presence in the
villagers' lives for many months after this,
although the casualties appear to have been limited.
One farmer told Middle East Watch that this was
thanks in part to the high mountains, dense tree
cover and natural shelters available, and in part to
the notorious inaccuracy of the Iraqi gunners. The
worst casualties were in Haladin, where one shell
hit a house killing a man named Yasin Abd-al-Rahman
and six members of his family. Otherwise, the main
effects of the gas shelling were tearing and
shortness of breath. Later chemical attacks produced
additional symptoms, including blistering and burns.
Those who died perished, in fits of shivering,
within an hour of exposure to the chemicals; others
acted as if deranged, and stumbled around laughing
hysterically.3
The Iraqi Air Force also attacked the valley
repeatedly. In the past, aerial harassment
operations had been restricted to helicopters. But
the Iranians had now supplied the PUK with
anti-aircraft missiles that kept the Iraqi
helicopters at bay, and fixed-wing aircraft were
pressed into service. Sometimes the attacks were
carried out by small Swiss-manufactured Pilatus
planes, more commonly used as trainers or for
crop-spraying. At other times, supersonic
Soviet-made Sukhoi fighter-bombers took part, with
as many as fifteen or twenty aircraft joining in the
attacks. At first the raids used only conventional
weapons, but on April 15, and again in July, the
warplanes also dropped chemical bombs. Dispersed on
the breeze, the main effect of the gas was temporary
blindness, lasting two weeks or so. But it also
killed a number of people, most of them civilians.
By the summer of 1987, the peshmerga had
supplies of gas masks, donated by the Iranians, and
each division, or teep, had its own officer
who was expert in defense against chemicals. But
ordinary villagers had to defend themselves against
the wind-borne gas as best they could, fleeing to
higher ground, covering their faces with wet cloths
as the Iranian-trained peshmerga doctors had
instructed them, orsetting fires in the caves and
underground shelters where they sought refuge.4
* * *
Throughout late January and February 1988, a flurry
of intelligence reports from Amn Suleimaniyeh
and the Iraqi Army's First Corps warned that new
joint actions were being planned by the "agents of
Iran" (Umala Iran) and the Teheran regime.
According to Amn, "mercenaries" from the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards, operating out of PUK
base camps, were "carrying out surveillance missions
in the direction of al-Ta'mim governorate"--in other
words, westward, toward the Kirkuk oilfields. The
PUK's first malband, based in Qara Dagh, was
"facilitating the entry of Khomeini's guards from
the Darbandikhan sector." On February 1, the Ba'ath
Party branch in Qara Dagh informed Amn that
"the Iranian enemy plans to help the saboteurs" in
attacking a number of targets--including the
sizeable Kurdish town of
Halabja.
On February 8, a report from a secret informant
briefed Amn on the enemy's state of
preparedness. It noted that Jalal Talabani himself
was out of the country. "The number of saboteurs in
Sergalou/Bergalou," it continued, "is between
600-800."5
Despite its long history of living under attack, the
PUK seems to have been unprepared for the ferocity
of the attack that broke on it later that month.
Perhaps the peshmerga had overestimated the
degree to which the Iraqi regime was now
psychologically tied down by the war against Iran.
But they quickly understood its thinking in laying
siege to the Jafati valley. Success there would not
only decapitate the PUK; it would also prove, to
devastating psychological effect, that the regime
could prevail over the peshmerga wherever it
chose, in any terrain.
At about 1:30 or 2:00 a.m. on February 23, the
people of Yakhsamar, Sergalou and Bergalou awoke in
the dark and rain to the thunderous sound of
shelling from rajima. Although there is no
definitive evidence that the Iraqi army was yet
using the word "Anfal" to describe its operations,
these artillery shells may be considered to all
intents and purposes the first shots fired in the
Anfal campaign.6
It is evident that the regime attached a special
significance to the new campaign right from the
beginning. An Iraqi Defense Ministry order, for
example, signed on February 23, passes on a
Revolutionary Command Council decree that those who
fall in the coming fight against the "saboteurs" and
the attendant campaign of village "purification" are
to be venerated as "Martyrs of the Glorious Battle
of Saddam's Qadissiyah"--that is to say, the
war against Iran.7
At daybreak on February 23, government ground forces
attacked from all directions. "The army that laid
siege to the headquarters was so big that it looked
like a fence that was separating the area from the
rest of Kurdistan," recalled one peshmerga
who was in Sergalou that day.8
The front line stretched for a full forty miles,
from Bingird on the eastern side of the lake to
Dukan, and thence to Suleimaniyeh and the towns of
Mawat and Chwarta. The PUK held out for more than
threeweeks, even though the assault involved army,
air force and the elite Republican Guards, who were
apparently employed only during the initial stages
of Anfal.9
The armed forces' target was not just the PUK
headquarters but all the villages in the valley,
some 25-30 in all.10
According to other PUK sources, between 200 and 250
people were killed in the course of the siege, most
of them active peshmerga. As long as the
peshmerga resisted, most of the villagers hid
out in nearby caves. But in the early days of March,
the villages began to fall one by one as tanks and
armored vehicles smashed through the PUK's defensive
lines. The inhabitants fled, most in the direction
of Iran. After they had departed, crews of army
engineers moved in with bulldozers and razed their
villages to the ground.
Enveloping the Jafati valley on three sides, the
army did leave one escape route open--to the east
and the Iranian frontier, twelve miles or so as the
crow flies from Sergalou across the mountains.
According to official intelligence reports, by
February 25 the PUK had opened at least two rough
roads to the border with Iranian assistance.11
At this stage, it appears that the government forces
made no attempt to detain those who fled over the
snow-covered mountains toward Iran. Mass
disappearances had not yet become a matter of
official policy.
Some survivors were offered an explicit choice by
the army, backed up with a powerful warning: "You
are free to remain or leave," one woman from Maluma
village was told, "but we will not be responsible if
you choose to stay. You may be killed or become the
victim ofchemicals."12
This was no idle threat, for chemical weapons were
used repeatedly during the First Anfal.
The majority of the armed peshmerga managed
to withdraw in relatively good order, with ideas of
redeploying their forces further to the south, in
the broad hilly plain known as Germian. But they
found their way blocked by government troops and
were forced instead to circle northward to the
fastness of Qandil mountain, on the Iran-Iraq border
near Haj Omran. Others fled to the grasslands on the
shores of Lake Dukan, where they defended themselves
until they ran out of ammunition. The bedraggled
survivors eventually ended up in Iran. Others still
set up a new, temporary base camp in the village of
Shanakhseh, until that too was hit with chemical
weapons on about March 22.
That morning, Iraqi warplanes flew over and dropped
balloons. Six aircraft returned at about 2:00 p.m.
and dropped the bombs. "The area was full of
peshmerga and fleeing families," said a PUK
fighter who was there. "There were thousands of
people, many living in tents. I myself was injured,
my face became black and my skin was painful. I had
trouble breathing. But these were mild symptoms;
others who were closer to the point of impact had
severe blisters. Some men suffered from swollen
testicles." A PUK local commander believed that as
many as twenty-eight people were killed and some 300
injured, mostly peshmerga families. (Other
sources believe the figure may be somewhat lower.)
Some of the dead were civilians, who were already
exhausted from their attempt to cross the mountains
into Iran.13
* * *
Given the intensity of this new campaign, which they
would soon come to know by the name of Anfal, the
peshmerga had realized that there was little
they could do to protect the civilians, and they
told them as much, advising the villagers that they
would have to take their chances alone. At this
point, with the PUK leadership still relatively
intact and with frequent warnings being broadcast
over the clandestine peshmergaradio station,
civilians seem to have been given fair notice of the
dangers they faced. This, together with the army's
decision to leave an escape route, no doubt led to
countless lives being saved. But by the time Anfal
spread to other areas, it was much harder to give
civilians any warning. After the siege of the PUK
headquarters, the peshmerga began to grasp
the direction that the campaign would take. But
there was little or nothing they could do about it.
Most of the villagers from the Jafati valley
survived. While some fled to the city of
Suleimaniyeh, the majority headed for Iran, through
the heavily mined no-man's-land along the border, in
the first large-scale refugee exodus since the
crushing of the Barzani-led revolt thirteen years
earlier. But it was March, and the harsh Kurdish
winter was not over.
"We left behind all the properties accumulated over
fifty years," added a middle-aged villager from
Sergalou. "The people moved like a panicked herd of
cattle through the mountains in the direction of
Iran. It was raining. There were warplanes
overhead....Six people from Sergalou froze to death
along the way, and another thirty from other
villages in the same valley."14
"The people were running, and lost their shoes,"
said a 57-year old woman from the village of Qara
Chatan. "There was much snow. We were shivering from
the cold."15
People with children suffered especially in this
way, since they could not move so quickly. The
single most tragic incident involved a group of
people who made it as far as Kanitou, a ruined
village north of Sergalou that had been evacuated
during the 1978 border clearances. Peshmerga
from several parties were present in Kanitou, but
they fell to bickering among themselves. In the
chaos, a large band of fleeing villagers tried to
cross the high snowpeaks into Iran. But they left
too late in the day, and darkness overtook them when
they were still several hours from safety. At least
eighty died of cold and exposure; by one estimate,
the number may have been as high as 160.16
Although the siege of the
Jafati
Valley was not accompanied by mass disappearances,
some villagers from the First Anfal theater did
vanish during late April, several weeks after
Sergalou and Bergalou had fallen. One farmer from
Haladin told Middle East Watch that after three days
on the run, his family found refuge on the border,
in tents supplied by sympathetic Iranian Kurds.
"They stayed there for one month," he remembered.
"Then the army came to the border and arrested all
these people, including my entire family. This was
on April 20. The army dropped troops from
helicopters. There was a bad snow, and people were
exhausted." The young man lost nine of his relatives
that day. They included his mother, three
sisters--two of them pregnant--and three nieces
under the age of six. The witness escaped to Iran;
only his father, a man in his late 50s, was ever
seen alive again.17
Others who fled the siege of the PUK headquarters
disappeared in a different manner. Three brothers
from Sergalou recrossed the border into Iraq after
two weeks in Iran, having heard false rumors of an
amnesty for those who turned themselves in.18
They surrendered to the mustashar at a
complex called Sengasar, outside the town of
Qala Dizeh.
But the man turned them over to the government, and
they were never seen again. Similarly, a group of
fifteen army deserters who had been hiding in the
mountains for several weeks gave themselves up to
the mustashar in the village of Chermaga. The
mustashar had given the family of one his
word of honor that no one would be harmed. But these
young men, too, disappeared into the custody of
Amn in Suleimaniyeh. These trick amnesties and
broken promises would be repeated over and over
again in the subsequent stages of the Anfal
campaign.
* * *
The March 16 Chemical Attack on Halabja
For years, the hostility between Iran and Iraq had
appeared to the Kurdish parties as a geopolitical
loophole that they could exploit to their advantage.
After withstanding the siege of Sergalou-Bergalou
for two weeks, the PUK took the desperate decision
to open a second front with Iranian military
support. As their target the peshmerga chose
Halabja, a town on the plain just a few miles from
the border, in a feint that was designed to draw
some of the Iraqi troops away from the siege of
Sergalou and Bergalou. But the plan turned out to be
a tragic miscalculation, as the once beneficial
alliance with Iran turned into a crippling
liability. For the Halabja diversion only cemented
the view of the Iraqi regime that the war against
Iran and the war against the Kurds was one and the
same thing.
At the end of February, Iraq had stepped up its
missile attacks on Teheran as part of the "War of
the Cities";19
the escalation was designed to push the weakened
Iranians to the negotiating table on terms favorable
to Baghdad. A confident senior official even
admitted to Patrick Tyler of the Washington Post
that Iraq was trying to lure its adversary into a
trap by overextending its forces. "For the first
time in our history, we want the Iranians to
attack," the official said.20
At Halabja, the Iranians obliged.
Halabja was a bustling Kurdish town with a busy
commercial section and a number of government
offices. Villagers displaced from their homes by the
war had swollen its population of 40,000 to 60,000
or more. The peshmerga had been strong here
for almost thirty years, with several clandestine
parties active--Socialists, Communists and
others--inaddition to Jalal Talabani's PUK. One
group with particular local strength was the
pro-Iranian Islamic Movement Party (Bizutnaway
Islami Eraqi). As a reprisal against local
support for the peshmerga, Iraqi troops had
already bulldozed two entire quarters of the town,
Kani Ashqan and Mordana, in May 1987.21
Since about 1983, Iranian troops had been making
secret reconnaissance visits to Halabja under cover
of darkness. The town lay on the very edge of the
war-zone, and dozens of small villages between
Halabja and the Iranian border had been razed in the
late 1970s, their inhabitants resettled in complexes
on the edge of the city. But the greater strategic
importance of Halabja was its location just seven
miles east of Darbandikhan Lake, whose dam controls
a significant part of the water supply to the Iraqi
capital, Baghdad.
During the first two weeks of March, a stream of
Iraqi intelligence reports noted the buildup of
Revolutionary Guards and peshmerga to the
west of Halabja and the shelling of the nearby town
of Sayed Sadeq by Iranian forces.22
On March 13, the Iranians officially announced that
they had launched a new offensive named Zafar 7 in
the Halabja area. According to Teheran radio, the
offensive--conducted by a joint force of PUK
peshmerga and pasdaran--was in
retaliation for the Iraqi regime's recent chemical
attacks on the Kurds.23
A second attack, apparently coordinated, followed
the next day. This one was called Bait al-Maqdis 4,
and the Iranians claimed that it had taken their
forces within twelve miles of Suleimaniyeh. On March
16, Teheran announced yetanother offensive,
codenamed Val-Fajr 10.24
Iran boasted that its forces had now advanced to the
eastern shore of Darbandikhan Lake, controlling 800
square kilometers of Iraqi territory and 102
(presumably destroyed) villages. But the main thrust
of Val-Fajr 10, Teheran declared, was the
"liberation" of the town of
Halabja.
Halabja had been subjected to three days of heavy
Iranian shelling from the surrounding hills,
beginning on March 13. One by one, the small Iraqi
military posts between Halabja and the border were
routed, and their occupants pulled back to the
safety of the town. Some stripped off their uniforms
and took refuge in the mosques, while some took up
temporary defensive positions in local army bases.
Others fled altogether. Yet the Baghdad regime
resisted the temptation to reinforce Halabja with
large numbers of ground troops, for it had an
entirely different strategy in mind.
Some Iranian pasdaran had reportedly begun to
slip into town as early as March 13. By the night of
March 15 they were openly parading through the
streets, accompanied by Iraqi Kurds, greeting the
townspeople and chanting "God is Great! Khomeini is
our leader!" They billeted themselves on local
Kurdish families and ordered them to prepare dinner.
Some rode around Halabja on motorcycles; others were
very young, barely teenagers, and carried only
sticks and knives. Many also carried gas masks. They
asked bewildered people in the streets how far it
was to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.25
Militants of the Iraqi Islamic Movement did a
victory dance outside the headquarters of Amn
and the Istikhbarat building, which they took
over for themselves. But among the townspeople as a
whole there was grave apprehension, especially when
public employees were ordered on March 15 to
evacuatetheir posts.26
Swift Iraqi reprisals were widely expected; one
Amn cable the next day spoke, with notable
understatement, of the need for "a firm escalation
of military might and cruelty."27
The Iraqi counterattack began in the mid-morning of
March 16, with conventional airstrikes and artillery
shelling from the town of Sayed Sadeq to the north.
Most families in Halabja had built primitive
air-raid shelters near their homes. Some crowded
into these, others into the government shelters,
following the standard air-raid drills they had been
taught since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in
1980. The first wave of air strikes appears to have
included the use of napalm or phosphorus. "It was
different from the other bombs," according to one
witness. "There was a huge sound, a huge flame and
it had very destructive ability. If you touched one
part of your body that had been burned, your hand
burned also. It caused things to catch fire." The
raids continued unabated for several hours. "It was
not just one raid, so you could stop and breathe
before another raid started. It was just continuous
planes, coming and coming. Six planes would finish
and another six would come."28
Those outside in the streets could see clearly that
these were Iraqi, not Iranian aircraft, since they
flew low enough for their markings to be legible. In
the afternoon, at about 3:00, those who remained in
the shelters became aware of an unusual smell. Like
the villagers in the Balisan Valley the previous
spring, they compared it most often to sweet apples,
or to perfume, or cucumbers, although one man says
that it smelled "very bad, like snake poison." No
one needed to be told what the smell was.
The attack appeared to be concentrated in the
northern sector of the city, well away from its
military bases--although these, by now, had been
abandoned. In the shelters, there was immediate
panic and claustrophobia. Some tried to plug the
cracks around the entrance with damp towels, or
pressed wet cloths to their faces, or set fires. But
in the end they had no alternative but to emerge
into the streets. It wasgrowing dark and there were
no streetlights; the power had been knocked out the
day before by artillery fire. In the dim light, the
people of Halabja could see nightmarish scenes. Dead
bodies--human and animal--littered the streets,
huddled in doorways, slumped over the steering
wheels of their cars. Survivors stumbled around,
laughing hysterically, before collapsing. Iranian
soldiers flitted through the darkened streets,
dressed in protective clothing, their faces
concealed by gas masks. Those who fled could barely
see, and felt a sensation "like needles in the
eyes." Their urine was streaked with blood.29
Those who had the strength fled toward the Iranian
border. A freezing rain had turned the ground to
mud, and many of the refugees went barefoot. Those
who had been directly exposed to the gas found that
their symptoms worsened as the night wore on. Many
children died along the way and were abandoned where
they fell. At first light the next morning Iraqi
warplanes appeared in the sky, apparently monitoring
the flight of the survivors. Many kept away from the
main roads and scattered into the mountains, despite
the ever-present menace of landmines. According to
one account, some six thousand people from Halabja
congregated at the ruined villages of
Lima
and Pega. Another thousand or so gathered among the
rubble of Daratfeh, the last village on the Iraqi
side of the border.30
The Iranians were ready for the influx of refugees.
Iranian helicopters arrived at Lima and Pega in the
late afternoon and military doctors administered
atropine injections to the survivors before they
were ferried across the border. In Iran, all agree
that they were well-cared for, although some had
injuries that were untreatable, and they died on
Iranian soil. The sickest were transferred to
hospitals in the Iranian cities of Teheran and
Kermanshah,
and the smaller town of Paveh. The remainder spent
two weeks in a converted schoolhouse in the town of
Hersin, where they received medical attention. From
there, they were taken to two refugee camps--one at
Sanghour, on the Persian Gulf nearBandar Abbas, the
other at Kamiaran in Kermanshah province, close to
the Iraqi border. There they waited until Anfal was
over, and they believed that it was safe to return
home.
There would, however, be no homes to return to, for
virtually every structure in Halabja was leveled
with dynamite and bulldozers after Iraqi forces
finally retook the city. So, too, were Zamaqi and
Anab, two complexes that had been built on the
outskirts of Halabja in the late 1970s to rehouse
villagers from the destroyed border areas. So, too,
was nearby Sayed Sadeq, a town of some 20,000. In
both Halabja and Sayed Sadeq, the electrical
substations were also dynamited.31
Even after the razing of Halabja, many bodies
remained in the streets to rot where they had fallen
four months earlier.32
"The loss of Halabja is a regrettable thing,"
remarked Foreign Minister and Revolutionary Command
Council member Tariq Aziz, adding, "Members of Jalal
al-Talabani's group are in the area and these
traitors collaborate with the Iranian enemy."33
As the news of Halabja spread throughout Iraq, those
who asked were told by Ba'athist officials that Iran
had been responsible. A Kurdish student of English
at Mosul University recalled his shock and disbelief
at the news; he and his fellow Kurds were convinced
that Iraqi government forces had carried out the
attack, but dared not protest for fear of arrest.34
Not until July did the Iraqi regime move to recover
Halabja, which was left under de facto Iranian
control. In the days following the mass gassing, the
Iranian government, well aware of the implications,
ferried in journalists from Teheran, including a
number of foreigners. Their photographs, mainly of
women, children and elderly people huddled inertly
in the streets, or lying on their backs with mouths
agape, circulated widely, demonstrating eloquently
that the great mass of the dead had been Kurdish
civilian non-combatants. Yet the numbers have
remained elusive, with most reports continuing to
cite Kurdish or Iranian estimates of at least 4,000
and as many as 7,000.35
The true figure was certainly in excess of 3,200,
which was the total number of individual names
collected in the course of systematic interviews
with survivors.36
* * *
The Fall of the PUK Headquarters
Halabja was a symbolic show of Iraqi force in a war
that Iran could never win. But the mass gassing had
also served a more important purpose by delivering a
crushing psychological blow to the Kurdish
peshmerga and their civilian sympathizers.
Halabja was exemplary collective punishment of the
most brutal kind, carried out in bald defiance of
all international prohibitions on the use of
chemical weapons. The PUK fighters had been exposed
to poison gas several times during the preceding
weeks; now the will of the civilian population was
to be broken.
The Halabja chemical attack was a harbinger of later
Anfal policies. During each of the eight phases of
the military campaign, these forbidden weapons would
be used against Kurdish villages, dozens of them in
all--enough to terrify their residents with a
reminder of what had befallen Halabja. Yet Halabja,
while remaining the single greatest atrocity of the
war against the Kurds, was not part of Anfal.
In that sense, it was the clearest possible
illustration of the bureaucratic logic of the Anfal
campaign. On March 15, the very eve of the Halabja
attack, the Northern Bureau Command ordered that
"the families of subversives who take refuge with
our units should be detained in special guarded
camps set up for that purpose under the supervision
of intelligence officers from the First and Fifth
Army Corps."37
These camps were the first step in establishing the
web-like bureaucracy of mass killing that operated
during Anfal. But the fleeing survivors of Halabja
were not detained and taken to the camps, because
the Iraqi regime did not consider Halabja to be a
part of Anfal. The reason was quite simple: Halabja
was a city, and Anfal was intended to deal with the
rural Kurdish population.38
* * *
After Halabja, the PUK headquarters did not resist
for long. At 10:10 on the night of March 18, army
units stormed into Sergalou causing heavy losses
among its final defenders. Bergalou fell the
following afternoon. Saddam Hussein had fulfilled
his promise to cut off "the head of the snake." By
the end of the day, the General Command of the Iraqi
Armed Forces had prepared its official victory
declaration,and a jubilant announcer on Iraqi radio
informed his listeners that "thousands of the sons
of our Kurdish people took to the streets of Erbil,
expressing their joy and chanting in support of
President Saddam Hussein."39
The army communique contains the first official
reference that Middle East Watch has been able to
find to the operation known as Anfal. The successful
conclusion of each subsequent phase of the campaign
would be announced in the Iraqi press with similar
fanfare.
The March 19 communique reads:
In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.
Like all covetous invaders, the Zionist Khomeinyite
forces relied on some of those who betrayed the
homeland and people in the northern area of
Iraq--those who our good Kurdish people expelled
from their ranks. Those elements performed shameful
services for foreigners. Among their shameful acts
was facilitating the missions of the invading forces
in entering in the Halabja border villages in the
Suleimaniyeh Governorate.
As an expression of the will of the great Iraqi
people, the brave Armed Forces, and the good
honorable nationalists from our Kurdish people; and
in response to the treason of this stray clique; the
brave Badr forces, the brave Al-Qa'qa forces, the
brave Al-Mu'tasim forces, and the forces affiliated
with them from our Armed Forces and the National
Defense Battalions [jahsh], carried out the
Anfal operation under the supervision of Staff Lt.
Gen. Sultan Hashem, who is temporarily assigned to
this mission in addition to his regular duties.40
Our forces attackedthe headquarters of the rebellion
led by traitor Jalal Talabani, the agent to the
Iranian regime, the enemy of the Arabs and Kurds, in
the Sergalou, Bergalou and Zewa areas and in the
rough mountainous areas in Suleimaniyeh. At 1300
today, after a brave and avenging battle with the
traitors, the headquarters of the rebellion was
occupied. The commander of the force guarding the
rebellion headquarters, and a number of traitors and
misguided elements, were captured with God's help
and with the determination of the zealous men of
Iraq--Arabs and Kurds. Many were killed and others
escaped in shame.
This is unique bravery and faithfulness. This is a
struggle admired by the entire world, the struggle
of leader Saddam Hussein's people, Arabs and Kurds,
who placed themselves in the service of the homeland
and gave their love and faithfulness to their great
leader, the symbol of their victory and title of
their prosperity. Our people have rejected from
their ranks all traitors who sold themselves cheaply
to the covetous foreign enemy.
Praise be to God for His victory. Shame to the
ignominious.
[signed] The Armed Forces General Command, 19 March
1988"41
______
1 Middle East
Watch interview with former Haladin resident Hakim
Mahmoud Ahmad, Piramagroun complex, July 27, 1992.
2 The PUK,
together with the Iraqi Communist Party, the
Socialist Party of Kurdistan and a number of Iranian
parties, had formerly been based in Nawzeng, the
"Valley of the Parties," some distance to the north.
See Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State,
p.39. But they were driven out in 1983, when the
Iranian army attacked and the Iraqis moved in to
retake the area. The Jafati valley housed
contingents of the Iranian KDP and Komala parties,
in addition to the PUK.
3 Again, these
symptoms suggest that a nerve agent such as Sarin
was used here.
4 Confirmation of
the Iraqi regime's intent to use chemical weapons,
and of the fact that the peshmerga had
obtained gas masks, is contained in a document in
the captured Iraqi archives. Classified "urgent and
secret," it is a telegram from Major Sa'di Mahmoud
Hussein, Commander of Zakho District, dated 22/6
(year omitted, but from the context almost certainly
1987), reference no. AS/3/4181 and addressed to
"Commander (A)". It reads:
"[With reference to] letter of
the command of the 38th Force Secret and Urgent
14665 on 20/6, we have learned the following: 4,000
gas masks arrived at the First Branch of the
descendants of treason [i.e. the KDP] to guard
themselves against poison gas and the saboteurs will
wear them when we use chemical materials to attack
their concentrations. Please check the accuracy of
this information and take all necessary measures."
5 These notes are drawn from a
lengthy series of secret cables on conditions in the
Sergalou and Qara Dagh areas that were sent to the
Security Directorate of the Autonomous Region from
Amn Suleimaniyeh. The cables are dated from
January 25 to March 19, 1988.
6 Middle East
Watch was given various dates for the opening of the
Sergalou campaign, ranging from February 22 to 26,
1988; from the Defense Ministry order cited here, it
seems apparent that the correct date is February 23.
In field interviews, both peshmerga
combatants and ordinary villagers could differ
wildly in their recollection of dates, even for
crucially important events.
7 Defense
Ministry Legal Department circular to Interior
Ministry,
no. Q2/236/6300,
dated February 23, 1988.
8 Middle East
Watch interview, Goktapa, June 2, 1992.
9 The Republican
Guard began life as a politically reliable
paramilitary force, made up of three brigades from
President Saddam Hussein's Tikrit district. Over
time it expanded into a heavily mechanized élite
corps, twenty-five divisions strong. It is easy to
recognize Republican Guard troops in the field
because of their camouflage uniforms and their
distinctive red triangular shoulder-patches.
10 This figure
was given to us by Aras Talabani, a senior PUK
official and nephew of party leader Jalal Talabani.
Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, April 12, 1992.
11 Secret cable,
signed by "security colonel," Amn
Suleimaniyeh to Amn Autonomous Region, no.
4610, February 25, 1988.
12 Middle East
Watch interview with former resident of Maluma (nahya
Mawat), Bayinjan complex, Suleimaniyeh, May 18,
1992.
13 Middle East
Watch interviews, Zakho, March 14 and April 6, 1993.
14 Middle East
Watch interview, Piramagroun complex, July 30, 1992.
15 Middle East
Watch interview, Piramagroun complex, July 27, 1992.
16 The lower
figure was cited by former PUK officials; higher
estimates were given by villagers interviewed by
Middle East Watch.
17 Middle East
Watch interview, Piramagroun complex, July 27, 1992.
18 Amnesty
decrees had long been a favored tactic of the Ba'ath
regime. However, it was vital for citizens to know
whether they were dealing with a genuine amnesty
announced through official channels. The rumor of an
amnesty could have devastating effects; fleeing
civilians and peshmerga were often lured into
government traps during the Anfal campaign by
spurious offers of amnesty, local as well as
general. Not until September 6, and the completion
of the military campaign, was a genuine amnesty
offered. See below, chapter 11.
19 Jupa and
Dingeman (op. cit., pp. 5-6) believe that
Iraq fired as many as 182 enhanced-range SCUD-B
missiles in a 52-day assault, starting February 29,
1988. Developed with the help of East German and
Brazilian engineers, these "souped-up" Scuds were
capable of reaching the Iranian capital, 340 miles
from the Iraqi border.
20 According to
this report, "The official explained that Iraq's
confidence that it could repel a major offensive
would demonstrate to Iraq's allies that Iran had no
hope of breaching the country's defenses. Moreover,
the world would be reminded, he said, that the war
is a volatile flashpoint requiring a major
diplomatic effort to bring it to an end."
Washington Post,
March 2, 1988.
21 On the razing
of the Kani Ashqan neighborhood, see the document
cited at pp.78-79 above.
22 Secret cable
traffic from Amn Suleimaniyeh to Autonomous
Region Amn headquarters, March 6-16, 1988.
23 The two
parties to the Halabja feint give differing accounts
of the relative strength of the forces involved.
While Iran played up its own participation, PUK
sources interviewed by Middle East Watch claimed
that the seizure of Halabja was a joint peshmerga
operation, which the Iranians only joined in large
numbers after the March 16 chemical attack. Neither
version can be regarded as wholly reliable.
24 Among the many
Iranian offensives of the war, the designation of
Val-Fajr carried special weight. Val-Fajr I, in
February 1983, was Iran's first land assault on
Iraqi territory; Val-Fajr 8 and 9, in February 1986,
resulted in the seizure of the Fao Peninsula and the
simultaneous occupation of mountain areas near
Suleimaniyeh, bringing Iranian forces close enough
to shell that city. See Cordesman and Wagner, op.
cit., pp.159, 219-224.
25 Both cities
contain important Shi'a shrines: Najaf is the burial
place of the Imam Ali, and Karbala of the Imam
al-Husayn. The question asked by the pasdaran
says something about their naivete. Both cities are
situated well to the south of Baghdad--several
hundred miles, that is to say, from Halabja.
26 Middle East
Watch interview with former municipal employee,
Halabja, May 8, 1992.
27 Secret Amn
cable, unnumbered, to Autonomous Region Amn
headquarters, March 16, 1988.
28 Middle East
Watch interview, Halabja, May 17, 1992.
29 The symptoms
described by survivors are consistent with exposure
to both mustard gas and a nerve agent such as Sarin.
30 Resool lists
these villages among those destroyed in the border
clearances of 1978. Daratfeh appears as a village of
thirty households in the nahya of Biyara;
Lima and Pega, hamlets of eight and twelve houses
respectively, are in the nahya of Sirwan.
31 This
reportedly occurred in every one of the nahyas
and qadhas that were demolished during the
campaigns of 1987-1989. By way of comparison, see
Middle East Watch's analysis of the targeting of
Iraq's electrical system during the 1991 Gulf War
(Operation Desert Storm), in Needless Deaths in
the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties during the Air
Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War,
pp.171-193. In Halabja and Sayed Sadeq, of course,
the evident intent was to make the towns
uninhabitable. Both were subsequently declared part
of a "prohibited area."
32 The Iranian
forces in Halabja had managed to bury an estimated
3,000 victims of the March 16 chemical attack in
mass graves under a thin layer of dirt in the
complex of Anab. Four years later, the corpses were
still there, and they were beginning to pollute the
local groundwater.
33 Amman Sawt
al-Sha'b in Arabic, March 25, 1988, in FBIS,
March 25, 1988.
34 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 20, 1992.
35 See for
example Time, "The Cries of the Kurds,"
September 19, 1988 and The Washington Post,
"Rebel Kurds Say They Are Ready to Strike at Iraq,"
January 24, 1991, both of which cite the figure of
4,000; Kendal Nezan, "Saddam's Other Victims--the
Kurds," The Washington Post, January 20, 1991
(5,000); Isabel O'Keeffe, "Flanders Fields
Revisited," New Statesman and Society, March
1989 (5,500); "Massacre by Gas," in The Kurds: A
Minority Rights Group Profile, 1990 (6,000); and
The Observer, "Hitler-Style Genocide
Threatens the Kurds," May 7, 1989 (7,000).
36 This figure
was collected by the Kurdish researcher Shorsh
Resool.
37 Letter no. 297
of the Northern Bureau Command, dated March 15,
1988. These instructions were conveyed to
Suleimaniyeh Amn (Chamchamal, Sayed Sadeq and
Darbandikhan) in an unnumbered letter from Eastern
Region Military Intelligence (Istikhbarat),
dated March 18 and classified "confidential and
personal."
38 By the same
logic of Anfal--perverse yet utterly
consistent--villagers from the Halabja region who
returned to their homes in the "prohibited areas"
after the chemical attack were later "Anfalized."
Thus, twenty families who were found by Iraqi troops
in the village of Tawella (nahya of Biyara)
when the army retook this area in July 1988 were all
reportedly arrested and disappeared. Middle East
Watch interview with a former resident of Tawella,
Suleimaniyeh, March 27, 1993.
39 Baghdad Voice
of the Masses in Arabic, March 19, 1988, in FBIS,
March 21, 1988, p.23.
40 The various
forces named correspond to divisions of the Iraqi
Army. The first of them is of course named for the
Battle of Badr in A.D. 624, which is the subject of
the Koranic sura of al-Anfal. Lt. Gen.
Hashem was later in command of Iraqi forces during
Operation Desert Storm, and negotiated the terms of
theIraqi surrender on March 3, 1991, with allied
commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
41 Baghdad
Voice of the Masses in Arabic, March 19, 1988,
in FBIS, March 21, 1988, pp.22-23.
4
Second Anfal--Qara Dagh, March 22-April 1, 1988
"Bring your families; nothing will happen to them."
-- army officer to villagers fleeing from southern
Qara Dagh.
Although the siege of Sergalou-Bergalou consumed
enormous resources, the Iraqi armed forces were not
so rash as to neglect other targets. To block any
attempt by the PUK to reinforce its beleaguered
national headquarters, the regime maintained a
steady rhythm of attacks against the other regional
commands, such as the first malband, based on
Qopi mountain in Qara Dagh and charged with all
operations in the governorate of Suleimaniyeh. At
each stage of Anfal, as the main assault changed its
geographical focus, this pattern of secondary
pressure was maintained.
Few parts of Iraqi Kurdistan are as lovely as Qara
Dagh. Its chain of jagged, serrated peaks runs
southeast for some seventy miles, as straight as a
razor's edge. But the features of its beauty were
also those that made Qara Dagh vulnerable. It took
three weeks for elements of twenty-seven army
divisions together with Kurdish jahsh to
crush resistance in the Jafati Valley, which is
hemmed in by steep mountains. But Qara Dagh was the
opposite: a thin line of mountains flanked by almost
indefensible lowlands. To the west lies the hilly
plain of Germian, the "warm country." To the east,
until 1988, dozens of small farming villages nestled
in green valleys of astonishing fertility. Fields of
winter wheat, barley, tobacco and rice flourished
next to rich plots of okra, peas, green beans,
tomatoes, melons and grapes. At the southernmost tip
of the Qara Dagh chain lay the 6,000-foot sentinel
of Zerda Mountain, a peshmerga stronghold.
Beyond this, to the east, a narrow corridor carried
the highway from Suleimaniyeh past the town of
Darbandikhan and the lake of the same name, with its
strategic dam. Even as the First Anfal raged to the
north, Iraqi intelligence kept a watchful eye on the
lake, ever fearful of a waterborne attack by Iranian
forces on the dam and its power station.
The government had relinquished control of rural
Qara Dagh since the early days of the Iran-Iraq War.
In 1987, the nahya itself was emptied, and
its population relocated to the nearby complexes of
Naser and Zarayen. Troops and jahsh took over
the deserted town, but they were quickly routed from
their positions by the peshmerga. Retaliatory
air-raids soon destroyed what was left of Qara Dagh,
although PUK forces continued to control the rubble.
Like the civilian population of the surrounding
villages, they learned to live with constant
artillery shelling from a half-dozen government
firebases between Suleimaniyeh and Darbandikhan.
Since 1983 the twin hubs of peshmerga
activity in Qara Dagh had been the villages of
Takiyeh and Balagjar, which housed armed contingents
of the Iraqi Communist Party as well as the PUK. A
dirt path linked these two villages, which lay less
than two miles apart. The district center of Qara
Dagh--the nahya--was some three hours distant
on foot; three miles off to the east was the large
village of Sayw Senan, where the peshmerga
had installed a field hospital that serviced much of
the surrounding population.
During the early months of 1988, Iraqi intelligence
cables were filled with references to Iranian
pasdaran moving freely in and out of the Qara
Dagh peshmerga camps. A force of
Revolutionary Guards, 200-strong, was reported to be
present in Balagjar on January 25; by March 6, their
number had risen to 400.1
Eighty members of "the imposter Khomeini's guard"
were said to be in Sayw Senan on March 9, and they
were heavily armed.
Sometime in February--the exact date is
unclear--eight Iraqi aircraft carried out a chemical
attack on Takiyeh and Balagjar. "Many bombs were
dropped," said Omar, a Takiyeh man who witnessed the
raid. "I don't know how many, maybe eight or nine.
When they fell, there was a loud explosion, a little
smoke, and it was like salt spread on the ground.
People who touched it ended up with blisters on
their skin. Animals that ate the affected grass died
instantly." But there were no human fatalities;
because of the daily attacks, all the Takiyeh
villagers had fled totemporary shelters in the
fields. "But in Balagjar, many of the pasdaran
and PUK peshmerga, and many other people too,
lost their sight for three days; the pasdaran
moved out of Balagjar three or four days before the
Qara Dagh Anfal began."2
The continual chemical attacks during the First
Anfal, and now on Qara Dagh, seem to have had the
effect that the Iraqi government intended. An Amn
intelligence report dated March 16, the day of the
Halabja massacre, noted that a dozen divisions (teep)
of the PUK had dispersed from their bases throughout
southern Iraqi Kurdistan during the previous few
days in fear of further chemical attacks. Another
cable the next day reported, "We have learned from
our reliable secret sources that a few days ago the
treacherous Al-Hasek group [the Kurdistan
Socialist Party] took possession of an estimated
1500 protective gas masks. They received these from
the Zionist-Iranian regime."3
These precautions, however, were of little help, for
Anfal came to Qara Dagh on March 22 with one of the
most lethal chemical attacks of the entire campaign,
on the village of Sayw Senan. It was the day after
Nowroz, the Kurdish New Year and the first
day of spring, which the peshmerga had
celebrated by lighting bonfires and discharging
their gunsinto the air.4
Despite the news of the attacks on Sergalou-Bergalou
and Halabja, and despite the recently reported
presence of Iranian pasdaran in their
village, the people of Sayw Senan seemed to have a
curious and ill-founded sense of their own immunity.
"People were saying, 'It will be the same as in the
past. They will attack us and we will defeat them,"
recalled one villager.5
Although Sayw Senan was home to a PUK division (teep),
there were very few peshmerga in the village
by this time; most had been summoned to the defense
of Sergalou-Bergalou. But at the dinner hour on
March 22, the villagers heard the whistling sound of
shells fired from a rajima and smelled the
odor of apples. One shell landed in the courtyard of
a house, instantly killing thirteen of the fourteen
people in the family of a man called Mahdi Hadi
Zorab. Only one son, a peshmerga, survived by
fleeing to the mountains. Six separate estimates
given to Middle East Watch by local villagers and
PUK officials place the total number of dead in the
chemical attack on Sayw Senan at between
seventy-eight and eighty-seven.
"When we received the news of the attack from people
fleeing it, many men from our village went to Sayw
Senan to help," said Omar, the farmer from Takiyeh.
"We saw the bodies of those who had died inside the
village. I helped bury sixty-seven with my own hands
in Koshk village after we took them there on
tractors. We laid them all in one big grave in the
Haji Raqa graveyard, with their clothes on. Another
fourteen bodies were buried in Asteli Serru village.
They had died instantly. They were bleeding from the
nose; it was as if their brains had exploded."
The following day, March 23, the chemical rajima
hit Dukan, another PUK base in a village of seventy
houses.6
On the night of the 24th it targeted Ja'faran, a
farming village of 200 houses which had no PUK
presence, but housed the small headquarters that
controlled KDP operations in the governorate of
Kirkuk. According to two villagers, this was not the
first time that Ja'faran had been attacked with gas.
In May 1987, MIG fighter planes had dropped
chemicals on the outskirts of the village--one man
counted fourteen bombs, which produced red, green
and white smoke. Ja'faran was lucky, for neither of
the chemical attacks killed anyone--even though
hundreds of farm animals perished. The May 1987
bombing took place when most people were outside the
village, and peshmerga paramedics from a
nearby base provided emergency medical care.7
The first attack scared people enough that they
rarely returned to their homes, and even slept in
temporary shelters in the fields. The March 1988
rajima attack found the village deserted.
* * *
The Exodus from Qara Dagh
By now the hillsides were alive with people fleeing
Anfal, for the army's ground assault had begun on
the afternoon of March 23. Troops from the army's
43rd Division, backed by jahsh and Amn
Emergency Forces, converged from four directions on
the area between Qara Dagh and Darbandikhan, driving
the villagers from their homes like beaters flushing
out game-birds.8
The general sense of panic was enhanced bythe news,
carried by word of mouth and over the peshmerga
field radios, of the devastating poison gas attack
on Sayw Senan.
The mass exodus was mainly to the north, where
people hoped to find sanctuary in Suleimaniyeh or in
one of the complexes along the main highway. One
group of villagers from Chami Smor smelled the
nauseating odor of rotten apples, carried on the
wind that was blowing from the direction of
Ja'faran. Another family, from the village of
Masoyi, took refuge in a cave a few minutes walk
from their homes. But they made the mistake of
leaving a lantern burning when they fell asleep. In
the night they were awakened by the throb of
helicopters, which had evidently been attracted by
the light, and the sound of explosions. Suddenly the
cave was filled with the suffocating smell of sweet
melons. The family stumbled outside and fled,
carrying two children who had been overcome by the
fumes. By good fortune they survived, and hid out on
the slopes of Zerda mountain. Three days later they
watched as the army burned the village of Masoyi.9
What the regime intended to do with civilians caught
up in the Second Anfal remains murky. By now,
Istikhbarat had received orders from the
Northern Bureau to set up special temporary camps to
house those who were displaced. But the roundups
during the last week of March were much less
systematic than in the later phases of the Anfal
operation. Between Qara Dagh and Suleimaniyeh, one
physical obstacle loomed before the fleeing
villagers--the 4,300-foot Glazerda Mountain. They
found its slopes swarming with troops, jahsh,
commandos in camouflage uniforms and members of the
Emergency Forces (Quwat Taware'). Everywhere
there were ragged people, tractor-drawn carts and
farm animals. Helicopters hovered overhead. There
was tank and artillery fire from every side: "It was
like a boiling pot," said a man from Ja'faran who
survived.
Yet the army's attitude was ambiguous. In the first
few days of the Second Anfal, some villagers were
told to make their own way to the city and the
complexes (although Amn later carried out
house-to-house searches of Naser, Zarayen and
Suleimaniyeh to track these people down.) Others
fled via back trails into the mountains as soon as
they saw the soldiers, and eluded the dragnet that
way. Word of the Qara Dagh exodus reached
Suleimaniyeh, and the city relatives of some
families made their way to Glazerda Mountain to
fetch them.
Despite the massive military presence, the survivors
of the Sayw Senan attack heard rumors of a temporary
amnesty, and remained on the mountainside unmolested
for several days in the rain. But on the fifth day
soldiers at the checkpoint on the Qara
Dagh-Suleimaniyeh road began to arrest them. Some,
especially the elderly and the infirm, were helped
to escape by the jahsh, in an early hint of
the contradictory role that the Kurdish militia
would play throughout Anfal. But between twenty-five
and thirty people from Sayw Senan were taken away at
this point and never seen again.
The attitude of the troops seems to have changed
with an incident that was witnessed by Omar, the
farmer from Takiyeh village:
When we arrived, the army had not yet started
arresting people. The officers were just asking us
if there were saboteurs in our area, and we told
them that there were. But then something happened. A
tractor cart laden with old wheat grain was blocking
the road because it had a flat tire. The owner had
abandoned it there. So a tank came and tried to move
the cart out of the way. Instead, it overturned it
completely and a lot of Kalashnikovs came tumbling
out from underneath the grain, enough to arm a whole
squad. Then the army put out a radio call to units
in different areas to set up roadblocks, and they
started to arrest people--men, women, children, even
the people who had come from Suleimaniyeh.
I was twenty meters away from the tank, behind the
army lines. There were 500 of us. We fled into the
mountains--it was the jahsh who told us to
run if we were able to.... My brother Khaled was
still behind the tractor cart when the incident
occurred. We were close to one another, close enough
to call out to each other. But he was arrested and
taken to Suleimaniyeh.10
Khaled was never seen again; nor were three other
young men from Takiyeh who were arrested with him.
Omar escaped to the city and survived.
Those who were arrested at the checkpoint were
loaded into military IFA trucks and driven to the
Emergency Forces base in the Chwar Bagh ("Four
Orchards") quarter of Suleimaniyeh. There were
thousands of prisoners there from the Qara Dagh
region, and every day hundreds more arrived. The
soldiers recorded their names and confiscated
whatever valuables and identity documents they were
carrying. One man from the village of Dolani Khwaru
described being held at first on a nearby military
base, supervised by Istikhbarat officers,
before being transferred to the Emergency Forces
headquarters.11
There the prisoners remained for as long as three or
four weeks. Some groups of young men were
blindfolded and separated from the rest, while
others were taken out for a couple of days but later
returned to their cells. The detainees were given
almost nothing to eat, although it was possible to
buy food from the guards. Although it was the army
that had detained them, the villagers who passed
through the Taware' base said that the daily
interrogation sessions were conducted by Amn
agents. "Are your sons peshmerga?," they were
asked; "What peshmerga activity is there in
your village?" The interrogators appeared to regard
even children of grade-school age as potential
"saboteurs." After an average of two or three weeks,
buses and coasters arrived to take the detainees
away. They drove off west, in the direction of
Kirkuk.
Middle East Watch interviewed survivors from some
ten Qara Dagh villages affected by the Second Anfal.
In every case, they could name the young men of
draft age who had disappeared after detention in the
Suleimaniyeh Emergency Forces base. From Serko, nine
never came back; four were lost from Takiyeh and
another four from nearby Balagjar; two from Berday,
three from Koshk, two from Dolani Khwaru, three from
Deiwana, nine from Mitsa Chweir, five from Chami
Smor. Repeated across the whole nahya of Qara
Dagh, with its eighty villages, one may reasonably
assume that several hundred young men disappeared
during the Second Anfal.
But the story is more complex than this, as the
experience of villages like Chami Smor suggests. The
five young men of Chami Smor who vanished from
Suleimaniyeh were army deserters who gave themselves
up to the authorities as part of the general exodus.
However, the village's location--at the very edge of
the high Qara Dagh mountains--tempted others into
what proved to be a terrible mistake. While
themajority fled north, two families struck out
across the forbidding peaks toward the Germian
plain, hoping to be safe in the town of Kalar, which
would not be touched by Anfal. There were seventeen
people in the group altogether--men, women and
children. None of them ever reached their
destination. Nor did hundreds of others who fled
south with the same idea. It must be presumed that
they were all seized by the Iraqi authorities.12
* * *
Flight to Southern Germian
There are very striking regional differences in the
pattern of mass disappearances during the Anfal
campaign. After the First Anfal, adult men and
teenage boys who were captured by the army were
disappeared--a pattern that was repeated in all
areas. But in several places, notably southern
Germian, huge numbers of women and children were
also taken away and never seen again. The criteria
for this selection seem to have included not only
one's place of birth but the area in which one was
captured. In many cases, but not all, the pattern of
disappearances appears to have reflected the degree
of resistance that the troops encountered. If the
peshmerga fought back strongly, women and
children captured in the vicinity were more likely
to be disappeared along with their husbands and
fathers. This may be what is implied in an Amn
letter, dated August 2, 1988, which requests
information on whether those who had been given into
its custody had surrendered in an area where combat
had taken place.13
Women and children who fled north from Qara Dagh
toward Suleimaniyeh and the complexes were not
harmed. Those who crossed into southern Germian
vanished. Two men, three women and six children
disappeared from the village of Aliawa. Forty-seven
villagersfrom Masoyi, including many children and
nursing infants, were captured near Kalar and never
seen again.14
The population of Omer Qala, a village of twenty
houses at the southern tip of Zerda Mountain, had
fled en masse on hearing of the gas attack on nearby
Sayw Senan. Taking with them only a few essentials
such as money and blankets, as well as their animal
herds, they skirted the mountain and headed
southwest in the direction of Germian. Although they
were not peshmerga, all the men carried
weapons, as is common practice among Iraqi Kurdish
males; all but three of them were either army
deserters or draft dodgers. The twenty families
walked for several days, sleeping in caves or in the
open air. They hoped to return to their homes when
the government was driven out of their area, as had
always happened in the past. But this time was
different. Reaching the village of Bakr Bayef on the
eastern edge of Germian, they learned that the whole
Qara Dagh area had fallen to government forces. All
of their villages had been razed to the ground;
there were no homes to return to. Behind them, the
army's chemical shells rained down on Zerda
Mountain, and in the early morning of April 1 the
army captured the crucial peshmerga villages
of Takiyeh and Balagjar.15
Far from outrunning the army, the people of Omer
Qala had run straight into the jaws of the enemy.
Germian was the next target of Anfal, the villagers
of Bakr Bayef told them, and its inhabitants had
been given seventy-two hours to surrender. The
twenty families gathered that night to decide on
their next move. They concluded that there was no
alternative but to surrender. After all, the more
optimistic among them reasoned, walking toward
government lines had offered protection in previous
rounds of fighting between the army and the
peshmerga. In the morning they headed in the
direction of the government forces, as far as the
village of Boysana. Less than a mile further on lay
a place calledSheikh Tawil, which was to become
perhaps the single most stubbornly defended target
in the entire Anfal campaign.
In the course of the last week of March, the people
of Sheikh Tawil, who belonged to the Tarkhani tribe,
had offered refuge to hundreds of fellow Kurds
fleeing from Qara Dagh. Although they were from
different tribes, said one man, "We sheltered them;
we became one."16
In the wake of the panicked civilians came a fresh
contingent of peshmerga, fleeing their rout
on Zerda Mountain. The triangle between the
mountain, Sheikh Tawil and Darbandikhan was by now a
raging cauldron. There was constant shelling from
all directions, some of it Iraqi and some from the
Iranian side. No one could any longer tell the
difference. Confusion reigned. From April 3 to 5,
the army and the peshmerga fought their
first, inconclusive battle for control of Sheikh
Tawil. In the general chaos that preceded the
fighting, most of the civilians of Sheikh Tawil
evacuated their homes and made for the highway that
runs southwest from Darbandikhan Lake to Kalar.
Seventy-nine of them would be captured and
disappeared. But this was not yet the Third Anfal,
the Germian Anfal: the horror of that was still to
come.
The Omer Qala families watched as four old men of
Boysana went forward to meet the troops, carrying
white flags. "Bring your families," they were told.
"Nothing will happen to them." Trusting the
officer's promise, a number of men, women and
children turned themselves in. They were promptly
arrested. Those who remained behind later learned
that they had been taken to the army brigade
headquarters in the town of Kalar. But that was the
last that was ever heard of them.
The remaining Omer Qala villagers fled once more,
walking until they reached the town of La'likhan on
the main road. They found a huge crowd of people
from many different villages milling around, and a
large fleet of trucks which the army had brought to
collect them. Again the villagers conferred. Despite
their terror, they again agreed that surrender was
their only hope. Akram, an eighteen-year old from
Omer Qala, was still suspicious, however. Fearing
punishment as a draft dodger, he hid himself in an
empty barrel to observe the mass surrender. Five
hundred gave themselves up; only twenty, including
Akram, stayed behind. Akram survived; the five
hundred disappeared.17
______
1 From a sequence
of secret cables from Amn Suleimaniyeh to
Amn Autonomous Region headquarters; no. 1754 of
January 25, 1988; no. 5474 of March 6, 1988; and no.
5860 of March 9, 1988. The second of these cables
also reported that sixty members of the "Treacherous
Iraqi Communist Party" were present in Balagjar.
2 This witness
also claimed that the pasdaran's weaponry
included US-made HAWK anti-aircraft missiles--the
type supplied to Teheran in the course of what came
to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, March 21, 1993.
PUK officials deny, however, that any HAWKs were
present inside Iraq and say that they had only
SAM-7s. They also claim that the main function of
the Iranian Revolutionary Guards was to conduct
reconnaissance and intelligence missions.
3 Amn
Suleimaniyeh to Amn Autonomous Region
headquarters, cables no. 6631 of March 16, 1988 and
no. 6739 of March 17, 1988. Despite the dates, from
other references in these documents to pasdaran
activities in and around Halabja it is apparent that
both reports were prepared by agents who were
unaware of the March 16 chemical attack.
4 While a second
witness gave the date of the Sayw Senan attack as
March 18, the later date seems more credible, since
the witness specifically referred to Nowroz
falling on the previous day. All dates given by
witnesses need to be treated with a certain amount
of caution: although the Kurds use a 365-day solar
calendar, the months do not correspond precisely to
those of the Gregorian calendar. On the Kurdish
calender and the traditional celebration of
Nowroz, see Izady, The Kurds, pp.
241-243.
5 Middle East
Watch interview, Naser complex, July 30, 1992.
6 Not to be
confused with the larger town of Dukan, to the north
of Suleimaniyeh.
7 Middle East
Watch interviews, Ja'faran village, June 6, 1992.
8 The army's
day-to-day movements are detailed in a sequence of
sixteen handwritten Amn cables, contained in
a file entitled "The Purification of Qara Dagh
Operation, [illegible] Darbandikhan." The documents,
classified "secret and urgent," cover the period
from March 23 to April 1, 1988, when Amn
announced the capture of Takiyeh and Balagjar.
9 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, March 21, 1993.
10 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, March 21, 1993.
11 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, April 1, 1993.
12 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, March 19, 1993.
13 Confidential
letter from Amn Autonomous Region to Amn
Erbil governorate, August 2, 1988. The text reads,
"Please take note of our telex no. 9887 of July 20,
1988 and inform us whether the persons who are the
subject of the communication came from the fighting
basin or not."
14 Middle East
Watch interviews, Bayinjan complex, March 21, 1993;
Naser complex, March 26, 1993.
15 A "secret and
urgent" telegram from Amn Darbandikhan, no.
9507, 1740 hours, April 1, 1988, reports the seizure
of "four bases of the saboteurs and agents of Iran,
along with a base of the Guards of Khomeini the
impostor and a base of the saboteurs of the Iraqi
Communist Party." With these army victories, the
military aspect of the Second Anfal was essentially
complete.
16 Middle East
Watch interview with a former resident of Sheikh
Tawil, Bawanur complex, March 28, 1993.
17 Middle East
Watch interview, Naser complex, July 28, 1992. Akram
in fact later passed through a number of army lines
and checkpoints along the way; but he never
abandoned his goats, and this may have saved his
life. Middle East Watch was told several stories of
draft-age men being spared, especially in the
southern Germian area, if they were tending their
farm animals at the time of Anfal.
5
Third Anfal--Germian,
April 7-20, 1988
"This was the first time people were taken away to
end them."
-- farmer of Golama village,
Qader Karam.
Germian--the warm country--is a large hilly plain at
the southernmost tip of Sorani-speaking Iraqi
Kurdistan, bordering on Iraq's Arab heartland. It is
bounded to the west by the highway between the
oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the town of Tuz
Khurmatu; to the north by the Kirkuk-Chamchamal
road; to the east by the Qara Dagh mountains; and to
the south by a shallow triangle of towns--Kalar,
Kifri and Peibaz.1
Almost exactly in the geographical center of Germian
lies the nahya of Qader Karam, once a busy
market center of some 10,000 people.
By the end of the first week in April, the
straggling remnants of the defeated peshmerga
from the Sergalou-Bergalou area had worked their way
southward to take refuge in the PUK's strongholds in
Germian. Villagers fleeing from the second Anfal
headed south and west as well. Some fighters from
the second malband took up fresh defensive
positions in Sheikh Tawil, which had been flooded
with the refugees from Qara Dagh. Others headed for
the village of Bashtapa on the Aqa Su river, which
bisects the Germian plain.2
(Local people call it the Awa Spi, or "white
river," for the milky color of its flow.)
Compared to the Jafati valley and even to Qara Dagh,
the flat terrain of Germian was much less favorable
to guerrilla warfare. This was, however, the
political heartland of the PUK revolt, and the sons
of its farming villages made up the bulk of the
organization's fighting forces. The villages were
also filled with deserters and draft dodgers, and
the peshmerga enjoyed an extensive and
well-organized network of local support. "They used
to come at night and get food from the villagers and
give political lectures for the villagers as to why
they should fight the government and why they should
not join the jahsh," said a woman from the
village of Sheikh Hamid, which lay close to the
important PUK stronghold at Tazashar.3
"The peshmerga had ordered each family to buy
one weapon," added a man from the nearby settlement
of Kani Qader Khwaru. "It was like a law, and the
people agreed with this because they saw it was
necessary. The armed civilians would join the
peshmerga in the defense of their villages. They
were referred to as the 'backing force.' All the
villages had this type of civil defense unit."4
Yet there was little the peshmerga could do
to withstand the ferocious assault of the Iraqi
Army. This was a more conventional war, though of a
grossly one-sided kind. For more than a week, the
area was enveloped in wave after wave of assaults by
infantry, armored divisions, artillery, air force
and jahsh. The people of Germian were
persuaded to surrender by the near-impossibility of
escape; never before had they seen such overwhelming
concentrations of troops and militia. The army did
not leave the area until all living things had been
captured, and they pursued any fleeing villagers, by
helicopter and on foot, into the mountains and into
the towns and cities.5
The Iraqi Army mercilessly exploited the PUK's
weaknesses in Germian. There were no strongly
fortified bases here--no Bergalou, noYakhsamar, no
heavy weaponry. The few peshmerga villages
with a fixed troop detachment, or teep, were
easily cut off from their supply lines; deprived of
reinforcements, the isolated fighters could either
flee or fight until they ran out of ammunition.
Peshmerga arriving from the areas of the first
and second Anfals were exhausted, and there was a
general collapse of morale in the wake of the
chemical attacks on the Jafati Valley, Qara Dagh and
Halabja. The Iraqi regime seems to have found poison
gas much less necessary during the Germian campaign,
although it did come into play against at least one
troublesome target.6
Some beleaguered peshmerga strongholds held
out for as much as five days, but in most places the
resistance crumbled quickly.
* * *
It is possible to reconstruct the battle plan of the
Iraqi Army in Germian in some detail, thanks to a
sequence of some thirty-three "secret and urgent"
military intelligence cables, which give an
hour-by-hour update of conditions on the
battlefield.7
These documents depict a series of enormous pincer
movements, with troop columns converging from at
least eight different points on the perimeter of
Germian, encircling peshmerga targets and
channeling the fleeing civilian population toward
designated collection points by blocking off all
other avenues of escape. (see map) The cable traffic
describes some 120 villages "stormedand demolished,"
or "burned and destroyed." Almost none of these is
described as a military target; in only a handful of
cases is there any report of resistance being
encountered; in the rare cases where a village is
searched, the soldiers tend to find nothing more
incriminating than "pictures of saboteurs and the
charlatan Khomeini."8
The intent of the operation could not be more clear:
it was to wipe out all vestiges of human settlement.
Several of the Istikhbarat field reports make
this explicit. "All the villages that the convoy
passed through were destroyed and burned, since most
of the villages were not marked on the map," reports
the Kalar column on April 13. The Pungalle column
returns to base on April 20, "after completing the
demolition of all the villages within its sector."9
No matter how thorough, a single pass was not
enough; in mid-August the troops returned to "burn
and remove any remaining signs of life."10
In one case after another, the names of the villages
that have been eliminated correspond to the site of
mass disappearances described to Middle East Watch
by survivors.
* * *
The Plan of Campaign: (1) Tuz Khurmatu
Early in the morning of April 7, the first troops
and jahsh battalions moved out from their
base in Tuz Khurmatu, at the southwestern corner of
Germian. Over the next two days, other units
leftKirkuk, Laylan, Chamchamal and Sengaw, all
converging from different directions on the town of
Qader Karam. The Tuz Khurmatu column quickly divided
into three task forces. One headed southeast from
the town of Naujul toward the Awa Spi river. A
second, larger task force moved east along the sandy
river valley. Preceded by airstrikes, it dealt
quickly with the resistance from the second
malband survivors at Bashtapa, and quickly
reported having wiped out seventeen villages at the
cost of just eleven dead--eight of them jahsh.11
Two of these villages were Upper and
Lower Warani,
a new fallback position for the peshmerga in
Bashtapa. The Waranis had suffered grievously in the
past, having been burned down on three separate
occasions since 1963. The twin villages also
provided a bitter illustration of the effects of Ali
Hassan al-Majid's demand for aerial and artillery
bombardment designed to "kill the largest number of
persons present in those prohibited zones."12
In the months preceding Anfal, there were three
fatal attacks by government helicopters. One killed
an old man resting in his fields at harvest time;
another, a fifteen-year old girl and her mother,
fetching water from the river; another, two young
shepherd boys, brothers aged eight and eleven.
But Anfal was different. The troops arrived at
breakfast time, set fire to the houses, killed all
the farm animals and rounded up many of the
villagers. Others managed to flee into the hills,
where they remained for several days. But they
realized that they were encircled on three sides,
and had no alternative but to head south toward the
highway, where they surrendered to a jahsh
unit commanded by a mustashar named Adnan
Jabari. It was the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim
month of fasting, one elderly man remembered--April
17. Trucks were waiting to take them away, and many
of them were never seen again. Thesurviving
villagers later made a list of 102 people from
Warani who had disappeared.13
As with all the villages in the Daoudi tribal area,
those who vanished included large numbers of women
and children.
Meanwhile, the third Tuz Khurmatu task force
launched a ferocious attack on the PUK base in
Tazashar, some twelve miles due north of the Awa Spi
river. Tazashar was a perfect example of the dilemma
that the PUK faced in Germian. A small village of
only about twenty households, it had assumed a
certain strategic importance because of its location
on an all-weather road close to the main Tuz
Khurmatu-Qader Karam highway. A small contingent of
20-25 peshmerga dug in here to fight the army
forces that were advancing south from the main road.
The army brought in heavy weapons and tanks, and
airplanes and helicopters lent aerial support. The
outnumbered and outgunned peshmerga put up a
spirited defense from 8 a.m. until the early
afternoon of April 9. But in a valley surrounded by
low hills, they were at a huge disadvantage; meeting
resistance, it was a simple matter for the army to
withdraw temporarily and send troops around behind
Tazashar to encircle it. The soldiers seized control
of the surrounding hilltops and destroyed three
other villages that lay in their path--Upper and
Lower Kani Qader, and Sheikh Hamid.
Several witnesses from neighboring villages say that
the army resorted to chemical weapons in Tazashar.
One man in Kani Qader Khwaru, four miles away, told
Middle East Watch that he intercepted radio
communications from the officer in command, saying
that gas was the only way to dislodge the
resistance.14
This witness then sawBritish-supplied Hawker Hunter
aircraft bombing Tazashar, sending up billowing
clouds of white smoke. An hour later the army
entered the village. All its defenders died.
Aisha, a pregnant 20-year old woman from Sheikh
Hamid, watched the attack from her family's hilltop
wheat field. She did not realize at first that
chemicals were involved, since the Iraqi Air Force
had bombed the area so often in the past. But when
she came down from the hillside that evening, she
saw the bodies of twenty-five peshmerga. "It
was then that I found out they had used chemical
weapons, because I also saw a lot of dead goats and
cows and birds." On the night of April 10,
Istikhbarat in Tuz Khurmatu cabled to Eastern
Region headquarters that it had removed "the bodies
of 15 subversives, who were buried in the vicinity
of the Tuz Military Sector Command; before burial
they were photographed, and the film will be sent in
a further dispatch."15
Having dealt with Tazashar, the column proceeded
south, eliminating another half-dozen villages
before finally wiping out the last peshmerga
resistance at Karim Bassam, and so reaching the
north bank of the Awa Spi river.
Like everyone else from Sheikh Hamid, Aisha fled. As
she was leaving the area, she encountered a
mustashar, a man by the name of Sheikh Ahmad
Barzinji, who had come in search of his own
relatives. She asked him what had happened. "I don't
know," the mustashar replied. "You should
just surrender to the army. This is the best thing
you can do. I cannot do anything; even my relatives
have been killed."
Aisha took her children and made for the hills. She
could not find her husband. With the mustashar's
words in mind, she first struck out north in the
direction of Qader Karam to surrender; the army had
in any case closed off all other avenues of escape.
But on the way, she changed her mind and decided
instead to hide out in a cave with a group of fellow
villagers. The mountainsides south of Qader Karam
were covered with clusters of refugees. They hid in
the cave for three days. On the second, Aisha gave
birth to her baby. She was hungry and too weak to
nurse, and had no covering to protect her child
against the cold night air. On thethird day, she
ventured out in search of food, leaving her day-old
baby in the cave.
As soon as she left the safety of her cave, however,
Aisha was spotted by a jahsh patrol tracking
down survivors. She was surprised at how kind they
seemed; they promised they would take her to the
mustashar, who would arrange for her to be
amnestied. They found their commander on the
outskirts of Qader Karam. It turned out to be Sheikh
Ahmad Barzinji, the same man she had encountered
three days earlier in the rubble of her village.
"He took me and promised me that he would help me
and he put
me in a nearby school. I felt safe in the school,
and he
gave me some food. But after a few hours they
brought a lot
of people into the school. A lot of villagers were
coming
in to surrender; they were encouraged to do so by
Sheikh
Ahmad's jahsh. The army separated the men
from the women,
handcuffed all the men and put them in a separate
room. When
the army took charge, they pushed the jahsh
aside. Sheikh
Ahmad disappeared and I did not see him again. Then
the
soldiers took all the men and put them into military
buses.
Soon after that, they began to do the same thing to
the women
and children.16
Aisha's story remains one of the strangest of the
Anfal campaign; in an apparently arbitrary act of
clemency, an army officer eventually allowed her to
leave the Qader Karam school and go to Suleimaniyeh.
Aisha not only survived Anfal; she was even reunited
in the end with the baby she had left behind in the
cave. Most people from her area were less
fortunate--if that is the word to use, since Aisha
herself lost her husband, three brothers and twelve
other members of her family. They were among a group
of at least eighty men from Sheikh Hamid who
surrendered to the mustashar and were never
seen again. From nearby Karim Bassam, at least
twenty-five people disappeared; from Aziz Beg, a
village between Tazashar and Talau, the list ran to
ninety-two, many of them women and children.
* * *
The Plan of Campaign:
(2) Qader Karam and Northern Germian
Meanwhile, other army units were pursuing a similar
campaign of terror to the north of Qader Karam,
under the direction of Special Forces Brigadier
General ('Amid) Bareq Abdullah al-Haj Hunta,
who appears to have been the overall commander of
the Third Anfal operation in Germian.17
Columns moving in from the west reported an
uneventful advance--hardly surprising, since they
were following the main Kirkuk-Chamchamal highway
through an area that had largely been destroyed and
depopulated during the spring 1987 campaign. They
reached Qader Karam rapidly, by the late afternoon
of April 10. The following morning, a column of
jahsh under Sayed Jabari set out from the
nahya to take care of the single, isolated
village of Ibrahim Ghulam, in the rocky hills south
of Qader Karam.18
The population had already fled after hearing of the
fighting nearby, but they straggled down from their
hiding places after a few days to surrender. Middle
East Watch was given a list of the names of
fifty-one men from Ibrahim Ghulam who were never
seen again.19
Ibrahim Ghulam was a village belonging to the
Zangana tribe, and the Zangana and the neighboring
Jabari were the victims of some ofthe worst ravages
of the Third Anfal.20
In April 1988, the Zangana inhabited dozens of
villages to the east of Qader Karam; the villages of
the Jabari dotted the low mountains to the north.
Columns of troops operating out of bases in Sengaw
and Chamchamal wiped out all of them. Some of the
Jabari villages did manage to escape northward,
through a temporary breach that the peshmerga
opened on the Kirkuk-Chamchamal road. Others tried,
but failed, to outrun the oncoming army troops. At
the time of the Third Anfal, the inhabitants of
Taeberz, a tiny Jabari hamlet on the paved road a
half-hour west of Qader Karam, were in the process
of trying to rebuild the homes that the army had
burned down the previous summer. Hearing that waves
of troops were moving towards them in a huge pincer
movement from Kirkuk and Chamchamal, they fled at
dawn, but were only two hours from the village when
the army and jahsh tracked them down. A
convoy of army IFA trucks was waiting for them on
the paved road. It took them to Leilan, a nahya
a little to the south of Kirkuk.
Other Jabari hamlets were deserted by the time the
troops arrived. Such was the case of Mahmoud
Parizad, another small settlement close to the main
road and only a half-hour drive from both Qader
Karam and Kirkuk. In many ways Mahmoud Parizad was
typical of the whole Jabari area: twenty-five houses
of mud or cement blocks, each with its own bomb
shelter; neither electricity nor running water; a
small mosque, as well as a schoolhouse that had been
closed down and its government teacher withdrawn
when the area fell under peshmerga control in
the mid-1980s.
When Anfal reached Mahmoud Parizad on April 11, the
army met modest resistance from peshmerga in
two neighboring villages, and the people of Mahmoud
Parizad fled to the mountains to escape the incoming
artillery fire. They were joined there by a steady
stream of refugees from other Jabari villages,
perhaps 1,000 in all. Word had spread rapidly of the
previous day's chemical attack on Tazashar, and the
women and children decided to surrender to the army;
their menfolk, most of whom were active peshmerga,
remained in hiding for another two days.
At noon the women and children returned to their
village, as a helicopter hovered overhead and
shellfire sounded all around. The army had already
taken Mahmoud Parizad, and with them was a small
contingent of jahsh. The first houses were
already in flames. The soldiers stripped the
villagers of whatever possessions they had taken
with them to the hills. Before torching the houses,
the troops also looted whatever they could lay their
hands on, even down to small domestic animals like
rabbits and pigeons. Then they bundled the villagers
into a line of waiting IFAs, and drove off north in
the direction of Chamchamal, away from the flames
that were now engulfing Mahmoud Parizad.
A few Jabari villagers did manage to escape the
advancing troops, sometimes with the help of advance
warning from their fellow Kurds in the jahsh.
This happened, for example, in Hanara, which lay
further north toward Chamchamal, and was linked by a
rough mountain path to the local PUK headquarters at
Takiyeh Jabari. There had been fighting in the
vicinity for years, and a number of villagers had
died in bombing raids. Whenever the injured were
taken to hospital, said one who survived, the
doctors told them that, "You deserve to be treated
like this because you are traitors and work with the
Iranians." The people of Hanara had grown accustomed
to a routine of spending their days in the hills
with their flocks, hiding when necessary in their
air-raid shelters, and returning to their homes only
at night to bake bread.
When Anfal came to Hanara--with helicopters and
fighter planes in the morning, and ground troops in
the evening--only a few peshmerga combatants
were present. The other villagers took the risk of
making contact with the jahsh units that they
spotted nearby, and pleaded with them not to destroy
Hanara. These jahsh did not take them into
custody, but instead urged everyone to flee. That
night, the villagers came down from the hills to
find nothing but smoldering rubble. Everything had
been bulldozed, including the mosque. Under cover of
darkness, the villagers set out on foot and on
tractors for the town of Leilan. "I turned off my
tractor's lights," one man from Hanara remembered.
"While I was driving to Leilan, it was all dark, but
I could see my village burning. I cried; I knew it
was the end of everything."21
In Leilan, the fleeing residents of Hanara met up
with refugees from two other villages. Townspeople
of Leilan, at great personal risk,sheltered all of
them until morning. From there, relatives succeeded
in spiriting away many of the villagers, taking them
to Kirkuk, where they hoped to find anonymity among
the crowds. Some also managed to vanish into the
crowds of displaced Kurds in the large new
resettlement camp of Shoresh, outside the town of
Chamchamal, which at this point was little more than
an open field. Here, they survived. As a result,
Hanara suffered proportionately less than many
Jabari villages as a result of Anfal. According to
survivors, twenty-seven people from a single family
disappeared from Golama; nearby Bangol lost
forty-one.22
Hanara's disappeared numbered only seventeen--the
Imam of the local mosque, and sixteen teenage
boys who surrendered to an especially notorious
mustashar named Tahsin Shaweis, whose empty
promise of amnesty was repeated on a wide scale in
the Qader Karam area. One survivor told us:
[The mustashar] told the villagers that there
was a general amnesty, and he gave his word of honor
that the youths would be protected. He would help
them reach a safe place if one could be found.
Otherwise, they should surrender and they would be
protected by the amnesty. A man brought the sixteen
young men, all relatives of his, to the jahsh
leader. None were peshmerga. After two or
three months, the father went back to Tahsin to ask
what had happened to the boys. Tahsin told him that
Ali Hassan al-Majid had talked to all the
mustashars and told them that no one should ask
about the fate of those who had disappeared.23
* * *
The Zangana tribal villages to the east fared even
worse. A large army task force, including scores of
tanks, set out from the nahya of Sengaw and
moved west, with the goal of subduing an important
PUK base in the Gulbagh valley, less than ten miles
east of Qader Karam. It took the army a whole day to
crush the resistance in this area, although it was
clear that the peshmerga were fighting
against impossible odds. Three of them died in
Qeitoul; another seven fell in Garawi. The PUK's
59th teep, together with survivors from the
55th teep in Qara Dagh, entrenched themselves
in Upper and Lower Gulbagh on April 10 and held off
the troops until nightfall. Two more peshmerga
were "martyred" here, and by 8:00 p.m. the survivors
realized that their position was hopeless and
withdrew to the south.24
The people of Qeitawan, a village of one hundred mud
houses on the Baserra river, were alerted to the
arrival of Anfal by the sound of government aircraft
bombing the nearby
village
of Garawi. Hoisting the small children on to their
shoulders, with only the clothes they stood up in,
they took flight. But the army dragnet caught up
with them before nightfall. "We were rich," said an
old woman who survived. "We had fruit, gardens, all
was looted. They took our tractors, water pipes,
even the lantern we used to light the rooms when it
was dark."25
Deciding that they had no alternative, her four
sons, aged thirty-five to forty-one, made their way
to Aliawa, an old destroyed village on the outskirts
of Qader Karam, where they gave themselves up to a
mustashar by the name of Sheikh Mu'tassem
Ramadan, of the Barzinji tribe.26
"But Mu'tassem handed them all over to the
government" and she never saw them again.
The people of nearby Qeitoul, by contrast, had taken
to the hills a full two weeks before Anfal reached
them, as soon as they heard newsof the fall of the
Sergalou-Bergalou PUK headquarters on March 19.
There were no peshmerga in the vicinity at
the time, and they felt unprotected. From their
hiding places above the village, they saw the
soldiers entering Qeitoul, preceded by jahsh
units and with helicopters providing air support.
After a brief debate they decided to make for the
town of Chamchamal, several hours walk to the north.
But they were captured in the mountains by troops
under the command of Brig. Gen. Bareq. The army
registered their names and sent them off in two
groups of trucks. One headed east toward
Suleimaniyeh; the other west, in the direction of
Kirkuk.
Many never returned.
Other villagers nearby were caught unawares in their
homes by the army's lightning attack. This happened,
for instance, in Qirtsa, a remote village of one
hundred houses on a dirt road beyond Qeitoul. Qirtsa
was a peaceful place--"We were living naturally, no
peshmerga, no government," remembered one
resident--and the attack, early in the morning,
found the villagers still in bed. Only a handful
managed to reach the safety of the mountains. Gen.
Bareq himself was in personal command of the troops
that came in that morning, rounding up all the
village men on the spot and handcuffing their hands
behind their backs. The men were trucked away first.
Then another army IFA departed, this one loaded up
with the villagers' livestock. Finally the women,
children and elderly were driven off, but only after
the soldiers had looted their homes. As they waited
for the IFAs and coasters that would take them away,
the women watched the village set afire and then
leveled with bulldozers. Sixty people disappeared
from Qirtsa, including every male under the age of
forty and many of the women. Another sixty vanished
from neighboring Qeitoul. "I am not sorry for myself
but for the young women," a female survivor of
Qirtsa told Middle East Watch. "We do not know what
happened to them. They were so beautiful. If they
were guilty, of what? Why? What had they done
wrong?"27
They had done nothing wrong, of course. They were
simply Kurds living in the wrong place at the wrong
time. But their fate may shed important light on one
of the great enigmas of the Anfal campaign.
Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, adult males who were
captured were disappeared en masse--as the standing
orders of June 1987 demanded. In certain clearly
defined areas, however, the women and
childrenvanished as well.28
In some cases, such as the Gulbagh Valley, these
mass disappearances occurred in areas where the
troops had encountered significant peshmerga
resistance.
* * *
The Plan of Campaign:
(3) Sengaw and Southern Germian
Some peshmerga had managed to escape to the
north, hiding out in the hills above the
Kirkuk-Chamchamal road. Others were driven in the
opposite direction, however, as army units swept
methodically southward from the nahya of
Sengaw to the village of Drozna, near the source of
the Awa Spi river. According to witnesses, close to
twenty villages were overrun and destroyed in this
one small area: the PUK bases at Darawar and
Banamurt (from which large numbers of people
reportedly disappeared); a nearby cluster of
villages including Upper and Lower Hassan Kanosh,
Tapa Arab, Kareza, Dobirya and three adjacent
hamlets, each called Penj Angusht29;
and a little further to the east, Hanzira,
Segumatan, Kelabarza, Darzila, Kalaga and Darbarou.30
The hundreds of villagers captured in this sector
were taken to Chamchamal; the nahya of Sengaw
would have been closer, but it had been destroyed
during the campaigns of 1987. The surviving
peshmerga were now driven hard up against the
southern edge of the Qara Dagh mountains, where the
Second Anfal had been fought to such devastating
effect. Thisconfined area, where the peshmerga
now also had to contend with other troop units
coming from the south, was one of the bloodiest
cockpits of the Anfal campaign.
At the southernmost extreme of Germian, where it
borders on the Arabized area of Diyala, the first
column of troops had set out from the town of Kifri
at 6:30 a.m. on April 9. Later that same morning,
other columns departed from their bases at Kalar,
Peibaz and Pungalle. Their basic strategy was the
same as in northern Germian: to launch a huge
enveloping movement from several directions at once;
to carry out mass arrests of all the civilians they
encountered; to destroy their villages; to funnel
escaping villagers toward the main road or to
prearranged collection points; and to channel the
surviving peshmerga into confined areas from
which there was no escape. The first step, however,
was to annihilate known PUK strongholds.
The initial target of the Kifri column, under the
command of a Brigadier General Sami of the First
Corps, was the large village of Omerbel, home to the
tribe of the same name.31
There had been a PUK base on the outskirts of
Omerbel ever since the founding of the organization
in 1976, and a hundred fighters were on hand when
the army attack began. This was a battle-hardened
peshmerga force, one which had managed to repel
a major army offensive the previous April. Although
the assault force had included tanks and armored
personnel carriers, it had been forced to retreat
after taking heavy casualties, and its failure was
emblematic of the regime's inability to achieve its
goals during the spring 1987 campaign.
Brig. Gen. Sami's force reached Omerbel by
mid-morning and immediately encountered fierce
resistance from peshmerga using the heavy
weapons that they had captured a year earlier.
According to the PUK commander who directed the
battle, the siege lasted for two whole days, and
this is borne out by the terse battlefield reports
from Istikhbarat.32
The army responded, however, as it had in Tazashar,
by sending advance units on a flanking mission to
destroy the villages that lay immediately beyond the
target. "1015 hrs: village of Chwar Sheikh stormed
and demolished," an April 10 cable reported. (The
village of Chwar Sheikh lay three miles to the
north.) Omerbel was now under siege from all sides,
and by nightfall the peshmerga, realizing
that further resistance was useless, had withdrawn.
The civilian population had already fled, but they
were quickly surrounded by troops in the mountains,
arrested and trucked away.
The main column continued northward, mopping up a
smaller PUK base at Tukin and then recording a
monotonous sequence of another twenty villages
"destroyed and burned" over the course of the next
week, as far north as the Awa Spi river. One of
these was Aliyani Taza ("New Aliyan"), a small
village of twenty homes, where a retreating band of
PUK fighters had taken up defensive positions.33
"Muhammad," a 32-year old member of the peshmerga
backing force, was at home when the troops arrived
on the morning of April 13.
The government was advancing from all directions, so
it was impossible for us to stay. We headed for Mil
Qasem village. We took our wives and children and
put them in tractor carts, and we took the animals,
and we put all our belongings on the carts. We
thought that the army was going to put us in tents
at the division base (firqa) on the other
side of the [Diyala] river. That is what we heard as
we were leaving. The peshmerga didn't stay;
they dispersed and went to the mountains.34
It took Muhammad and his family three days to reach
Mil Qasem, normally a journey of less than two
hours. From there the soldiers led them to the main
road, and ordered them to drive under armed guard to
the fort at Qoratu, headquarters of the army's 21st
Infantry Division. The fort would be the first stop
in Muhammad's journey through the bureaucracy of
Anfal.
Meanwhile, on April 11, a secondary task force under
the command of Captain Abed Awad of the 417th
Infantry Regiment had split off temporarily to take
care of Daraji, an outlying village a few miles to
the west of Omerbel. "The inhabitants who
surrendered to the column were evacuated to a
specially prepared camp close to the 21st Infantry
Division," that evening's intelligence report
noted--a rare official comment on the removal and
mass detention of civilians, and an explicit
reference to the fort at Qoratu.35
After pitching camp at Daraji that night, Capt.
Awad's task force retraced its steps the next
morning to rejoin the main column. On the way, it
paused to burn Belaga al-Kubra and Belaga al-Sughra,
which like Daraji were villages of the Daoudi tribe.
Affection for the peshmerga ran deep here,
according to Rashad, a farmer in his early 60s:
"They were all our sons and daughters, all our
brothers, all our people. We loved them." Rashad was
at home when the bombing and shelling began at
lunchtime. With the rest of the village, he and his
wife Fekri fled to the hills, but the aircraft
pursued them; Fekri was hit by gunfire and killed.
Those who survived the air attack were soon hunted
down by a contingent of jahsh headed by two
mustashars from Kifri, Sheikh Karim and Sa'id
Jaff, and trucked away--presumably also to the
"specially prepared camp" at Qoratu, the first step
in a journey that would end in their deaths. Among
the villagers who disappeared from Belaga al-Kubra
that day were Rashad's son Akbar, three nephews, two
nieces and their six young children, all aged from
one to seven.36
Such a heavy proportion of women and children among
the disappeared was characteristic of Anfal in the
Daoudi tribal area.
* * *
The first targets of the army units that left Kalar
on the morning of April 9, commanded by Major
Munther Ibrahim Yasin, were the twin villages of
Upper and Lower Tilako, where part of the shattered
firstmalband of the PUK had installed itself
after the rout in Qara Dagh.37
The troops' advance seems to have been relatively
painless, and by the early morning of April 11 both
Tilakos had been destroyed after a short firefight
that left just four soldiers wounded. This area,
inhabited by the Roghzayi branch of the Jaff tribe,
was poorly mapped, and helicopters were needed to
airlift troops into zones that were inaccessible by
road. Major Yasin's forces passed through several
villages whose existence was not even officially
recorded. But they destroyed them all regardless.
Few, if any, Kurdish tribal groups were worse hit by
Anfal than the Jaff-Roghzayi. The Roghzayi, one of a
half-dozen subdivisions of the Jaff, used to inhabit
more than one hundred villages in this area; all of
them were wiped out during Anfal. The head of the
Roghzayi, an elderly man named Mahmoud Tawfiq
Muhammad (b.1927), lived in Barawa, a village tucked
away in a narrow plain at the southeastern tip of
Germian, close to the Qara Dagh mountains and ringed
by important PUK bases. Although Barawa fell within
the Third Anfal theater, its inhabitants had been
terrified into flight by the chemical attacks that
took place at the end of March during the Second
Anfal.
Mahmoud was a prosperous man, and twenty-four
members of his immediate family lived in a large,
sprawling house surrounded by vineyards and the rich
gardens where they grew apples, figs and
pomegranates. Artillery fire and aerial bombing had
become part of daily life, and it took chemical
weapons to destroy their morale. After the attacks
on Sayw Senan and other targets in Qara Dagh at the
end of March, the people of Barawa held an urgent
meeting. Even though the PUK was present in the
village, Mahmoud remembered, "We decided to
surrender to the government, the father of the
people, since we were only poor farmers with no
relations to any political party. Instead, they did
what they did." His son added, "When we went to
them, the government captured us, looted everything
and Anfalized us. Nothing remained."38
The people of Barawa abandoned their homes and their
property and headed for another Roghzayi settlement
called Kulajo, a place of forty or fifty households
that lay several days' walk away over themountains,
to the southwest. Although the Third Anfal had not
yet officially begun, the hills were already full of
soldiers. At each checkpoint, the villagers
explained that they were making for the government
lines in order to surrender. The troops allowed them
to pass unhindered and eventually they reached
Kulajo, where they spent two nights safely. But on
the third day they saw that the village where they
had sought refuge was surrounded.
According to army intelligence reports, the Kalar
task force arrived at Kulajo at 11:15 on the morning
of April 13. Just before the troops got there, they
encountered a brief flurry of resistance on their
right flank, from a place called Tapa Sawz, "so this
village was crushed and destroyed, and four rifles
were confiscated."39
Taymour Abdullah Ahmad, a boy of twelve at the time
of Anfal, had lived in Kulajo since he was three.40
His father, a wheat farmer, owned a little land
there, and like all the men was a member of the
village's "backing force." Taymour was the eldest of
four siblings. Since the family's move from nearby
Hawara Berza, three daughters had been born. Unlike
their kinfolk fleeing from other villages in the
area, Taymour told Middle East Watch, the people of
Kulajo had stayed in their homes until the last
moment. But now, seeing the tanks and heavy
artillery advancing toward them from Tilako, an
hour's walk away across the plain, each family ran
up a white flag from its roof and took flight. The
men, including Taymour's father, concealed their
weapons in the village wells and other hiding
places. Taymour helped his parents to cram a few
hastily collected household possessions on to their
rickety tractor-drawn cart. Assuming that they would
return to their homes before too long, they planned
to take temporary refuge in the large new complex of
Sumoud, outside Kalar, where some relatives had been
relocated as a result of the village clearance
campaign of the previous spring. But the people of
Kulajo, and the fugitives from Barawa, found that
the army had left only a single exit route open for
them, a "funnel" as it were, that directed them
southtoward the village of Melistura, close to the
main Kifri-Kalar highway.41
The journey to Melistura took two hours by tractor;
they moved slowly because the vehicle was so heavily
laden.
Having destroyed Kulajo, the troops pressed on to
the north, followed by a line of bulldozers and
empty IFA trucks. They soon reached Hawara Berza,
Taymour's birthplace, and it, too, is recorded on
the daily intelligence report as "burned and
demolished."42
The next tiny hamlet, Kona Kotr, was abandoned by
the time the army arrived. All six of its families
had already fled. But they ran into an army patrol
in the mountains, and were also ordered to proceed
to Melistura. An officer promised that no one would
be harmed, and that they would all be rehoused in a
new complex that would be built soon. As it turned
out, however, thirty-four people were to disappear
from Kona Kotr's six households--a pattern that was
repeated across the Jaff-Roghzayi area. Mahmoud
Tawfiq Muhammad of Barawa, the elderly tribal head,
lost thirty-seven members of his extended family
from Barawa village--including his two wives and ten
children, aged two to fifteen, as well as his son
and daughter-in-law and their six small children.
Another twenty-five relatives disappeared from
neighboring Tapa Garus village, a peshmerga
base--more than half of them children.43
On April 15, in heavy rain, the troops of the Kalar
column reached the northernmost limit of their
operations, storming and burning Qulijan, a village
close to the Awa Spi river. One family fleeing
Qulijan ran into a contingent of jahsh in the
hills, headed by a local mustashar named
Fatah Karim Beg. "Your time is over," he told them.
"This is thetime of the government."44
They, too, were left with no option but to head
south toward the main highway.
The displaced villagers spent two days in Melistura,
unable to go any further, sleeping in the open
fields. The crowds swelled until it was impossible
to count them. "It was like the Day of Judgment,"
recalled one man from Kona Kotr who reached
Melistura safely with his family and his farm
animals. On the third day the soldiers instructed
everyone to move on. Army trucks were brought in
from the military base at Kalar, and those who had
their own means of transport were ordered to follow.
This rough caravan crossed the Diyala river into a
stony, arid area that had been forcibly Arabized in
1975 and then laid waste in the border clearances of
the late 1970s and the first years of the Iran-Iraq
War. Their destination was the fort at Qoratu,
headquarters of the Iraqi Army's 21st Infantry
Division--the "specially prepared camp," in other
words, that had been set up under Istikhbarat
control in accordance with the March 15 order of the
Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau Command.45
* * *
By about April 18 or 19, ten days into the Third
Anfal, the Kifri and Kalar columns had completed
their missions. All resistance between the
Kalar-Kifri highway and the Awa Spi river had been
crushed; not a stone of any village remained
standing. A little way to the east, the Peibaz and
Pungalle forces were able to report similar success.
The Peibaz task force, commanded by Lt. Col.
Muhammad Nazem Hassan, took a couple of days to
subdue PUK forces in the villages of Sofi Rahim and
Ali Wasman, and there were complaints that an
unnamed mustashar in charge of the 75th
National Defense Battalion had fled the field. But
once these problems had been surmounted, the rest of
the expedition proved uneventful, and after razing
another fourteen villages the task force returned to
base.
More serious obstacles lay in the path of the troops
operating out of Pungalle, a village some eight
miles south of the important Darbandikhan dam. On
its first day out, the task force ran into stiff
resistance from a peshmerga unit defending
the village of Sheikh Tawil, already the scene of a
fierce battle a few days earlier. The army
commander, Lt. Col. Salman Abd-al-Hassan of the 1st
Commando Regiment of the 17th Division, was wounded
in an early exchange of fire, and without him the
chain of command fell apart. One of the supporting
jahsh battalions, the 131st, retreated in
disarray; part of the army force, including another
officer, was cut off and pinned down by peshmerga
fire. The remainder pulled back two miles and called
in reinforcements from the 21st Division at Qoratu.
Even with the help of airstrikes, tanks,
missile-firing helicopters and heavy artillery, it
took the army five full days to subdue the fifty
peshmerga in Sheikh Tawil. But on the night of
April 13 the village's defenders received the order
to withdraw.46
At
14:30 hours the next day, the new commanding officer
of the army task force, one Major Salem, reported to
headquarters that Sheikh Tawil and the neighboring
village of Bustana had both been "occupied and
destroyed." Fifty-three families were duly reported
to have "returned to the national ranks."47
With this, the troops were free to drive deeper into
an area that had been partly abandoned two weeks
earlier by the large group of villagers headed by
Mahmoud Tawfiq Muhammad, tribal chief of the
Jaff-Roghzayi. The PUK, along with smaller
contingents of peshmerga from the Iraqi
Communist Party and the Islamic Movement, had now
been pinned back into their last redoubts in
Germian--the string of bases along the western flank
of the 5,900-foot Zerda mountain. This area had
already been pounded from the east during the Second
Anfal. Now it was under siege by troops advancing
from the west, and by helicopter-borne Special
Forces (Quwat Khaseh). It was impossible for
the peshmerga toresist any longer. The last
PUK defensive base at Zerda Likaw fell quickly;
thousands of villagers flocked to the village of
Faqeh Mustafa, where they were rounded up by troops
and jahsh and trucked away; others made the
arduous trek north along the spine of the Qara Dagh
mountains, accompanied by the last of the
peshmerga survivors. On the morning of April 20
the Pungalle task force returned to base, reporting
that all its objectives had been accomplished.48
* * *
The Collection Points
"These people are heading toward death; they cannot
take money or gold with them."
-- Iraqi Army officer during the looting of a
village.
Villages and small towns like Melistura, Faqeh
Mustafa and Maidan in the south of Germian, and
Aliawa and Leilan in the north, were the first
collection centers through which the fleeing
civilians were funneled. In some cases, their places
of origin were noted down at this stage and their
identity documents given some cursory examination.
After their initial capture, the vast bureaucratic
machinery of a number of specialized party, police
and intelligence agencies would be brought to bear
on the problem of the Kurdish "saboteurs." But at
this early stage of the operation, almost all those
in evidence on the government side were either
regular Army troops or members of the jahsh
militia. It would be inaccurate to describe the
initial collection points as "improvised," since the
Kurds were clearly directed toward them in a
coherent fashion. Yet at the same time places like
Aliawa and Melistura showed real signs of
porousness--the only point at which the efficiency
of the Anfal campaign seemed to break down. In part
this was no doubt because even the Iraqi Army's
considerable resources were stretched in dealing
with such huge numbers of prisoners; but in part it
also reflectedthe deeply ambiguous role that would
be played in the roundups by the jahsh. (For
a description of the jahsh, see above
pp.43-46.)
For the villagers swept up in the northern Germian
campaign, there were at least four principal
collection centers: Leilan, Aliawa, Qader Karam and
Chamchamal. Many captives were processed through two
or even three of these centers in succession.
Leilan, a small nahya to the southeast of
Kirkuk, appears to have lacked any sophisticated
infrastructure for handling the large numbers of
Kurdish prisoners who passed through. People fleeing
the Jabari tribal villages arrived in Leilan in a
number of different ways. Some made their way there
on their own initiative, perhaps hoping that a
town--even one of this modest size--would offer more
protection than the exposed countryside, as well as
food and water. But they were given a hostile
reception; as they approached Leilan on foot, said
one woman from the village of Qara Hassan, soldiers
fired into the air above their heads. Others, men,
were taken to Leilan from Qader Karam, where they
had gone to surrender, in the custody of the
jahsh. They were blindfolded and handcuffed.
On arrival at Leilan, the army took down basic
details on each newcomer. The women wept and begged
for mercy, but they were repeatedly told that they
had nothing to fear, that they would be granted land
by the government in a new complex and allowed to
lead a normal life. But the women grew fearful when
they were forcibly separated from their husbands,
sons and fathers, who were crammed into an animal
pen in the open air behind barbed wire. There were
"a huge number of people" there, said one witness;
"more than 2,000 men, women and children," according
to another. There were army and jahsh guards
everywhere, although security was less vigilant for
the women and children, and a number managed to slip
away in the initial confusion before their names
could be registered. At least one woman was allowed
to leave by army officers after being interrogated.
Those who remained slept in the open air for eight
or nine days, in the rain and hailstorms of early
April, before the men were driven away in army IFA
trucks to an unknown destination.
While Qader Karam itself served as the main
processing point for all the villages in its
jurisdiction, Aliawa, a destroyed village a little
to the west, was the primary collection center for
many people. During the Third Anfal it was the
headquarters of the notorious mustashar
Sheikh Mu'tassem Ramadan Barzinji, brother of the
governor of Suleimaniyeh.Mu'tassem's name came up
repeatedly in interviews with Anfal survivors, along
with those of five other local jahsh
commanders--Adnan and Sayed Jabari, Raf'at Gilli,
Qasem Agha and Tahsin Shaweis--as one of the
principal agents of the roundup and mass surrender
of villagers from central Germian.
Many factors drove the fleeing villagers--naive
expectations that this campaign was no different
from its predecessors, slender hopes of escape, fear
of being captured in a prohibited area, terror of
the troops who were burning their villages en masse.
But a further inducement was now added: the promise
of amnesty for those who gave themselves up. Using
loudspeakers attached to the mosques of Qader Karam,
the authorities repeatedly broadcast the message
that all villagers had three days to turn themselves
in--from Sunday April 10 through Tuesday April 12.
During that time, they would even be permitted to
return to their hiding places in the hills and
recover the possessions with which they had fled.
All the males who gave themselves up would be
obliged only to serve a tour of duty in the jahsh.
News of the offer spread quickly among the refugees,
as townspeople spread word to their relatives that
they had nothing to fear. Jahsh units under
Sheikh Mu'tassem and the other commanders also
dispersed into the hills. "They said that the
government would not harm the men who surrendered,
and that they would be given jahsh papers.
They told them to bring their families and
surrender," reported one survivor.49
Mu'tassem's jahsh units detained a large
group of male prisoners for two days in Aliawa,
where army personnel registered their names. "There
were thousands of men there," according to one who
passed through this transit facility, "peshmerga,
deserters, draft dodgers and ordinary civilians from
peshmerga-controlled villages." Here, the
mustashars' message was repeated: the men would
be taken to jahsh headquarters in Chamchamal,
an hour's drive to the north. There they would be
issued with jahsh identity papers before
being returned to Qader Karam. At that point they
were to go and find their families and their
livestock, prior to relocation in a
government-controlled mujamma'a.
On the second or third day of the roundup, Aliawa
received a personal visit from Brig. Gen. Bareq,
commander of military operationsin the Third Anfal
theater. In his presence, the prisoners were filmed.
According to another witness, a similar scene
unfolded, probably on the same day, at the police
station in the center of Qader Karam, where several
hundred prisoners were also being held.50
This time a helicopter touched down on the adjoining
landing pad, and three men stepped out--Brig. Gen.
Bareq, First Army Corps Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashem, and
Ali Hassan al-Majid himself. Again, there was a
videotaping session, and this footage was later
broadcast on national television as film of
"captured Iranian saboteurs." The news clip was
broadcast repeatedly over the following weeks, to
the point where the National Security Council began
to complain that its use was becoming
counterproductive: people were beginning to see that
these were ordinary villagers, not peshmerga
fighters.51
Hundreds of other prisoners--as many as 2,000
according to one estimate--were briefly detained in
the deserted complex of Qalkhanlou, just outside
Qader Karam, which had been built originally to
house relocated villagers from the spring 1987
campaign. Hundreds more were held in an elementary
school in Qader Karam, where the sexes were
separated. "I was put in a room with many other
older women," one woman remembered. "I was the only
young woman there. I was very scared so that I
covered my face with my scarf. I did not want to see
anybody. We were held there for two days. Through
the window I couldsee the soldiers blindfolding and
beating the men."52
After two days, a military bus came and took the
older women to Chamchamal, where they were abandoned
in the streets, far from their homes and with no
means of sustenance. But this was an exceptional
case, and the reasons for it remain obscure.53
According to one of the very few young male
survivors from the Qader Karam area, "The people who
surrendered to the government all disappeared. Saved
were those who managed to stay in the hills, or went
into hiding with relatives in the towns, or were
saved by relatives in the jahsh, or paid a
bribe to the local mustashar."54
Qader Karam itself did not survive Anfal. Once the
town had served its purpose as a holding center,
soldiers and Ba'ath Party members came from house to
house to register the names of the inhabitants. At
the same time, Amn warned the population over
loudspeakers that no one should shelter Anfal
fugitives, as happened in a number of towns. The
people of Qader Karam were given fifteen days to
evacuate their homes and move to new housing in the
Shoresh complex, outside Chamchamal, and in early
May the town was bulldozed. However, in a telling
illustration of the logic of Anfal, these people
were not otherwise harmed. They were even paid
compensation of 1,500 dinars ($4,500) each for the
destruction of their homes. The population of Qader
Karam, after all, had been recorded in the October
1987 census. Despite its location in the middle of
the war zone, the town was still, in bureaucratic
terms, within "the national ranks."55
Chamchamal was the last of the smaller-scale
detention places for the captured villagers of
northern Germian. A large town and qadha,
itis one of the few population centers that remains
intact in this part of Iraqi Kurdistan. For those
who were trucked to Chamchamal from some other
preliminary assembly point such as Leilan or Qader
Karam, the destination was either the headquarters
of the local army brigade (liwa') or the
headquarters of the jahsh.
Some male detainees were brought here by bus, and
soldiers came aboard to take additional statements
from them. Again, the prisoners were reassured that
an amnesty had been declared and they had nothing to
fear. But the mood was ominous, and through the bus
windows the detainees could see thousands of hungry,
ragged men, women and children on the army base.
Other men were roughly transported to Chamchamal in
open-backed army IFA trucks. "We suffered much at
the hands of the guards," said one. "We were
blindfolded and had our hands tied, and we were made
to get on and off the trucks several times. The
trucks had a door and one step, but because we could
not see or use our hands, many fell. It was
chaotic."56
"At the brigade headquarters," another man added,
"we were literally thrown out of the trucks, and
they took our names and addresses."57
After the stop at the army brigade headquarters, it
became apparent that other government authorities
were becoming involved for the first time. Winding
through the streets of Chamchamal, the prisoners
soon found themselves outside the offices of Amn,
the feared secret police agency.
At this point, an almost unprecedented act of mercy
and solidarity occurred. Anfal witnessed many quiet
acts of individual courage, both by members of the
jahsh and by Kurdish townspeople, and these
saved many lives. But nothing quite compares to the
response of the townspeople of Chamchamal as they
saw their fellow Kurds being trucked through their
streets. At enormous risk to their own lives--and in
some cases at the cost of their lives--the
townspeople staged a spontaneous unarmed revolt to
liberate the detainees.58
The jahsh undoubtedly had a hand in the
Chamchamal protest, and chance also played its part.
The trucks that were being used to ferry the
prisoners from the Chamchamal brigade headquarters
were not military IFAs but commandeered civilian
vehicles, with civilian drivers. Surreptitiously,
the jahsh guards persuaded a number of these
drivers to free their women prisoners. The drivers
seized their opportunity to do so in the uproar that
ensued when townspeople stoned the trucks and
smashed their windows. "Even young children put
stones in their dresses, threatening to break the
windows," said Perjin, a 20-year old woman from
Qirtsa village, who was able to break free.59
The soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, and
even called in MIG fighter planes and helicopter
gunships to rocket the crowd. "My dress was full of
bullets from the Bareq soldiers," Perjin said.
According to one account, five people died and
twelve were injured.
The uprising seemed at first to have been a partial
success. Several dozen people escaped, and the
residents of Chamchamal offered them refuge--"for
the sake of humanity." But this was not the end of
the story. Those fugitives who were later hunted
down by Amn agents were publicly executed,
and in a macabre detail that recurs in many
testimonies from Iraq, the surviving family members
were even required to pay the cost of the bullets.60
On her second day in hiding in Chamchamal, Perjin
watched a report about Anfal on the Iraqi TV news
program. This was almost certainly the film shot
while Ali Hassan al-Majid and his military
commanders were visiting the police station at Qader
Karam on April 10. It showed a group of "captured
Iranian agents who belonged to [Jalal] Talabani."
Despite his blindfold, Perjin thought she recognized
her husband, Fareq, and a number of other men from
her village. It was the last time she ever saw him
alive.
* * *
In the southern part of Germian, there were two
principal counterparts to these holding centers.
Kurds who were captured from the Daoudi tribal area,
as well as other villagers who fled into this sector
in the wake of the chemical attack on the PUK base
at Tazashar, were taken first to an empty youth
center in Tuz Khurmatu. Some had already been
separated by sex at their point of capture; those
who had been trucked in together were now placed in
two separate buildings at the youth center and held
there for periods that ranged from three days to
about a week. The building that housed women and
children contained about 4,000 people, according to
one survivor who was able to recognize people from
at least a dozen Daoudi villages.
As in Leilan, a few managed to escape with the help
of the jahsh, who were placed on guard duty.
A sympathetic mustashar even reportedly
smashed one of the school's windows, allowing many
women and children to escape at night. His action
almost certainly saved their lives. The regular
soldiers, most of whom were Arabs, behaved much more
harshly, stripping the women of any money and
valuables they were carrying and telling them that
"they deserved all they got because they had
supported the peshmerga." Those who
disappeared forever from Tuz Khurmatu after the
trucks came to collect them included hundreds of
women and children. One elderly woman from a Daoudi
village never again saw her brother, husband, father
and cousin--or her two daughters-in-law and the
elder one's six small children. Her younger
daughter-in-law, "a very pretty girl called Leila,
newly married," was dragged away by soldiers. She
clung to her mother-in-law's dress, while the older
women pleaded with the soldiers not to take her. But
they shoved the old woman aside, and Leila was never
seen again.61
For the rest of southern Germian, including the
villages of the Jaff-Roghzayi, the main processing
center was the 21st Infantry Division base at
Qoratu, a large, ugly Soviet-designed fort typical
of those erected throughout Iraqi Kurdistan during
the 1980s. After the Kurdish uprising in
Suleimaniyeh in September 1991, Qoratu was dynamited
by Iraqi troops as they retreated to a new frontline
further south. Two months later, the Iraqi writer
Kanan Makiya visited the fort. On the side facingthe
Iranian border, he saw "forty, maybe fifty wagons of
the sort Kurdish farmers hook up to the back of
their tractors when carting feed or livestock." It
was in just such a high-sided, wooden cart that
Taymour, the 12-year old from the village of Kulajo,
had arrived with his parents and three small
sisters. Makiya went on, "Piles of faded dresses and
sharwal, the traditional Kurdish trousers,
were tumbling now from these wagons, or lay rotting
amid the dirt and clumped yellow grass. Everywhere
were plastic soles, all that remained of so many
pairs of shoes."62
"There were at least ten thousand people in the
fort," one villager recalled to Middle East Watch.
"They were all tired, hungry and frightened. Nobody
knew what was going on but I knew something horrible
was in the making. No one could talk to each other.
We were all silent and waiting to see what would
happen."63
Some of the prisoners stayed in Qoratu for just a
single night, during which they received neither
food nor water; others said they were held there on
a starvation diet for longer periods: "We stayed in
tents at the division headquarters for three days.
We received one piece of bread per person per day,
and water. There were countless people there. The
army registered all their names and asked them
questions: the name of their tribe, whether they
were with the peshmerga or the government.
Everybody was afraid to say that they belonged to
the peshmerga. They all said that they were
farmers or shepherds."64
Taymour himself, recalled the scene at Qoratu
clearly four years later. "All the people from the
Kalar area villages were there," he said. "All the
halls were filled. There were perhaps fifty halls,
and each hall held from 100 to 150 people. We had
very little food: soup, bread and water. Families
were allowed to stay together. The guards all seemed
to be army, all dressed in khaki. They didn't speak
to the detainees. We were afraid that we were going
to be killed, and everyone was talking toeach other
about this, because we knew this government campaign
was different from the previous ones. The jahsh
had lied to us."65
* * *
The Ambiguous Role of the Jahsh
The mustashars had indeed lied--or at least
made promises that they were in no position to keep.
A final word must be said here about the
contradictory role of the jahsh forces during
Anfal. As accomplices of the army, they undoubtedly
helped send thousands of Kurds to their deaths.
Jahsh units performed a wide range of appointed
tasks. They protected army convoys and went into the
villages ahead of the troops as advance scouting
parties--or as cannon fodder. They combed the
hillsides for those who had fled the army's advance
and brought them down into custody, often flagrantly
breaking their promises of safe conduct. They lied
to the refugees, promising them the benefits of an
amnesty that never existed--promising them, in
effect, that this was to be just another in the
government's unending series of resettlement
campaigns, as a result of which they would enjoy the
blessings of "modern life" in a
government-controlled mujamma'a. On occasion,
the jahsh also reportedly made false claims
to army officers that villagers in their custody had
been "captured in combat"--either to curry favor or,
perhaps, in the hope of some monetary or material
reward.
And material reward there was: It was the jahsh
who benefited most directly from the application of
Anfal in the literal, Koranic sense of the word--as
the "spoils of the infidel." As the standing orders
for the Anfal campaign had stipulated, "Every item
captured by advisers (mustashars) of the
National Defense Regiments or their fighters shall
be given to them free with the exception of heavy,
supportive and medium weapons."66
"Give the men to us and you can have the property,"
washow a Ba'ath Party "comrade" translated this to
one jahsh leader.67
"The peshmerga are infidels and they shall be
treated as such," a former mustashar was told
in a seminar run by army intelligence officers. "You
shall take any peshmerga's property that you
may seize while fighting them. Their wives are
lawfully yours (hallal), as are their sheep
and cattle."68
And indeed the jahsh looted the abandoned
villages mercilessly before they were burned and
bulldozed to the ground. The account given by one
villager was typical of many:
My husband and I were captured in a cave where we
were hiding by jahsh, who did not say
anything, tell us anything or give us any reason.
They just asked for my husband's ID, took it and did
not return it. The jahsh took everything from
my house while I was standing there, everything,
including all the furnishings. I did not have any
money, but they took my jewelry and the animals and
the tractor and loaded everything into a truck. They
cleaned out all the houses in the village in the
same way. Then I saw them burning the items that
they found inside the house that were not useful to
the soldiers and jahsh, like people's
clothes. They used kerosene to set fire to the
houses; I saw them.69
But while many jahsh assiduously performed
the duties assigned to them, it is also true that
the Iraqi regime's old doubts about the political
reliability of the Kurdish militia were
well-founded, and that individual jahsh
members were responsible for spiriting many
peopleaway to safety in the towns and complexes
during the initial sweeps. It was only because of
the jahsh, in fact, that this villager,
having seen her home looted and burned, was able to
survive at all. "Other jahsh guarded the
Zils," she went on.70
"They told the army at checkpoints that what was in
the covered Zils was sheep. The jahsh saved
most of the women and children from this village in
that way."
It seems likely that some of the jahsh's acts
of clemency were inspired by bribery, a simple
appeal to the same venal motives that also led to
their looting sprees. One young man from the Zangana
village of Qeitawan, in the nahya of Qader
Karam, recalled how, at great personal risk, he
persuaded the jahsh to help: "I was able to
save many family members, women and children, taking
them in groups to Kirkuk, Qader Karam and so forth.
At the checkpoints I bribed the jahsh with
yogurt and food and everything else I had."71
But other testimonies suggest that the most
plausible reason for the jahsh's occasional
flashes of generosity was that they sincerely
believed the lies that they told the villagers,
having been told the same lies themselves. Middle
East Watch did locate one former mustashar
whose unit, or fawj, had been informed by the
army that "they were going to arrest and kill or
bring in men from the villages." But this was an
isolated testimony, and it came from a village in
the northern governorate of Dohuk, scene of the
eighth and final stage of Anfal, during which the
army's standing orders appear to have been modified
in several important respects. A much more
widespread sentiment, certainly representative of
the Third Anfal in Germian, was that the
mustashars and the men under their command
remained ignorant of the regime's intentions until
the roundups had reached an advanced stage.
"I was never told by the army where the captured
villagers were being sent," said a mustashar
from the Jaff-Roghzayi tribe, whose unit served in a
number of villages in southern Germian, including
Kulajo, the home of Taymour Abdullah Ahmad. "I
always thought they were beingtaken to the south.72
I never thought that they might be slaughtered. All
the jahsh did was to assist the army in
finding the best ways to get to the villagers, and
to capture the escaping villagers and deliver them
to the army." One day, he asked an officer what was
to happen to the captives. "We are taking them to
modern villages," the man replied. But this
mustashar became suspicious later, when he had
occasion to visit an army camp (presumably Qoratu)
and saw large crowds of detainees there. Again he
asked an officer what was going on. This man
answered, "It is none of your business." When the
mustashar's suspicions turned to conviction, he
says he was filled with remorse: "We spit on
ourselves for taking part in this operation; it was
a crime."73
For some members of the jahsh, the moment of
realization appears to have come at the processing
center in Tuz Khurmatu. Their change of heart was
quite visible to the prisoners. "When the
mustashars saw that the men and women were
separated from each other," said one former
detainee, "they knew what was going to happen, and
they were upset. The mustashars tried to take
the women away secretly."74
Another of the Warani villagers had been captured by
jahsh who took her to Tuz Khurmatu and handed
her over to the army. Soon, however, "the men were
separated from the women and packed into trucks that
took them to Tikrit. When we asked what was
happening, the officers said that Tikrit would be
more comfortable for them." At this the jahsh
became suspicious. "Some of them came to rescue the
same people they had previously captured and handed
over to the army. One jahsh freed ten women
in this way. Then they took us to their homes and
hid us."75
But the real question about the role of the jahsh
is what power they actually enjoyed. In the
operational hierarchy of Anfal, the Kurdishmilitia
was at the bottom of the pyramid, lower than the
most ordinary foot soldier of the regular army.
Until the appointment of Ali Hassan al-Majid,
membership in the jahsh had conferred some
measure of protection. Amn documents on
village destructions carried out during 1986
explicitly spare those whose menfolk were jahsh.76
Now, however, the rules had changed, and a number of
pro-regime villages were burned and bulldozed along
with those of the other Kurds.
The promises that the jahsh made to the
captured villagers, even if sincerely meant, were
empty. A prosperous farmer from the Jaff-Roghzayi
village of Qulijan in southern Germian, fleeing his
burning village, sought out the forces of Fatah
Karim Beg, the most powerful mustashar in the
district, for help. He was told to have no fear. "He
issued me with a paper saying that I was with him,
the mustashar, and that I had seven families
with me. He told me that if I carried this letter
the army would leave me alone."77
Comforted by this encounter, the farmer made his way
down to the main road to Sarqala, where a group of
soldiers ordered him to halt. With confidence, he
handed them the mustashar's letter of safe
conduct. "Who is this Fatah Beg?" a soldier asked.
And using an expression that is grossly insulting in
Arabic, he sneered, "He is my shoe." The letter was
worthless, and the farmer was taken with all the
other detainees to the 21st Division fort at Qoratu.
* * *
Several former mustashars have given Middle
East Watch accounts of a number of meetings in Erbil
and Kirkuk with Ali Hassan al-Majid and the
commanders of the Army's First and Fifth Corps. At
one of these meetings, in August 1988, al-Majid told
the mustashars that the Anfal campaign was
now to be taken into Badinan, the mountainous
northern stronghold of Mas'oud Barzani's KDP. But on
the personal orders of Saddam Hussein, the Badinan
Kurds were to be given one final chance to "return
to the national ranks." Clemency would be shown to
anysaboteurs who surrendered from that
area--presumably until military operations began in
the north.78
Al-Majid asked for questions, and several men rose
to speak. Among them was Sheikh Mu'tassem Ramadan
Barzinji, the powerful and widely feared
mustashar from Qader Karam who had handed over
thousands of civilians to the army. According to
another mustashar who was present that day in
Erbil's Hall of the Cultural Masses, Sheikh
Mu'tassem appeared skeptical. Would the promise be
honored, he asked, given what had happened in the
earlier stages of Anfal?79
But the qualms of even such an influential Kurdish
collaborator, a man who had done all that the regime
had demanded of him, were contemptuously flicked
aside. Al-Majid told Mu'tassem that he was "a black
spot on a white mirror"; if he did not sit down,
al-Majid would have him taken away and executed,
"even if Allah intercedes." Before the Secretary
General of the Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau, even
God Himself had limited powers.
______
1 The town of
Peibaz, on the main road from Kalar to Darbandikhan,
is also known as Bawanur--"Father of Light"--in
honor of a holy man who is buried there and whose
shrine is said to emit light each Friday evening.
2 Middle East
Watch interview with former PUK commander in
Germian, Suleimaniyeh, March 28, 1993.
3 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, May 19, 1992. By
this time, of course, there was absolutely no
incentive for draft dodgers to turn themselves in,
given the recent decrees establishing the death
penalty for desertion. Public and even televised
executions of deserters were commonplace. See above
p.66.
4 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, July 25, 1992.
5 A "secret and
urgent" field report from Eastern Region military
intelligence to the Northern Bureau, for example,
describes a dawn raid on April 26 on the abandoned
village of Kilar. Three armored companies of the
444th Infantry Regiment encircled the village to
search for "families that had infiltrated the
village as a result of the Third Anfal Operation."
All the fighting in this sector had ended at least a
week earlier.
6 There are
reliable reports of a chemical attack on the village
of Tazashar (nahya Qader Karam). For details,
see below pp.134-135. Middle East Watch has also
received unconfirmed reports of a gas attack during
Anfal on Khalo Baziani (Qara Hassan).
7 These cables,
generally headed "Umala Iran synopsis," are
dated April 9-27, 1988. They were found bound
together with a lace in a folder whose cover bears
the handwritten title, "The File on the Third Anfal
Operation (Qader Karam Sector), April 9, 1988. For
all its detail, it is apparent that this is far from
a comprehensive file on the Germian theater. Most of
the documents originate with Kalar Military
Intelligence or the Second Army Corps and describe
operations in the southern part of Germian. A
handful from Tuz Khurmatu and Chamchamal
Istikhbarat report on actions further to the
north. Some of these documents are reproduced in the
February 19, 1993 report on Iraq by the Special
Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights,
loc. cit., pp.102-117.
8 Second Corps
cable no.10724 of April 14, 1988, describing the
actions of the Kifri column. "After occupying the
village of Aziz Qader, the force inside the village
found nothing but furniture inside homes and
documents and pictures of saboteurs and the
charlatan Khomeini. It was burned."
9 Kalar
Istikhbarat cable no. 10687 to Eastern Region
Istikhbarat, April 13, 1988; Second Corps cable
no. 11386 to Northern Bureau Command, April 21,
1988.
10 Amn
Kalar, "secret and urgent" cable no. 19442, August
20, 1988. The order to "isolate prohibited areas
from tilling and burn them" was given by Northern
Bureau communique no. 3821 of July 3, 1988.
11 The task force
was made up of the 65th Brigade of the Special
Forces, supported by the 58th and 200th National
Defense Battalions (jahsh). Tuz Khurmatu
Istikhbarat cable no.10340 of April 10, 1988.
The cable complains that another jahsh unit,
the 25th, "has withdrawn from the task, having
failed to carry out its mission." Such complaints of
the shortcomings of the Kurdish militia occur
frequently in these cables.
12 Paragraph 4 of
Northern Bureau Command directive SF/4008 of June
20, 1987, cited above at p.82.
13 Middle East
Watch interviews with former residents of Warani,
Benaslawa complex and Suleimaniyeh, April 19 and May
12, 1992.
14 According to
numerous witnesses interviewed by Middle East Watch,
it was a common practice for peshmerga and
ordinary villagers to tune in to frequencies used by
the armed forces. One PUK commander in Germian was
unsure whether chemicals were used in Tazashar, but
eyewitness accounts, together with frequent
references in other interviews, offer persuasive
evidence that such an attack did occur. Middle East
Watch interviews with former residents of Sheikh
Hamid and Kani Qader Khwaru, Bayinjan complex and
Suleimaniyeh, May 19 and July 25, 1992, and March
19, 1993. It is also possible that there was a
second chemical attack on April 10. A sheep farmer
in the nearby village of Talau reported that
peshmerga survivors fled in that direction and
were bombed by aircraft at about midnight. According
to this man, thechemicals killed ten people in
Talau. Middle East Watch interview, Daratou complex,
April 18, 1992.
15 Tuz Khurmatu
Istikhbarat cable no. 10334, April 10, 1988.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, May 19, 1992.
17 General Bareq,
a "hero of al-Qadissiyah," (the Iran-Iraq War), was
now in charge of a Special Forces detachment
guarding the Kirkuk oilfields. Other witnesses also
reported sighting him at Glazerda Mountain, during
the Second Anfal. According to a former Iraqi police
chief, Bareq was also the commander of military
campaigns against Shi'a dissidents in the south in
the mid-1980s. (Middle East Watch interview with
Hamdi Abd-al-Majid Gilli, Suleimaniyeh, July 24,
1992.) Bareq was reportedly executed in 1991 on
suspicion of being involved in a plot to overthrow
President Saddam Hussein.
18 Cable no.
10488 from Chamchamal Istikhbarat to Eastern
Region Istikhbarat headquarters, April 11,
1988. There are unconfirmed reports of one chemical
attack in this sector against the village of Khalo
Baziani.
19 Middle East
Watch interview with a former inhabitant of Ibrahim
Ghulam, Suleimaniyeh, June 28, 1992.
20 The Zangana
are one of the largest non-confederated tribes in
Kurdistan, with settlements on either side of the
Iran-Iraq border. The Jabari were not protected
during Anfal by the pro-regime stance of their two
mustashars, Sayed and Adnan Jabari. For
general information on Kurdish tribes and tribal
confederacies, see Izady, The Kurds,
pp.74-86.
21 Both
quotations are from Middle East Watch interviews
with a former inhabitant of Hanara, Suleimaniyeh,
May 21 and June 28, 1992.
22 Middle East
Watch interviews, Jedideh Zab complex, Erbil, May 2
and July 16, 1992.
23 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 21, 1992. Many of
the most hated mustashars, including Tahsin
Shaweis himself, later changed sides and joined the
peshmerga during the March 1991
uprising--creating a further twist in the
complicated landscape of Kurdish politics.
24 Middle East
Watch interview with a former PUK commander who took
part in the Gulbagh Valley fighting, Kalar, March
30, 1993. The fall of Upper and Lower Gulbagh was
reported in Chamchamal Istikhbarat cable no.
10488 of April 11, 1988.
25 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 21, 1992.
26 One of the
most feared of the mustashars, Sheikh
Mu'tassem was the brother of Sheikh Ja'far Barzinji,
a Saddam Hussein loyalist who was governor of
Suleimaniyeh and later became chairman of the
official Executive Council of the Kurdistan
Autonomous Region.
27 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992.
28
For a sense of these regional patterns, see Appendix
D, p.365.
29 A U.S. Defense
Mapping Agency map of this sector, sheet no. 5060
III, shows the villages of Penj Angusht-i Haji
Muhammad, Penj Angusht-i Haji Muhammad Agha and Penj
Angusht-i Sheikh Mustafa. Such multiple naming is
very common in rural Iraqi Kurdistan.
30 Middle East
Watch interviews with former residents of Hassan
Kanosh and Drozna, Shoresh complex and Suleimaniyeh,
May 9 and June 28, 1992. Resool lists all of these
villages among a total of sixty-seven destroyed in
the nahya of Sengaw during Anfal.
31 The general's
full name is not given. The Kifri column was made up
of troops from the 417th and 444th Infantry
regiments, supported by the 100th, 131st and 197th
National Defense Battalions. Kalar Istikhbarat
cables to Eastern Region Istikhbarat, nos.
10212 and 10238, April 9, 1988.
32 Middle East
Watch interview with PUK regional commander,
Suleimaniyeh, August 1, 1992; supporting details
provided by an interview with a former inhabitant of
Omerbel, Banaslawa complex, July 7, 1992.
33 Aliyani Taza
is reported as having been "burned and destroyed" at
08:30 a.m. on April 13, in a "secret and urgent"
cable from Kalar Istikhbarat to Eastern
Region headquarters, no.10687 of April 13, 1993.
34 Middle East
Watch interview, Aliyani Taza village, March 30,
1993. Identity concealed, at subject's request.
35 Cable from
Kalar Istikhbarat to Eastern Region
Istikhbarat headquarters, no. 10468, April 11,
1988.
36 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
37 The officer is
identified in Kalar Istikhbarat to Eastern
Region Istikhbarat headquarters, cable no.
10212, April 9, 1988.
38 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
39 Cable from
Kalar Istikhbarat to Eastern Region
Istikhbarat headquarters, no. 10687, April 13,
1988.
40 The story of
Taymour--for a long time the only known survivor of
an Anfal execution squad--has been widely reported.
The account given here is from a Middle East Watch
interview, Sumoud complex, July 29, 1992.
41 Villagers from
other parts of southern Germian were reportedly
funneled toward the town of Maidan, on the far side
of the highway.
42 The army
recorded the exact time of the burning of Hawara
Berza as 17:27 hours on April 17. Cable from Kalar
Istikhbarat to Eastern Region Istikhbarat
headquarters, no. 11180, April 19, 1988.
43 Middle East
Watch interviews, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
44 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
Several other witnesses name Fatah Beg as the
commander of jahsh forces in this area;
according to one, he was from the Bagzada branch of
the Jaff tribe.
45 Northern
Bureau Command letter no. 297 of March 15, 1988.
46 Middle East
Watch interview with a peshmerga who fought
at Sheikh Tawil, Kalar, March 31, 1993.
47 This
euphemistic terminology continued to crop up in
official communications during the Anfal period,
even though many of those captured were now to be
killed rather than resettled. Cables from Second
Corps Istikhbarat to Northern Bureau Command
and other agencies, nos. 10780 and 10915, April 15,
1988. Bustana, it should be recalled, was the site
of the surrender in late March of people fleeing
from the village of Omer Qala as a result of the
Second Anfal operation in Qara Dagh.
48 Cable from
Second Corps Istikhbarat to Northern Bureau
Command and other agencies, no. 11386, April 21,
1992.
49 Several
survivors told similar stories about Sheikh
Mu'tassem, including this witness from the village
of Kani Qader Khwaru. Middle East Watch interview,
Suleimaniyeh, July 25, 1992.
50 Middle East
Watch interview with a former resident of Khidr
Reihan, Shoresh complex, July 1, 1992.
51 May 2, 1988
letter, reference no. L. Sh. D/397, classified
"personal and secret," from the Secretary of the
National Security Council (Majlis al-Amn al-Qawmi)
to the Interior Ministry, Office of the Minister,
with copies to the Northern Affairs Committee of the
Revolutionary Command Council and to the General
Security Directorate. The National Security Council
is a high-level advisory group headed by President
Saddam Hussein. The letter also warns that
"underground cells of the PUK" may organize an
anti-government demonstration in Kalar to protest
the fact that "saboteurs who returned to the
national ranks along with their families" are being
detained. "Returning to the national ranks"
continues to appear in army documents reporting the
capture of civilians during Anfal operations. The
National Security Council's May 2 warning clearly
implied that Kurdish villagers had begun to suspect
that the term had now become a euphemism concealing
a more sinister intent.
52 Middle East
Watch interview with a former resident of Sheikh
Hamid village, Bayinjan complex, May 18, 1992.
53 Middle East
Watch is aware of other groups being spared either
because of a bribe being paid or as the result of
some other private arrangement with a local
official, but neither appears to have happened in
this case.
54 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, September 12, 1992.
55 The
destruction of Qader Karam was described to Middle
East Watch by a former resident; interview in
Shoresh complex, June 29, 1992. In April 1988,
according to this witness, Shoresh was merely an
open field, and those relocated there built their
own homes under the supervision of a government
engineer.
56 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, September 12, 1992.
57 Middle East
Watch interview, Shoresh complex, July 1, 1992.
58 A similar
partial escape in fact occurred the following month
in the town of Koysinjaq, during the Fourth Anfal,
but on a much smaller scale.
59 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992. After
the Chamchamal revolt, the authorities carried out
house-to-house searches for those who had eluded the
Anfal dragnet. It did not take a revolt to provoke
this treatment: Similar searches were conducted in
Kirkuk, Suleimaniyeh, Tuz Khurmatu and the large
Sumoud complex, outside Kalar in southern Germian.
All witnesses concur in identifying those who
performed the searches as agents of Amn.
60 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, April 1, 1993.
61 Middle East
Watch interview with a family from the nahya
of Naujul, Benaslawa complex, Erbil, April 19, 1992.
62 Makiya, "The
Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate
the Kurds," Harper's Magazine, May 1992,
p.55.
63 Middle East
Watch interview with a villager from Karim Bassam,
Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
64 Middle East
Watch interview, Zammaki complex, July 24, 1992.
65 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, July 29, 1992.
66 Northern
Bureau Command directive no. SF/4008 of June 20,
1987. See above p.82.
67 The remark was
overheard by a villager during a conversation
between a military officer and a mustashar
named Sa'id Agha in the village of Garawan (nahya
Rawanduz). Middle East Watch interview, Garawan,
April 29, 1992.
68 Middle East
Watch interview with former mustashar
Muhammad Ali Jaff, Suleimaniyeh, May 11, 1992.
69 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, May 18, 1992.
This witness was from Galnaghaj, a village destroyed
in early May during the Fourth Anfal, but the
essential details in her account were repeated in
many other testimonies from different stages of the
Anfal campaign.
70 Zils were an
earlier Soviet model of the East German-manufactured
IFA army truck, and the term is commonly used by
Kurds to refer to either--even though by the time of
Anfal IFAs were more widely used. We have generally
referred to these vehicles as IFAs.
71 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 21, 1992.
72 As had
happened, initially, in other words, during the
well-known deportations of the Barzanis and others
in the 1970s.
73 Middle East
Watch interview with Muhammad Ali Jaff,
Suleimaniyeh, May 11, 1992.
74 Middle East
Watch interview with a former resident of the Daoudi
village of Warani, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992.
75 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992.
76 A handwritten
December 1986 letter from the Northern Affairs
Committee of the Revolutionary Command Council
reports on the destruction of three villages, but
approves a First Army Corps recommendation to spare
others because their inhabitants are members of the
jahsh.
77 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
78 A memorandum
from Amn Suleimaniyeh, dated July 11, 1988,
appears to confirm this new policy. This document
reads in part:
"Comrade Ali Hassan al-Majid,
Member of the Regional Command and Secretary General
of the Northern Bureau, has announced the following:
1. The saboteur who turns himself in and hands over
his weapon and who is returning from areas that have
not been included in Anfal operations up until now,
will be granted amnesty for all crimes, including
those of delinquency and flight [from military
service].
2. The saboteur returning without a weapon from
those areas not included in Anfal operations will be
pardoned for the crimes of affiliation with a
saboteur group and of delinquency and flight.
[emphasis in original]
3. There is nothing barring the enlistment of the
aforementioned in the National Defense Battalions
[the jahsh]."
79 Middle East
Watch interview with former mustashar,
Suleimaniyeh, June 30, 1992.
6
Fourth Anfal--The Valley of the Lesser Zab,
May 3-8, 1988
"Some were blind; some could not reach our village.
The spirit left them on the way; they were all
black."
-- Na'ima Hassan Qader of Galnaghaj, describing the
exodus of villagers from the chemical attack on the
neighboring village of Goktapa, May 3, 1988.
After the initial blitzkrieg in Germian--there is no
other word for what took place there--the remaining
peshmerga forces headed north. While the army
prepared to confront them there, the intelligence
apparatus spared no effort to track down those who
had slipped to safety in the towns or mujamma'at.
On May 4, the General Security Directorate (Amn)
issued orders for anyone who had surrendered in
combat areas of the first three Anfal operations to
be rounded up and handed over by the army into its
custody for case-by-case evaluation.1
In the northern part of Germian, many villagers
escaped this dragnet and survived by melting into
the anonymous crowds of Kirkuk and the smaller
Kurdish towns. But those in the south were less
fortunate. Hemmed in on all sides by troops,
mountains, well-guarded main roads and an Arabized
desert area, they had little chance to elude their
captors. Only a few lucky ones made it as far as Tuz
Khurmatu or the new complex of Sumoud
("Steadfastness" in Arabic), outside the town of
Kalar. Those who were caught accounted for the
heaviest single concentration of disappearances
during the Anfal campaign. While malesaged from
15-50 routinely vanished en masse from all parts of
Germian, only in the south did the disappeared
include significant numbers of women and children.
Most were from the Daoudi and Jaff-Roghzayi tribes.
Yet their tribal affiliation was unlikely to be the
cause; there seems no reason why the Iraqi regime
should have harbored any special hatred for these
two groups. Furthermore, people from other tribes
who fled or strayed south of the Awa Spi river were
subject to the same treatment. Nor can the
explanation lie with brutal or over-zealous local
army commanders, since the detainees were
transferred within a matter of days--still alive--to
centralized processing camps. It was there that the
intelligence services singled them out, referring to
the highest authorities where necessary for a ruling
on what to do in the cases of individual detainees.2
No single theory can adequately explain the mass
disappearances of women and children from southern
Germian, although they may in part reflect a
mentality of reprisals for the stiff resistance that
the army faced in such PUK-controlled villages as
Tazashar, Omerbel and Sheikh Tawil. It was the
inhabitants of these places, and scores of others
like them, who suffered so grievously; in some
cases, entire village populations appear to have
been wiped out, with the exception of some of the
elderly. In the absence of a comprehensive
statistical survey, it is hazardous to estimate the
total numbers who perished during Anfal. But by the
most conservative estimate, it is safe to say that
at least 10,000 Kurds disappeared from this one
small area alone.3
In only one other area was a similar pattern
repeated; this was in a cluster of villages along
the Lesser Zab river during the Fourth Anfal, in the
first week of May 1988.
Beyond the town of Chamchamal, the land falls away
sharply. Immediately to the north is the broad
valley of the Nahr al-Zab-al-Saghir, the Lesser Zab
river, which forms the borderline between the
governorates of Erbil and Al-Ta'mim (Kirkuk). (The
Kurds call the river Awi Dukan--the Waters of
Dukan--because it flows from the dam on the lake of
that name.) It was this area which offered temporary
sanctuary to PUK forces fleeing from the Third
Anfal.
By about April 13, the peshmerga in Germian
realized that further resistance was futile. The
military leadership met secretly that day in
Tilako--two days after the village had been burned
by the army--and decided to organize an orderly
retreat. They pulled back first to the village of
Masoyi Bergach (Sengaw nahya), and then, on
April 15, split up into three columns, with each
taking responsibility for the safety of large
contingents of women and children. Two groups headed
for the Redar (Shwan) area, northwest of Chamchamal.4
The other, led by the surviving nucleus of the first
malband, made for the town of
Askar,
a few miles south of the Lesser Zab.5
In 1988, the river valley was studded with little
Kurdish towns: nahyas like Aghjalar, Taqtaq
and Redar, as well as other population centers of
local importance such as Askar and Goktapa. Further
north the Koysinjaq plain spread out, with its
untapped oil reserves; to the northwest lay the city
of Erbil, and the handful of villages on the Erbil
plain that had escaped the army's spring 1987
assault. These were now targeted as part of the
Fourth Anfal. To the north and east, the operation
extended as far as the western shore of Dukan Lake
and the last outcroppings of the Qara Dagh mountain
chain.
As the Fourth Anfal began, the morale of the Iraqi
troops could hardly have been higher. On April
17-18, in a devastating counterattack that cost
10,000 enemy lives, Iraq had retaken the Fao
peninsula at thehead of the Persian Gulf, reversing
the most humiliating loss of the eight-year war and
paving the way for Iran's final defeat.5
* * *
The Chemical Attacks on Goktapa and Askar
Goktapa means "green hill" in Turkish--a language
whose influence is often apparent still in this
former part of the Ottoman Empire's Mosul vilayet.
Although the whole village had originally been built
on the slopes of the hill, some families had
resettled on the flat farmland on the south bank of
the Lesser Zab after Goktapa was burned in 1963,
during the first Ba'ath regime, after the first of
many fierce battles between government forces and
the peshmerga. In truth Goktapa was more a
small town than a village, with at least 300--some
say as many as 500--households, as well as a school,
a clinic and two Sunni mosques. The surrounding
fields produced rich harvests of cotton, wheat,
tobacco, sunflowers, potatoes, eggplant, sweet
pepper, beans, okra, grapes, apricots, figs and
watermelon. Goktapa even had electricity, although
the women still carried water from the river on
donkeys.
Goktapa had endured the repression familiar to most
villages in the prohibited areas. From a checkpoint
outside the nahya of Aghjalar, half an hour
away by car on a paved road, the army tried with
mixed success to impose a blockade on all foodstuffs
reaching the villages on the south side of the
Lesser Zab. In 1982 or 1983, after a pitched battle
between government forces and peshmerga,
Goktapa was savagely attacked by helicopters,
aircraft, tanks and ground troops. Among those
killed was a 45-year old woman named Miriam Hussein,
shot from a helicopter. There had been peshmerga
in Goktapa since the far-off days of Mullah Mustafa
Barzani, and after 1984 the village housed an
important PUK command post. As a result it was
bombed frequently. "We spent most of our lives in
shelters," said one woman. When asked to describe
the attitude of the civilian population towards the
peshmerga, Fawzia, a woman of sixty, smiled.
"The peshmerga were loved by the people," she
said. "No one hates his own people." The
peshmerga protected them from the armyand
jahsh, she added: "Naturally; if there were no
peshmerga, they would kill us with knives,
cut out our tongues."6
May 3, 1988 was a lovely spring day. The river
valley was carpeted in green and dotted with roses
and other flowers. Although it was still Ramadan,
and the people were fasting, the women of Goktapa
were baking bread, and the children were splashing
in the Waters of Dukan. Throughout April, Goktapa
had seen a lot of peshmerga coming and going,
stopping briefly in the village to eat, bringing
news of the rout in Germian and Qara Dagh, spending
the night and then moving on. But there had been no
fighting in Goktapa itself, and ten days had now
passed since the last Kurdish fighters had been
sighted.
An hour or so before dusk, the late afternoon
stillness was broken by the sound of jet engines.
Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari, a man in his late 60s,
was a little distance from his home when he heard
the aircraft. Everyone in this part of Iraqi
Kurdistan knew of Abd-al-Qader and his famous
family. His late father, Abdullah, had been the head
of the Qala Saywka tribe, which owned thirty-six
villages in the hills around Aghjalar. By the time
he died, the old man's property had dwindled to
seven villages, which he divided among his sons.
Abd-al-Qader was given Goktapa, although "I always
worked with my hands; I never liked to exploit
anyone."7
His brother Ali received the nearby village of
Askar--hence the name "Askari." In time Ali became a
senior PUK commander and a close confidant of Jalal
Talabani.
Askar, an hour and a half on foot from Goktapa,
seems to have been the aircraft's first target on
May 3, no doubt because the PUK's first malband,
in retreat from Germian, had tried to set up its new
base here. A formation of MIGs swooped low over the
village, which was now full of peshmerga.
There were eight dull explosions, followed by a
column of white smoke that smelled pleasantly of
mint. Borne on a southeasterly wind, it drifted as
far as Haydar Beg, a couple of miles away. When it
cleared, nine villagers of Askar lay dead. Members
of the PUK rushedaround administering atropine
injections to those who had been exposed to the gas.8
Askar was not visible from Goktapa, and Abd-al-Qader
was not especially alarmed when he looked up and saw
the aircraft approaching. "I did not pay attention
because we suffered from many bombardments. I
thought it would be the same as in the past. We did
not go into the shelters in front of our houses. No
one paid any attention to the planes; we were
accustomed to them. But when the bombing started,
the sound was different from previous times. It was
not as loud as in the past. I saw smoke rising,
first white, then turning to gray. I ran away." But
the wind from the southeast carried the smoke toward
him. "I ran 50 meters then fell down. The smoke
smelled like a match stick when you burn it. I
passed out."
The bombs fell at exactly 5:45 p.m., according to
Abd-al-Qader's daughter-in-law Nasrin, the 40-year
old wife of his son Latif, a former schoolteacher.
Nasrin remembered the time with precision because
her family had a rare luxury: a clock mounted on the
wall. She recalled counting four aircraft, although
some other villagers say there were six--and some
added that a second flight of six dropped their
bombs later. The smoke, said Nasrin, was red and
then turned to blue. It smelled of garlic.
There was general panic and confusion; villagers
were screaming, running in all directions and
collapsing from the fumes. Nasrin remembered the
general advice that the peshmerga had given:
in the event of a chemical attack, head for the
river and cover your faces with wet cloths. She
grabbed a bunch of towels and ran to the riverbank
with seven of her eight children. Her eldest
daughter, who ran off in another direction, was
later arrested and disappeared. The advice about wet
towels may well have saved the lives of Nasrin and
her family, since the wind blew the gas straight
across the Lesser Zab river where she had fled, and
one bomb even fell in the water. Dead fish floated
to the surface.9
Today, a simple monument on top of the "green hill"
memorializes those who died in the chemical attack
on Goktapa. Survivors say that they buried as many
as 300, although a list compiledlater by the PUK
gives the names of 154.10
Some died in the fields as they tended their crops.
Other bodies were found in the river. With the help
of a borrowed bulldozer, some of the villagers dug a
deep trench in front of the mosque that had been
destroyed by the army in an earlier raid, and buried
many of the bodies that same night. Menawwar Yasin,
a woman in her early 60s, helped with the burial.
"Some of their faces were black," she said, "covered
with smoke. Others were ordinary but stiff. I saw
one mother, nursing her infant, stiffened in that
position." Other corpses were covered over by the
army with a rough layer of dirt when the ground
troops destroyed Goktapa several days later. There
was no time to do it any other way, an officer
explained to a visiting member of the Askari
family--it was hot and the bodies were beginning to
smell; if they were left uncovered they might cause
health problems for his men.11
Whatever the exact number of those who died, it was
the heaviest toll from any confirmed chemical attack
other than Halabja, six weeks earlier.
* * *
In the wake of the Goktapa attack, villagers
remembered, the waters of the Lesser Zab rose
quickly. It was a trick they had seen the regime use
in earlier campaigns, opening the sluices at the
Dukan Dam to block any attempt at flight across the
river. The survivors from Goktapa, Askar and Haydar
Beg scattered in all directions. Some fled south in
the direction of Chamchamal, hoping to find
sanctuary in the complexes of Takiyeh and Bayinjan,
on the main road to Suleimaniyeh. Others headed west
by back ways and goat tracks, travelling parallel to
the river into the area inhabited by the Sheikh
Bzeini tribe. More than fifty families from Askar
were arrested on the morning of May 4 bytroops
approaching along the main highway and were taken
east in trucks to the complex of Suseh.
After passing out from the effects of the chemicals,
Abd-al-Qader knew nothing more until he awoke the
next morning in a strange room. A voice told him
that he had reached the village of Mamlesi, some
five miles west of Goktapa. He had been brought here
unconscious by his son, the former teacher Latif.
There was a smell of burning, and looking out they
saw that most of the houses in Mamlesi were on fire.
Abd-al-Qader and Latif crept into an air-raid
shelter and waited there for three days and two
nights until they were forced out by a sudden burst
of gunfire at the entrance. Outside were four
armored personal carriers, a contingent of troops
under the command of an army major, and an IFA
truck; the old man and his son surrendered and were
driven away.
Meanwhile, Abd-al-Qader's daughter-in-law Nasrin and
her seven crying children had found refuge in a
cave. With her were thirty refugees from Goktapa,
and another twenty from Mamlesi. At first light on
May 4, 5:00 a.m., they went outside and saw
helicopters hovering over the valley below. Some of
the men had fieldglasses, and they watched in
silence as the troops entered Goktapa later that
morning. This account is borne out by army documents
from the Fourth Anfal campaign, which note that
troops had reached Askar at 5:30 a.m. on May 4 and
were advancing north toward Goktapa.12
Seeing the troops approach, Nasrin and her children
fled into the hills, where they survived for ten
days by extraordinary good fortune before finally
reaching safety in the complex of Takiyeh. Another
daughter-in-law, Fahima, was less lucky; she was
captured by troops in the village of Jelamort and
disappeared. (Yet another member of this ravaged
family, a three-month old child named Avan, was
involved in an incident that is reminiscent of the
baby-snatching practiced by the Argentine military
during the "dirty war" of the 1970s. Avan survived
the chemical attack, although her mother, brothers
and sisters all died. But a member of the jahsh
abducted the infant from her crib and took her to
his childless wife in Koysinjaq. The child was
eventually retrieved by an uncle.)
* * *
The Anfal Dragnet: East of Taqtaq
As in Germian, it appears that the army pursued a
strategy of envelopment, attacking the Fourth Anfal
area with at least a dozen separate task forces from
several directions at once. Fragmentary handwritten
field reports of the Fourth Anfal from the commander
of the First Army Corps, Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashem,
show that troop columns hit the Lesser Zab valley at
first light on May 4, twelve hours after the
chemical bombing of Askar and Goktapa. Some,
operating out of Koysinjaq, attacked the villages
along the north bank of the river; others converged
on the south bank from Suseh and Chamchamal; two
convoys moved out of Taqtaq, one headed north toward
Koysinjaq, and the other crossing the river and
cutting through the area inhabited by the Sheikh
Bzeini tribe.
Most of the task forces reported only token
resistance, but in a couple of places the
peshmerga fought back hard, and even pinned the
troops down under sustained artillery and rocket
fire. On the morning of May 4, Lt. Gen. Hashem
reported "fierce opposition" on Takaltu Mountain, a
few miles to the northeast of Taqtaq. But by the end
of the day, the mountain had been "cleansed after
killing nine of them, whose bodies were left on the
site." In the rugged Chemi Rezan valley, to the east
of Goktapa, the task force operating out of Suseh
ran into difficulties in one village after another:
"0740 task force reached Surqawshan village,
confronted saboteurs numbering 20-25....0900 task
force was able to burn Awdalan and Kalabash after
removing resistance....0945 Talan village burned
after destroying resistance consisting of four
groups of ten saboteurs." Lt. Gen. Hashem even found
it necessary to call in reinforcements, more than
700 helicopter-borne Amn troops from
Suleimaniyeh.13
By the late afternoon of May 4, however, the Chemi
Rezan valley was quiet.14
The next day was punctuated only by brief firefights
in Goktapa and across the river in Gomashin. By May
6, the entire area was under army control. Over the
next two days, military units movednorth along the
shore of Dukan Lake, burning everything in their
path. By May 8, the Fourth Anfal was over.
Along both sides of the Lesser Zab river, the
consequences for the civilian population were
devastating. Those to the north, with few escape
routes, were the worst hit, and some 1,680 people
are listed as having disappeared from the six large
villages of Kleisa, Bogird, Kanibi, Qizlou, Kani
Hanjir and Gomashin. Many people from the south bank
villages, such as Nasrin and her children, reached
the safety of complexes; even so, the losses were
catastrophic. As many as 500 are estimated to have
disappeared from Goktapa alone, and hundreds more
from villages such as Galnaghaj, Gird Khaber,
Jelamort, Qasrok and Qamisha.15
One daily field report from the Army's First Corps
for May 6 gives some notion of how many of these
people were women and children. In addition to
thirty-seven saboteurs, this notes the surrender
close to Taqtaq that day of sixty men, 129 women and
396 children.16
Those who lived north of the river had no way of
learning about the chemical attack on Goktapa, since
the army had disabled the cable ferry that the
villagers used to pull their rafts across the river.
But the panicked flight of the survivors, many of
them blind or dying, alerted people in the villages
on the south bank to the fact that Anfal had now
reached them. Some fled as soon as they heard the
news from Goktapa; others stayed where they were. At
midnight on the day of the gas attack, survivors
arrived, "smelling of apples," at the village of
Darbarou, an hour and a half to the west on foot.
Despite this, the people of Darbarou did not seem to
feel that they were at immediate risk, and stayed in
their own beds that night. But at 10:00 the next
morning, they found themselves surrounded by
jahsh and regular army troops arriving
fromTaqtaq. Aircraft flew overhead, bombing, and
helicopters hovered over the village, with their
loudspeakers announcing "Come out; there is a pardon
for you." The villagers were rounded up and trucked
away in IFAs as their homes went up in flames.17
Goktapa survivors also turned up toward midnight at
Gird Khaber, a village of the Sheikh Bzeini tribe.
People here had already sensed that trouble was
brewing, and some of the men had taken the
precaution of sending their wives and children away
to the safety of the towns, taking refuge themselves
in caves in the surrounding hills. As in Germian,
there were false promises of an amnesty for those
who surrendered, issued in this case by Qasem Agha,
a one-eyed mustashar from Koysinjaq, whom
people called "Qasma Kour" (Qasem the Blind). With
the aid of this trick, Qasem Agha's forces captured
200 men fleeing from the Gird Khaber area.
But others in Gird Khaber were still at home when
the Goktapa survivors arrived. They met early the
next morning, in the pre-dawn darkness, to decide
what to do. Some of the young men decided to take
their chances in the mountains with the peshmerga,
and it seems that some survived in this way. But
most felt there was no alternative but to surrender.
Accordingly, they made their way that morning to the
village of Qamisha, where they knew the army was
located, fearing that otherwise they too would be
attacked with chemicals. It took them two hours to
reach Qamisha, travelling packed into nine
tractor-drawn trailers.
Army tacticians appear to have assigned Qamisha a
role similar to that of Germian villages like
Melistura and Aliawa--an initial assembly point
toward which fleeing villagers could be funneled.
The refugees from Gird Khaber found Qamisha occupied
by a jahsh unit commanded by a mustashar
named Borhan Shwani. Regular army troops were also
in attendance, as well as a camouflage-clad
contingent of commandos (Maghawir). "The army
was firing into the air over people's heads, scaring
them," one elderly resident of Gird Khaber said.
"They were merciless with the old people."18
A man from Gird Khaber recognizedfaces from a
half-dozen villages. An army officer with the two
stars of a first lieutenant was carrying out body
searches and confiscating "money, gold earrings,
everything." Identity documents were taken away and
never returned.
A somewhat different procedure appears to have been
followed during the army attack on Jelamort, another
Sheikh Bzeini tribal village a few miles to the
south of Gird Khaber. The troops did not reach
Jelamort until May 6, but the inhabitants had
already heard of the Goktapa bombing from fleeing
peshmerga. They took to the mountains, where
they joined hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other
refugees, hiding in caves or under trees. But they
were quickly surrounded by the army. The troops
opened fire, killing two men, and everyone else came
out quickly with their hands held high. Men and
women were separated on the spot and those from
Jelamort were marched back to their village. Again,
as in Qamisha, the troops stripped everyone of their
money, valuables and documents, while other soldiers
and jahsh completed the business of looting
their homes. Some of the houses were already
burning, and the bulldozers were at work on the
cement structures. Three empty army trucks waited
nearby. The sight of the looting was apparently too
much for one member of the jahsh, who
protested loudly. But he was confronted by an angry
military officer, who told him, "These people are
heading toward death, they cannot take money or gold
with them. The law of the state says they are going
to die." The commander of the jahsh unit came
over at this point and disarmed his rebellious
underling, telling him, "It is the law of our state;
you cannot do anything."19
In Jelamort, then, the sexes were separated at the
point of capture rather than later at one of the
regime's processing centers. This was also the
procedure in Galnaghaj (although married women from
this village were eventually trucked away with their
husbands), and in Qaranaw, just outside the town of
Taqtaq, where all the women were spared for reasons
that remain obscure. "The army officers took all the
men," an elderly woman from Qaranaw told Middle East
Watch. "Then they held us in the village for two
days. We could not eat or do anything. We just sat
in one big line. When we were waiting in the
village, thejahsh and the soldiers burned all
the houses."20
After two days, the women of Qaranaw were driven to
Chamchamal in army buses and dumped in the street.
"I asked one of the soldiers why they were leaving
us like this in the city where we didn't know
anybody. They replied, 'You are lucky that you have
ended up here; your men have gone to hell.'"
To the north of the Lesser Zab, it was much the same
story, as one village after another was captured and
demolished by the task forces operating out of
Koysinjaq. The villages of Gomashin and Kleisa, for
example, lay on the north bank of the river, almost
directly across from Goktapa. Anfal reached Kleisa
on May 4, the day after the chemical attack. Like
Gomashin, it housed a PUK headquarters and the
village had a large peshmerga presence. ("Our
souls were on their heads," was how one woman put
it.) Most of the villagers had moved out of Kleisa
two years before Anfal, to build new homes along the
Lesser Zab, which narrows to a gorge at this point.
They called the place Qolti Karez, "the pit of the
underground stream." It was here that Anfal
surprised them, and after a brief attempt to hide
out in caves in the mountains, they were arrested en
masse and disappeared.
In October 1986, Gomashin and neighboring Qizlou had
provoked the wrath of the regime when a group of
Iranian pasdaran passed through the two
villages, making an unusual sortie so far from the
border. Aircraft had rocketed Gomashin a short time
afterwards, and villagers assumed that the raid was
in reprisal. One projectile hit a woman named Aisha
as she carried water from the spring, killing her
instantly. Another pierced the wall of a house,
wounding a woman named Hajer and her 18-month old
child. Since there were no cars to take them to a
hospital to have their wounds treated, both died
within hours.
Peshmerga
fleeing the rout in the south had converged upon
Gomashin in the days before the Fourth Anfal. One
teenager from Gomashin, a boy of thirteen at the
time, estimated that 200-300 peshmerga were
in the vicinity at the beginning of May. The day
after the chemical attack on Goktapa, they decided
to try to make their way to Iran, appropriating the
village's tractors for transport. The people of
Gomashin pleaded with them not to deprive the
villagers of their only means of escape, but the
peshmerga brushed aside their objections. At
dawn, however, the empty tractors came back with
their drivers, and thevillagers now used the
vehicles to flee in the direction of Koysinjaq.21
The following day Iraqi aircraft and groundforces
attacked Gomashin. Many of the villagers were
captured in flight and disappeared. One witness said
that 115 people from Gomashin were "Anfalized";
another put the number at 130.22
On May 6, the First Corps reported that Gomashin had
been razed to the ground, together with Gird Khaber
and a string of other villages.23
The Shwan Area
While the region east of Taqtaq was being devastated
in this way, other army units turned their attention
to the nahya of Shwan (Redar), a short way to
the west. Once again they were assisted by jahsh
contingents under the command of the short, stoutly
built mustashar Qasem Agha of Koysinjaq. The
small town of Shwan itself had been destroyed in
September 1987; several of the seventy villages in
its jurisdiction had already been razed during the
clearances that spring, their inhabitants being
relocated to the newly built complexes of Daratou
and Benaslawa on the southern outskirts of the city
of Erbil.
As one moves west, the landscape becomes flatter and
less dramatic. Here, the Lesser Zab valley begins to
broaden out into the plain between Erbil and Kirkuk,
although it is still broken up by craggy hills and
horizontal rock outcroppings. On the face of it, the
terrain here was far from ideal for guerrilla
warfare. Yet from the evidence of a dozen interviews
that Middle East Watch conducted with Shwan
villagers, it is apparent that small peshmerga
units (both PUK and a few KDP) hung on here for
several weeks, fighting occasional skirmishes before
retreating. A considerable number of civilians also
managed to escape to safety through the army lines.
Many of the Shwan villages, being in relatively
low-lying land closer to the highway and the cities,
had never been "liberated territory" in the same
sense as the more mountainous interior. More than
one survivor spoke of government forces and
peshmerga "taking turns" at controlling these
villages. During periods of greater peshmerga
influence, there was brutal, if intermittent,
government harassment in all the forms familiar in
the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan--punitive jahsh
incursions, burning and looting, shelling from
artillery, rocketing and occasional bombing from the
air. After the spring 1987 campaign of village
destruction, many army deserters had rebuilt crude
homes in sheltered areas, and most of the remaining
villages harbored large numbers of draft dodgers. In
the Shwan village of Dellu, for example, a village
of eighty mud and stone houses, fully half the men
considered themselves active peshmerga,and
the population was swelled by some fifty or sixty
fugitives from military service.
Dellu had been destroyed and rebuilt twice
before--once in 1963 and then again in 1976. The
Fourth Anfal reached the village on the morning of
May 5, with rocket attacks from helicopters and
fixed-wing aircraft softening up the area for
advancing ground troops from the 77th Special
Forces. Some died in their homes. According to one
witness, three or four elderly women and four or
five children died in the initial attack, either
burned to death or killed by artillery fire.24
Twenty-eight villagers were arrested in the army
roundup and disappeared; they included three women
and one small child. The remainder fled to the
hills, and many managed to hide out, eluding Amn's
house-to-house searches, in Kirkuk, Chamchamal or in
the Benaslawa complex, which had been built to house
people from this area a year earlier, some six miles
outside Erbil.
Many people were also lucky enough to escape from
Khala Kutia, a 15-minute walk from Dellu, and from
Zigila, where remarkably the army managed to capture
only six elderly people, including the mullah,
from a village of thirty households. All the rest
had been forewarned and fled. From a hideout on a
nearby mountain side fifty villagers from Darmanaw,
in the Sheikh Bzeini area, watched as the army and
jahsh looted and burned their village; they
survived for twelve days in caves, eating nothing
but wild grasses. Hunger eventually drove them down
to the town of
Taqtaq,
where "we threw ourselves on the mercy of the
people, kissing their hands." With the help of the
townspeople and a local mustashar, hundreds
of fugitive villagers from the Sheikh Bzeini area
hid out for several days in a poultry farm, huddled
together in the chicken sheds. Remarkably, the army
never found them.25
Even some draft-age males escaped the Anfal sweep in
the Shwan area. This happened, for example, in the
village of Palkana, after it was attacked by regular
troops and commando units, backed up with artillery
fire, aerial bombardment and tear gas. The villagers
took flight on the morning that Anfal reached them,
crossing the Lesser Zab river on wooden rafts to
outrun the approaching troops. Even without food
supplies, this group managed to remain in the
mountains for two months,after which a number of
young draft dodgers and army deserters slipped into
the Benaslawa complex, which appears to have been
sloppily monitored by the security forces.
More remarkable still in some ways was the escape of
a group of sixty young draft dodgers from the
village of Ilenjagh, a little to the east of Palkana
and a few miles to the south of Taqtaq. Although
Ilenjagh lay in the Shiwasur valley, a peshmerga
stronghold, the village was vulnerable, since it was
situated close to an army base and the paved road.
In 1987 it was destroyed after a fierce battle, but
the villagers defiantly returned to rebuild their
homes in a secluded location a little further away
from the army base. Almost the entire population
survived Anfal. First, the women and children were
sneaked into hiding in Taqtaq. Then the sixty young
men fled with their weapons and dug into hiding
places in the hills. Only two were captured. Moving
from one place to another, the rest held out until
the public amnesty of September 6, 1988, which
marked the official end of the Anfal campaign.26
* * *
Zbeida's Story
The drama of the Shwan villagers' flight from Anfal
with the help of the peshmerga is well
captured in the testimony of Zbeida, a young woman
who was nineteen at the time. Zbeida was a native of
Serbir village, a sizeable place on the plain,
toward the main Erbil-Kirkuk highway. Although
Serbir was not a peshmerga village, it had
been destroyed in the spring 1987 campaign that
leveled scores of government-controlled villages on
the Erbil plain. At first the villagers had been
given two months to evacuate; officially, they were
told that their homes were being razed to "protect
them from harassment" by the peshmerga. A
week later, their period of notice was shortened to
just twenty-four hours, and they were ordered to
move into the Benaslawa and Daratoucomplexes, which
at this time were merely open fields with neither
shelter nor infrastructure.
Zbeida and her parents moved into the city of
Erbil--not into one of the complexes as the soldiers
had ordered. Her two brothers, however, who were
both active peshmerga, made for the PUK
stronghold in the Sheikh Bzeini area. After being
harassed by Amn in Erbil for three months on
account of their sons' affiliation, the parents and
Zbeida eventually moved to the "prohibited area" as
well, in September 1987. Their new village was under
constant government attack, and during one air-raid
in February 1988, the family smelled a powerful
aroma of apples from their shelter. When they
emerged two hours later, they found that a number of
peshmerga had suffered chemical burns
although none had died.27
Anfal reached them on the morning of May 4, a year
to the day after the destruction of Serbir. A
helicopter had been seen circling overhead the
previous day, so the attack was not entirely
unexpected. At 4:00 a.m., the shelling began and the
villagers immediately sought refuge in caves in the
mountains. From this vantage point they could see
the army entering a number of villages along the
north bank of the Lesser Zab, rounding up the
population and burning their houses. They witnessed
the destruction of the villages of Qashqa and
Khurkhur on the far shore. What they did not realize
was that the soldiers were not only in the valley
below but also in the mountains above their hideout.
Zbeida's family decided to flee in the opposite
direction, to the east. They were fortunate, for the
army soon descended on the caves and captured and
disappeared their occupants. Zbeida's family, which
was now accompanied by Rahman, one of the two
peshmerga brothers, returned to their homes and
paused there for a few minutes. But they could see
the army approaching with tanks and armored
personnel carriers, and they ran again. Looking
back, they could see the soldiers tossing barrels of
kerosene over their houses and setting them aflame.
They ran on, with the troops in hot pursuit. Shells
fell around them, but after crossing a series of
small streams, they seemed to have thrown offtheir
pursuers, and they stopped to rest in the village of
Turki, another peshmerga stronghold.
Turki itself soon came under shellfire, and the
refugees ran toward the Lesser Zab, hoping to cross
to the other side. They tried to wade, but gave up
when the water reached their necks. Behind them, the
peshmerga were putting up a determined
defense with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.
Eventually, Zbeida's brother Rahman managed to
fashion three crude rafts from planks and inner
tubes, and Zbeida, her parents and sister managed to
get across. Rahman, who remained on the bank, yelled
at them to make for the safety of the peshmerga-controlled
Qala Saywka area.28
On the north bank of the river, they found
themselves in another abandoned village; this was
Shaytan. In one of the empty houses, they found
bread and dry clothes. Behind them, they could still
hear Rahman shouting, "Go! Go! Run to Qala Saywka
and follow the peshmerga!" They walked all
that night of May 4-5 along a narrow path, resting
for a few hours at dawn, until they reached the
mountains, and a safe-looking cave. Setting out from
their shelter in mid-morning, they could see the
army continuing to burn villages in the flood plain
below. In the late afternoon, by an extraordinary
coincidence, they chanced upon Omer, the second
peshmerga brother. He wept to hear that Rahman
had been left behind and insisted on going back to
join him, to try and help civilians cross the river
and get away from the advancing army. But first he
led his parents and sisters north, away from the
river, to another village, Nerajin, where they
managed to pay for places in a grossly overcrowded
tractor-drawn cart. Finally, at about 4:00 a.m. on
May 6, the exhausted family reached the relative
safety of the Benaslawa complex.
Omer came to Benaslawa just once, in the middle of
May. He stayed for two weeks, then left again in
search of his brother. In August, the family
received news that the two brothers had found each
other and fought together in a battle with the army
near Turki village in June. In this part of Iraqi
Kurdistan, in other words, some peshmerga
units held out for at least a month after the
initial assault of the Fourth Anfal. But the
peshmerga who brought news of the reunion of
Omer and Rahman also brought news of their capture.
Through binoculars, their comrades hadseen them
being arrested by the jahsh and driven away
in army IFAs. Their parents, and their sister, never
saw the two again.
* * *
The Fourth Anfal Collection Points
The villagers who were driven from their homes by
the Fourth Anfal were subsequently taken to at least
three temporary holding centers in the Lesser Zab
valley. Harmota, an army camp outside the town of
Koysinjaq, held a number of detainees from Gomashin
and other villages for three days after their
capture. Takiyeh, a complex that had been built in
1987 on the main road leading east from Chamchamal,
was the initial destination for the trucks that
carried away the survivors from the chemical attack
on Goktapa and its environs. One Goktapa woman
learned that her daughter, son-in-law and five
children had been seen in an army truck at Takiyeh;
another held her brother-in-law and his family of
twelve. "The elder girl was seen crying to people to
save them. She caught sight of a relative and yelled
at him to try to save them, but he could do
nothing."29
Many refugees also made their way to Takiyeh in the
wake of the Fourth Anfal, hoping to find refuge
there, even though the residents of the
mujamma'at had been warned that anyone offering
shelter to an Anfal escapee would have their home
demolished.30
But it was the town of Taqtaq itself, an important
regional center of some ten thousand people on the
north side of the Lesser Zab, which acted as the
principal collection point for villagers rounded up
during the Fourth Anfal. As in Qader Karam to the
south, the numbers of detainees were such that more
than a single holding center was pressed into
service. Some prisoners described being taken to the
ameriya--the town's military garrison, housed
in one of the innumerable forts that dotted Iraqi
Kurdistan, built to a standard design during the
1970s. An elderly man from the village of Darbarou
told of being brought here in a convoy of IFAs, some
carrying his fellow-villagers and the remainder
loadeddown with their chickens, sheep, goats and
cows.31
Along the way a pregnant woman in his truck gave
birth. At the garrison he recognized people from
more than a dozen villages in the valley, from both
sides of the river, packed into a number of inner
rooms, with men and women held separately. The
villagers spent a single night there before being
trucked off to a new, unknown destination.
The second location was variously referred to by
survivors as "a corral"; "a fenced-in area used for
animals"; "a livestock pen near the bridge"; and
"some sheds used for cows and horses." Once again,
there were hundreds of people here from a number of
villages along the Lesser Zab Valley. Some witnesses
said that families remained together here; others
disagreed, saying that young and old were
segregated. Guards stood watch, but at this point
there was no interrogation. These were extremely
primitive facilities, and they were used only for a
few hours. The soldiers also had less than total
control of the crowds, and, as in Germian, members
of the jahsh aided in a number of escapes. As
one convoy of trucks pulled into the detention area,
a young woman jumped off, clutching her baby, and
managed to run away even though the military guards
opened up on her fleeing form with machineguns. In
the confusion of arrival, two siblings from the
village of Qasrok--an 11-year old boy named Osman
and his elder sister--were approached by a jahsh
guard, a stranger, who whispered to them, "Take a
chance, there are no soldiers here, run away. If
anyone asks you where you are from, tell them
Taqtaq." Being a resident of a town or a complex
would of course offer immunity, given Anfal's rigid
bureaucratic logic. The pair ducked into a jahsh
car that was bringing food to the corral and managed
to slip out through the army lines. It was the last
time that Osman saw his parents, two brothers and
remaining three sisters--the youngest of them just
three years old.
After their brief sojourn in the cattle-pen, the
family was hustled once more into the waiting
trucks, which lumbered across the bridge over the
Lesser Zab and headed south, like so many of their
predecessors, in the direction of the oil city of
Kirkuk, home of the Ba'ath Party's Northern
Organization Bureau. Army documents from the Fourth
Anfal provide revealing evidence, from the
government side, of what happened to the detainees.
Buried in the scrawl of his handwritten field
reports, Lt. Gen. Hashem notes briefly that two
groups of captured civilians from theShwan
area--fourteen men, twelve women and twenty children
in all--have been "sent on to the Amn
administration of al-Ta'mim [Kirkuk]
governorate"--the clearest possible proof of the
destination of those heavily laden convoys of IFA
trucks.32
______
1 "The following
has been deemed appropriate," reads a communique
from Amn Suleimaniyeh to the agency's local
office in Chamchamal: "All persons who surrender in
the theater where fighting took place during the
First, Second and Third Anfal Operations, shall be
sent to the Security Directorates with an
explanation regarding the political stance of each
one of them, in order to take the necessary measures
[word illegible]." Communique no. 2827, May 4, 1988.
2 This, in
addition to the emphasis on the place of capture, is
the particular significance of the Amn
correspondence cited above at p.121. The governorate
office of Amn in Erbil has evidently found it
necessary to appeal to the agency's headquarters for
a ruling on what to do with particular individuals
in its custody.
3 Resool, op.
cit., calculates that some 200 villages were
destroyed in this sector during Anfal, with a total
population in excess of 35,000. On the basis of
numerous Middle East Watch interviews with
survivors, a disappearance rate of 30 percent seems
conservative. Middle East Watch hopes to prepare a
comprehensive statistical survey that will allow for
a more precise estimate of the numbers who died or
disappeared as a result of Anfal.
4 Redar is the
town in the center of the nahya and tribal
area of Shwan, and the two names are often used
interchangeably.
5 This account of
the PUK withdrawal is based on Middle East Watch
interviews with two former peshmerga
commanders in Suleimaniyeh and Kalar, March 28 and
30, 1993.
5 See Jupa and
Dingeman, op. cit., pp.6-7.
6 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, May 18, 1992.
7 The 1958 land
reform did away with these old patterns of
ownership. Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari continued to
be acknowledged, however, as the effective leader of
the village of Goktapa.
8 Middle East
Watch interviews with former residents of Askar and
Haydar Beg, Askar village, August 2, 1992.
9 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, August 1, 1992.
10 Middle East
Watch was given the names of thirty-eight people in
two families who died in the attack. More than half
of these were children. Interviews with Abd-al-Qader
Abdullah Askari and other former residents, Daratou
complex and Goktapa village, April 20 and May 24,
1992.
11 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, July 4, 1992. As a
result of his official contacts, this relative--who,
as a city resident, was unaffected by Anfal--was
granted permission to return to Goktapa after the
attack to search for members of his family.
12 Handwritten
daily report no. 8184 of May 4, 1988 from (signature
illegible), Commander of First Army Corps, to Army
Operations Headquarters.
13 Handwritten
daily field report from First Corps Commander to
Army Operations Headquarters, no.19/8179, 0500
hours, May 5, 1988.
14 Handwritten
daily report no. 8276 from First Corps Commander to
Army Operations Headquarters, May 6, 1988.
15 These are
merely the villagers from which Middle East Watch
was able to interview survivors. According to
Resool, op. cit., some seventy-five villages
in the nahya of Aghjalar were destroyed
during the Fourth Anfal, along with twenty-four in
the nahya of Koysinjaq center, fifty-two in
the nahya of Taqtaq, and sixty-one in the
nahya of Redar. Army documents speak of 138
villages "burned, destroyed or purified" during the
Fourth Anfal. As in the case of the Third Anfal,
these lists include most of the villages whose
survivors reported mass civilian disappearances to
Middle East Watch.
16 Handwritten
daily report no.8280 of May 6, 1988 from First Corps
commander to Army Operations.
17 Middle East
Watch interview, Koysinjaq, April 22, 1992. This
witness supplied the names of eleven disappeared men
from the village of Darbarou.
18 Middle East
Watch interview, Taqtaq, April 24, 1992.
19 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
20 Middle East
Watch interview, Bayinjan complex, May 18, 1992.
21 Like
Chamchamal in the Third Anfal, Koysinjaq was the
target of massive house-to-house searches to locate
survivors of the Fourth Anfal. Many people
disappeared as a result of these Amn sweeps.
22 Middle East
Watch interviews, Erbil, July 7 and 8, 1992.
23 Handwritten
daily report no. 8276 from First Corps Commander to
Army Operations Headquarters, May 6, 1988. This
phase of Anfal also seems to have sucked in some
people who were not its direct targets. One curious
case concerns a driver and two porters--one of them
a 25-year veteran of the Iraqi police named Khasraw
Khidr Sa'id--in the town of Koysinjaq. Sometime in
early May, the three men were approached in the
bazaar by an Amn agent and three members of
the jahsh of Qasem Agha. They ordered the men
to accompany them, saying only that they had some
belongings that needed to be moved. Khasraw Khidr
Sa'id's family later heard that the three men had
been taken to the village of Kanibi, just across the
river from Goktapa.
Three days later the former policeman's family
received a message via a guard at the Topzawa camp,
to say that the man had been arrested. (Topzawa's
crucial role in Anfal is described in detail below,
at pp.209-217.) Beyond this, the family dared not
approach the authorities, for fear that they too
might be disappeared. This was the last word they
received from any of the three men, who then
vanished into thin air.
Then, in January 1992, they learned that Khasraw
Khidr Sa'id's name had appeared on a document pasted
to the wall of a local mosque. The paper turned out
to be a transmittal order from the Erbil office of
Amn to the morgue at the city's Republic
Hospital. The letter was numbered 10160, classified
"confidential" and dated June 29,1988--six weeks
after the porter's disappearance, in other words. It
ordered the hospital to bury and provide death
certificates for four "saboteurs," including Khasraw
Khidr Sa'id; the list also included the name of
Hassan Muhammad Hassan Mawloud, the Koysinjaq driver
abducted with him. The name of the second captured
porter appeared on a similar document posted on
another part of the mosque wall. Four days later,
the family of Khasraw Khidr Sa'id obtained his death
certificate from the Erbil Hospital. It listed
thecause of death as execution. This case strongly
suggests that Amn may have forced civilian
bystanders to play an auxiliary role in the removal
of the property and effects of villagers during the
Fourth Anfal, and then killed them to preserve the
secrecy of the operation.
24 Middle East
Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, July 7, 1992.
25 Middle East
Watch interview, Daratou complex, April 20, 1992.
26 It should be
noted, however, that the amnesty did not put an end
to their troubles. The sixty deserters were sent
back to their army units, where at least some were
beaten and mistreated before finally being released.
Middle East Watch interview with Ilenjagh villager,
Taqtaq, April 24, 1992.
27 A chemical
weapons attack on this area was not mentioned by any
other sources, and is not included in any of the PUK
and KDP listings of such attacks. Nevertheless, the
details of this account are persuasive, and the
witness was extremely credible in all other
respects. Middle East Watch interview, Daratou
complex, July 15, 1992.
28 In the
nahya of Aghjalar. Rahman was evidently unaware
that other army units were simultaneously laying
waste to this area in the wake of the chemical
attack on Goktapa.
29 Middle East
Watch interview with former resident of Goktapa,
Bayinjan complex, May 18, 1992.
30 Middle East
Watch interview, Suleimaniyeh, August 1, 1992.
31 Middle East
Watch interview, Koysinjaq, April 26, 1992.
32 Lt. Gen.
Hashem notes that on May 5 "forty-one persons...
from various villages came to our mobile base at
Shwan"; on May 6, four men and one woman "were
detained in the prohibited village of Turki." Both
groups were "sent on to the Amn
administration of Ta'mim governorate." Handwritten
reports (numbers illegible) from First Corps
Commander to Army Operations Headquarters,
0600 hours May 6 and 0700 hours May 8, 1988.
7
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfals:
The
Mountain Valleys of Shaqlawa and Rawanduz, May
15-August 26, 1988
The forces of the "agent of Iran" Jalal Talabani had
now been driven from their principal headquarters in
the Jafati Valley, from their mountain strongholds
in Qara Dagh, from the broad plains of Germian and
the valleys and flatlands that stretch west to
Erbil. Here and there, in caves and isolated
outposts, pockets of resistance lingered. Several
dozen peshmerga even remained behind in the
desolation of Germian throughout Anfal and beyond.
But most of the remnants of the PUK were now making
their way to the remote fastnesses to the north of
Dukan Lake for their final stand, to the steep
mountains and narrow valleys that lie south of the
town of Rawanduz and west of the Iranian border.
To the west of the lake, battered units of
peshmerga had learned of--and in some cases
witnessed--the rout of the villages around Goktapa
in the first week of May. Along the lakeshore, in
the final engagements of the Fourth Anfal, the
survivors of the battles at Takaltu Mountain and the
Chemi Rezan Valley tried vainly to resist the army's
onslaught. They hid out as best they could for three
or four days, some of them hunkered down in the
grasslands by the water's edge, and resisted until
their ammunition ran out. At night, according to one
peshmerga, when the government helicopters
could no longer spot them, they pulled back, leaving
the last civilians behind. At last, by the second
week of May, they had reached Korak mountain and
their familiar sanctuaries in the Balisan Valley.
It was to Balisan and the neighboring thinly
populated valleys that Anfal came in the middle of
May 1988. This was the climax of the regime's drive
to destroy the PUK once and for all as a fighting
force, to punish those civilians who continued to
sustain it and to expel the lastIranian troops from
the northern front of the Iran-Iraq War.1
The mass relocation--and mass killing--of civilians
would not be a pressing issue for the army in this
phase of Anfal. The borderlands of Erbil governorate
were now empty, their Kurdish population having been
removed in two great sweeps, the first in 1977-1978
and the second in 1983-1984. And the valleys to the
south and southeast of Rawanduz had been largely
evacuated by civilians after the chemical attacks of
April 1987.
From a strictly military point of view, the Anfal
campaign continued to follow the logic of the great
sweep that had begun three months earlier with the
siege of Sergalou-Bergalou. The movement of the
troops somewhat resembled the motion of a car's
windshield wiper, first clockwise and then
counter-clockwise, driving the diminishing forces of
the peshmerga before it at every stage and
"purifying" the countryside of the last of the
Kurdish villages to remain intact under PUK control.
Yet the Fifth Anfal, unlike the earlier stages of
the operation, gave the Iraqi Army a great deal of
trouble. A second and a third assault on these
recalcitrant valleys would be required, and the
Iraqi Army would designate these new campaigns Anfal
VI and Anfal VII.
* * *
The Balisan Valley was the headquarters of the PUK's
third malband, controlling operations in
Erbil governorate from the villages of Beiro and
Tutma. Other parties were also present in this
rugged and beautiful area, where bears and other
wild animals still roamed the steep mountainsides.
The Socialist Party of Kurdistan had been present
here since its foundation in 1979, and there were
also armed units from the Iraqi Communist Party and
from Mas'oud Barzani's KDP, whose main strongholds
lay further to the northwest, near the Iraqi-Turkish
border. The leadership of the third malband
knew full well that Anfal was on its way north. As
the Fourth Anfal ended, the peshmerga began
togather food and ammunition, carrying supplies
through the high mountain passes on muleback to hide
them away in inaccessible caves, stockpiling enough
to withstand a prolonged siege.2
Hundreds of fighters congregated around the twin
villages of Upper and Lower Garawan, seven or eight
miles to the southeast of Rawanduz, while others
took up positions in nearby Malakan, Akoyan and
Warta.3
At least this time the peshmerga did not have
to worry about how to protect the civilian
population. Almost all the residents of these
valleys had fled from their homes after the
murderous poison gas attacks of the previous spring.
There were only a few exceptions, such as Lower
Bileh and Wara, where for very different reasons the
villagers felt secure. Lower Bileh, tucked into
folds of the mountains far from the road, had been a
peshmerga base since even before the start of
the Iran-Iraq War. Despite the chemical attack on
the upper village on May 27, 1987,4
the people of Lower Bileh felt that they were
protected by the remoteness of the place, and had
chosen to stay where they were. But now, Bileh was
newly vulnerable, since it was a transit point for
peshmerga defending the frontline on nearby
Chilchil and Jajouk mountains.
Wara was a different matter. There were no
peshmerga in the vicinity, and the village was
planted squarely on the paved road from Khalifan to
the rundown town of Ranya, close to Dukan Lake. Its
location made it useless as a base for the
peshmerga, and past experience had taught the
residents of Wara that their closeness to the
government lines conferred a measure of safety.
Although some had moved a few miles to Hartal,
higher on the mountainside, most stayed put.
At dusk on May 15, the people of Wara were preparing
for the 'Id al-Fitr, the festival which breaks the
fast of Ramadan. Some of the former residents of the
village, now living in Hartal, saw two airplanes fly
low overhead, but they paid little attention to
them, never thinking that Wara might be their
objective. The nearest peshmerga units
immediately realized what was happening, however,
when they saw the jahsh lighting fires on the
darkening mountain peaks--a sure sign that chemicals
were being used. The people in Hartal were stunned
when the first survivors came running to them, two
hours later, to report that Wara had been hit with
gas. "As soon as we arrived," said one man from
Hartal, "we saw four or five people in the orchard
on the hillside. They were obviously dying. Then we
walked on a little further and found three people
dead in the graveyard. When we reached the center of
the village, we saw that the place was a mess. Food
was still on the stoves. There were animals lying
all around, dead or dying, and we could hear their
screams."
A young woman named Amina was outside her house when
the aircraft made their bombing run over Wara. "The
sound I heard was like when a car races at very high
speed and then you step on the brake. Then there
were four explosions, and smoke covered the
village." Amina's two-year old daughter, Najiba, was
one of thirty-seven villagers who lost their lives
that night.5
The survivors buried thirty-three bodies in a mass
grave outside the village. Three were interred in
the nearby village of Khateh, where they had been
taken by tractor cart to the PUK field hospital, and
one in the complex of Seruchawa, which already held
the graves of fifty of the victims of the previous
year's gassing of Sheikh Wasan.
* * *
Morning brought an unnatural calm, which lasted for
more than a week. Then, in the early afternoon of
May 23, waves of aircraft dropped chemicals in
Balisan, Hiran and other neighboring valleys. The
attacks became so frequent at this point that the
peshmerga lost count of them. An old woman from
Upper Garawan, hiding in a cave, saw two warplanes
swoop down over nearby Malakan and release bombs
that produced a blue smoke which "covered the place
and made everythingdark." The gas, which smelled
pleasant at first, quickly made the cave's occupants
dizzy. Several of them fell to the ground, vomiting
and teary-eyed, their skin turning black. A mother
and her son in the cave died.6
While the entire valley suffered the effects of gas
attacks against the peshmerga on Chilchil
mountain, witnesses said that the largely abandoned
villages of Sheikh Wasan and Balisan were hit
directly for the second time. Soviet-built Sukhoi
fighter-bomber aircraft carried out a 20-minute raid
on Sheikh Wasan with both cluster bombs and chemical
weapons. Although some of the peshmerga had
German-made gas masks, there were not enough for
their families, and everyone fled, combatants and
non-combatants alike. In Bileh, the chemicals killed
at least three children, including two siblings,
Suran and Haydar Saleh Majid, aged two and three.7
Two people also reportedly died in the village of
Nazanin; gas and cluster bombs fell over Seran
village; chemical shells from a rajima rained
on the mountain of Rashki Baneshan, and the heavy
vapor drifted down into Akoyan village. Late in the
night of May 23, or early the next morning, the
ground troops made their simultaneous advance from
three directions.
Most of the remaining civilians had fled to the
hills as soon as this latest round of attacks began.
"There was a nasty smell in the places that had been
bombed," recalled one woman who fled, and the
corpses of horses and sheep overcome by gas still
littered the fields. Like many others, the people of
the village of Akoyan scattered in three directions.
Some set out on foot or on horseback for the Iranian
frontier, thirty-five miles away. Others sought
sanctuary in the complex of Hajiawa, which had been
built in 1987 at the northern edge of Dukan Lake, a
three- or four-day walk distant. Others tried to
hide out in the mountains.
After an arduous journey across rough, steep
terrain, hundreds of refugees, including many of
those from Akoyan and Garawan, converged on the
uninhabited village of Gulan, almost half way to
Ranya. They spent up to a month there, sleeping in
the open air and surviving on the charity of the
local people. They found themselves in the fiefdom
of a powerful local leader called Swara Agha, of the
Ako tribe. "He was the government in Gulan," said
one fleeing villager who arrived there. "He had his
own soldiers and jahsh; he owned everything
except Saddam's airplanes."8
But tribal loyalties are relatively loose in this
part of Iraqi Kurdistan, and even though they were
not his people, Swara Agha made a deal with the
newcomers that seems to have been unique in the
story of Anfal. Those who wished could stay in his
village, he told them; he would not let the military
touch them. "He told the government we were all
jahsh," according to a man from Garawan. And
indeed those who made it as far as Gulan seem to
have been spared. Some chose to remain there, while
others--especially those who had family members in
the peshmerga and were not in the mood to
take any chances--opted for the sanctuary of Iranian
refugee camps. The chieftain, Swara Agha, guaranteed
them safe passage as far as the border--a trek that
took all day and all night, with frequent detours to
avoid Iraqi troop patrols.
Others who reached Gulan decided to surrender to the
army and be relocated to the Hajiawa complex,
outside the town of Ranya. It appears that they were
allowed to do so freely, although conditions in the
mujamma'a were abysmal. For the remainder of
the summer it was hot and insanitary and there was
no regular water supply; the camp was monitored by a
police post, and its agents warned the inmates not
to go too far: only to shop in Ranya or the larger
complex of Seruchawa. After September, the searing
heat gave way to bitter cold, and Zara, a woman from
Garawan, lost two of her seven children that
winter--Shilan, aged three, and Isma'il, aged two.9
The experience of the third group of fugitives from
Akoyan, those who tried to survive in the mountains,
is summed up in the experience of Amina, a woman in
her early thirties. Amina had left home one day at
7:00 a.m., before the soldiers could reach her
village. By noon she had found a hiding place, where
she met up with other refugees from Bileh and
Garawan. They were some fifty households in all in
the group, and they hid out for several days until
word came that the troops were closing in on them.
After wandering around in the mountains for hours,
they reached another hiding place overlooking the
village of Faqian. Here, too, they remained for four
days, until the artillery fire came too close for
comfort. They walked on again, losing all track of
time, heading northwest over the high peaks,
venturing out only after nightfall, until they
reached the government-controlled village of
Julamerg, exhausted and out of food.10
These were the unlucky ones, even though the first
signs were encouraging; jahsh manning the
checkpoints at Julamerg declined to arrest them,
telling them that "this is not the appropriate time
to come to the butcher's hand."11
Despite this, they were quickly rounded up by army
troops. Their names were recorded, their photographs
taken, and they were taken to the nearby military
post at Spielk, outside the town of Khalifan, where
they were housed for several days under canvas,
eight or nine families to each tent, in an area
enclosed by barbed wire. The women and children who
had surrendered after the attack on Lower Bileh were
also here; their menfolk, who fled to the mountains
briefly before turning themselves in, were brought
to Spielk later.
According to survivors, Lower Bileh was the only
village in the area to suffer large-scale civilian
disappearances during Anfal. The events in Lower
Bileh are also referred to in official Iraqi
documents. One handwritten Amn field report
notes that "on the night of June 2-3, thirty
families from the village of Lower Bileh were
received by the military command of FQ 45. They were
counted and surveyed by us. We will presently send
you lists of their names, addresses and birthdates."12
Here is further official confirmation of what
survivors reported with numbing frequency--that a
specific civilian group was in government custody at
the moment it vanished. The Amn note
indicates again that there was nothing
indiscriminate about these disappearances; no one
was to be "Anfalized" until his or her personal data
had been recorded and analysed on a case-by-case
basis.
Some of those affected by the Fifth Anfal
disappeared from Spielk. Others were glimpsed
through a window in a prison in Rawanduz. Others
still vanished into the custody of Amn in
Erbil.
But as in the previous four phases of Anfal, the
same detail recurs in one account after another:
from these interim places of detention, the
prisoners were bundled into army IFA trucks, which
always departed south in the direction of Kirkuk.
* * *
The PUK's Last Stand
The battles raged on and off for more than three
months. During the periods of fighting, says a
peshmerga who saw action in the Balisan region,
"the heaven was never empty" of government aircraft.13
Although government forces quickly occupied some
twenty villages in these valleys, the peshmerga
felt that the difficult landscape had frustrated the
regime's goal of cutting off their main escape
routes to Iran. The villagers who remained in the
mountains also saw that their homes were being left
intact for the time being. With the terrain limiting
themovement of ground forces, the campaign of
village demolition would wait until special
helicopter-borne engineering units were flown in
towards the end of the year.
Upper and Lower Garawan seem to have been a
particularly tough nut for the army to crack. The
twin villages are the subject of a number of
contradictory field reports exchanged by local and
regional branches of Amn during June 1988.
Telegram no. 1132 from Amn Sadiq to Amn
Shaqlawa, dated June 3, refers to the "purification
and burning of Lower Garawan." However, telegram no.
1136 from Sadiq to Erbil, dated June 6, refers to a
continuing "siege of Upper and Lower Garawan,"
indicating that peshmerga forces there were
still putting up resistance; telegram no. 1137,
dated the next day, announces the "fall of Upper and
Lower Garawan." A further telegram, no. 1179, dated
June 14 and again from Amn Sadiq, informs
regional headquarters in Erbil that a number of
villages have now been burned, including Garawan.14
After hiding out in the mountains for weeks, several
people from Garawan crept back into their village in
search of food. Some homes had been destroyed by
shelling, but most were still standing at this point
and official records suggest that the destruction
was carried out sporadically over the next several
months.15
But leveled they were: Wheninhabitants were at last
able to return to Garawan in 1991, after the
post-war uprising, they found that "everything had
been destroyed, exploded by dynamite; even the pipes
were taken that brought the water from the spring."
All signs of life had vanished, even the beehives.
The poplar trees used for roofing material had been
cut down. Even this was not enough, it seems. "They
also destroyed a martyrs' cemetery [for peshmerga
who had fallen] that had been built in the area of
Zenia," said a fighter from Garawan, who was hiding
nearby and had relatives interred there. The man
watched from the mountainside through binoculars as
a group of jahsh and soldiers dynamited and
desecrated the graves.16
* * *
From the regime's point of view, the Fifth Anfal had
been a messy and inconclusive operation--the only
phase of the operation so far that had lacked a
clear beginning and end. The government's intention
had been to wipe out the PUK and then move on to the
Badinan area, running up to the Turkish border,
which was controlled by the KDP. But this goal had
to be postponed for several months, because the
resistance of the third malband's forces was
more tenacious than the Iraqi Army had anticipated.
The atmosphere of frustration and repeated delays
can be gleaned from the telegrams that flew back and
forth between local Amn offices. June 4: "Met
strong resistance while advancing on Korak
mountain"; June 8: "Special Anfal Operations: Attack
by Saboteurs"; June 27, and again July 8:
"Purification of Gelli Resh, Badawara, Gilga";
August 15: "Request complete picture of purification
of the region within 24 hours."17
The sense that the Fifth Anfal was not a great
success also emerges clearly from an unusually
detailed military document entitled "Analysis: Final
Anfal Operation," (Khatimat al-Anfal). This
is a report to the Army General Command from
Brigadier General Yunis Muhammad al-Zareb, Commander
of the Fifth Army Corps. It is classified "Strictly
confidential and personal." In essence, the report
is a glowing review of the brief, triumphant
campaign against the KDP-held areas of the north,
between August 28 and September 3, 1988. But in
reviewing the background to the Final Anfal, it
speaks of innumerable delays in "purifying" the
Rawanduz-Shaqlawa sector. It also provides a
revealing picture of the chain of command that
ordered the successive stages of the Anfal
operation.
"After the completion of Operation Anfal V on June
7, 1988, preparations and plans were embarked upon
for Operation Anfal VI," Gen. Zareb writes. "A
cleansing operation was planned to crush the
saboteurs in the Alana and Balisan valleys (Anfal
VI). This plan was sent to the Army Chief of Staff
on May 30, 1988 in my strictly confidential and
personal communication no. 1049." But this first
plan did not materialize, for, "The Army Chief of
Staff, in his confidential and urgent communication
no. 1475 of June 7, 1988, ordered the postponement
of the operation until a more suitable time. The
Chief of Staff, in his strictly confidential and
personal communication no. 519 of June 7, 1988,
ordered a plan to be devised to crush the saboteurs
in the Balisan and Smaquli regions."
The main reason for the decision to suspend the
campaign temporarily seems to have been the
obstinate resistance of the PUK around Korak
mountain, a 7,000-foot peak at the head of the
Alana
Valley. But the temporary ceasefire, which held
until well into July, may also have been connected
to the June visit to
Washington,
D.C. by PUK leader Jalal Talabani. Although the
peshmerga were excited by this trip, which was
seen as a diplomatic breakthrough, it can scarcely
be considered a success. Senior U.S. officials
declined to meet with Talabani, and the mid-level
State Department personnel who did see him commented
only that, "Because of his Iranian alliance, his
group has enjoyed a certain degree of military
success at the expense of the Kurdish population as
a whole."18
This remark essentially reflected the line of the
Iraqi government toward the PUK. Since Talabani is
known to have informed U.S. officials about the
Anfal operation and the recent chemical attacks
against the Kurds, his visit also raises the
question of how muchWashington may have known about
the Kurdish genocide as it was happening.19
"The plan for the destruction of the saboteurs'
headquarters in the Smaquli area," General Zareb
continues, "was provided in our communication no,
1572, dated August 15, 1988 [sic]."20
"In a confidential and personal communication no.
2544/K of June 23, 1988, sent to us by the Army
Chief of Staff in communication no. 641 of June 24,
the Presidency of the Republic (Secretary) gave its
agreement to launch the operation and destroy the
headquarters of the saboteurs in the Balisan basin
and the Smaquli region."
President Saddam Hussein himself, then, evidently
saw fit to involve himself in operational decisions
about Anfal, at least when the campaign was running
into difficulties. Gen. Zareb went on:
"In a confidential and personal communication no.
14671 of July 16, 1988 from the office of the
Presidency of the Republic, relayed to us by the
Army Chief of Staff in confidential and personal
communication no. 861 of July 20, we were informed
that the Anfal operations should becompleted with a
high momentum after the religious feast [of the 'Id
al-Adha], if God so desires.'"21
But God did not appear to be smiling on the
enterprise, and several days after the 'Id al-Adha
the offensive remained stalled. "In a meeting held
at the headquarters of the First Army Corps in
Kirkuk on the morning of July 29, 1988, attended by
the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations and the
Director of Military Movements, and pursuant to
confidential communication no. 943 of July 29, Anfal
operations VI and VII were postponed until
operational requirements were completed."
* * *
While the Iraqi regime grappled with the delays to
the Sixth and Seventh Anfals, events elsewhere were
giving the peshmerga fresh cause for alarm.
On July 17, then Iranian President Ali Khamenei
notified UN Secretary General Javier Perez de
Cuellar that his country was willing to accept UN
Security Council Resolution 598.22
As far as the PUK was concerned, Iran's decision to
end the fighting was a breach of the terms of their
October 1986 Teheran agreement, which had stipulated
that neither party would make a unilateral deal with
Baghdad. But they were powerless to do anything
about it--as powerless as Mullah Mustafa Barzani had
been when the Shah cut off his supply lines to the
KDP in 1975.
On July 26, the day after the 'Id al-Adha, the
commanders of the third malband held an
emergency meeting and decided that a partial
withdrawal was its only option. Anyone who was
unable to fight should now take their families to
safety in Iran; the able-bodied peshmerga
would stay behind to harass the troops and protect
the retreat. Even as the evacuation began, the Iraqi
Air Force launched another fierce chemical attack.
Again, it struck all the main valleys: Balisan,
Malakan, Warta, Hiran, Smaquli. Thirteen people died
in a number of different locations,said one
peshmerga who fought in this theater; fifteen,
according to another account. The clouds of gas
drove the peshmerga to seek safety on the
upper mountain slopes; but early the next morning a
second attack with cluster bombs drove them down
again. Many of those who remained now scattered in
confusion, and the last of the civilians were mopped
up quickly.
A contingent of jahsh arrived in the Smaquli
valley one August morning to find the population
fleeing from artillery fire. Via loudspeaker, the
mustashar urged them to surrender, and after
five days a considerable number of people had turned
themselves in. They were divided into three groups
by age and sex and their names were registered. The
men were told that they would be pardoned, but only
if they surrendered with their weapons. Since many
of them were unarmed civilians, this was difficult,
and they were reduced to digging up caches of
peshmerga arms in order to hand over whatever
guns they could lay their hands on. Some were even
allowed to buy guns from the jahsh in order
that they might qualify for a pardon. The men were
then ordered to sign a confession that they were
indeed peshmerga. Once this grim charade was
over, the mustashar recalled, "all these
people disappeared via Topzawa"--the Popular Army
camp outside Kirkuk that served as the main
processing center for the victims of Anfal.23
* * *
During the weeks that followed, hardly a day went
past without further chemical attacks, even after
the Iranians had accepted Saddam Hussein's terms for
the ceasefire on August 8. Although the peshmerga
were now in full flight, the Iraqi Army never did
manage to cut off the two main avenues of escape to
Iran. Sympathetic jahsh commanders like Swar
Agha helped the last families to reach the border,
and on August 26 or 27 the remaining peshmerga
contingents in the Balisan Valley dynamited their
headquarters and fled. By the 28th, ground and
airborne forces had occupied the entire area. The
PUK was finished as a fighting force, and the whole
territory where it had once held sway was under the
control of the Iraqi government.
With this, the regime turned its attention further
north, to the region of Badinan, the principal
stronghold of the KDP. This time, the campaign would
not be given a number; it would simply be designated
the Final Anfal. As Brig. Gen. Zareb's report
indicates, the plans had been in the works for
several weeks, concurrently with preparations for
the Seventh Anfal. Zareb writes: "In a highly
confidential and personal communication no. 941 of
July 28, 1988, sent to us by the General Commander
of the Armed Forces, instructions were given to deal
the saboteurs a crushing blow in the Badinan
sector."
"A meeting was held on August 7 at the headquarters
of the First Army Corps in Kirkuk," the general
continues, "chaired by Comrade Ali Hassan al-Majid,
member of the Regional Command and Secretary General
of the Northern Bureau. This meeting was also
attended by the Deputy Chief of Staff and the
Directors of Military Movements and the Air Force."
There is a laconic hint of what must have been
al-Majid's fierce mood: "Instructions were given to
put an end to all acts of saboteurs in the northern
region."
After some additional meetings to fine-tune the
details, the army's responsibilities were assigned.
"It was decided that the First Army Corps should
operate in the Balisan-Smaquli sector, and that the
Fifth Corps should operate in the two areas of
Sheikhan and Zakho in the Badinan strip. This was in
accordance with a highly confidential and personal
communication no. 1076 of August 16, 1988 from the
Army Chief of Staff."
It remained only to fix dates. There were two. The
preparatory, or softening-up, stage of the final
Anfal would commence on August 25, and as in almost
every preceding phase of Anfal, this meant attacks
from the air with chemical weapons. On August 28,
the ground troops would go in, "with the first rays
of the dawn."24
______
1 Losing ground
rapidly after the loss of Fao, Iran attempted one
final offensive in the south on June 13, 1988, but
it was contained by Iraqi forces. Simultaneously,
the Iraqi Army's First Corps--which handled the
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfal operations in the
area south of Rawanduz--recaptured a number of
strategic mountain peaks that the Iranians had been
holding in the north. See Jupa and Dingeman, op.
cit., p.8; on the overall military situation in
June 1988, see also Cordesman and Wagner, op.
cit., pp.384-390.
2 Middle East
Watch interview with a PUK peshmerga, Galala
complex, March 23, 1993.
3 The two
Garawans, like much of this area, had been a thorn
in the regime's side for a long time. One Amn
report, dated April 22, 1987 (less than a week, that
is, after the chemical attacks on Sheikh Wasan and
Balisan a few miles away) speaks of an
attempt--presumably unsuccessful--by a joint force
of army, police, Amn and Ba'ath Party Special
Forces to raze the villages of Upper and Lower
Garawan. Amn Shaqlawa to Amn Erbil,
letter no. 5614, classified "secret and
confidential" and dated April 22, 1987.
4 See page 51.
5 Middle East
Watch interview, Wara, March 24, 1993.
6 Middle East
Watch interview, Garawan, April 29, 1992.
7 Middle East
Watch interview, Ramhawej village, July 18, 1992.
8 Swara Agha was
reportedly a former PUK member who had surrendered
and made his own separate peace with Baghdad,
promising that areas under his control would stay
neutral. Middle East Watch interviews with villagers
from Akoyan and Garawan, April 28 and 29, 1992.
9 Middle East
Watch interview, Garawan, April 29, 1992. It remains
a mystery why those who surrendered in Gulan were
spared, while people from the same villages who
surrendered to the army at Julamerg were sent to the
Anfal camps. The difference may be explained by the
clemency of a local army commander.
10 Julamerg lies
a little to the south of the town of Khalifan, at
the head of the Alana Valley. It was near here, on
the banks of the Alana river, that the survivors of
the April 1987 Sheikh Wasan and Balisan chemical
bombing had been dumped by Amn.
11 Julamerg
itself survived intact until September 3, when it
was destroyed, according to a September 3, 1988
telegram from Amn Shaqlawa to Amn
Erbil, no. 4799, alluding to the "purification" of
the Alana Valley by the army's 37th Division.
12 According to
survivors, this list ran to 267 villagers from
Bileh. "Secret and confidential" telegram no. 1130
of June 3, 1988, from Amn Sadiq to Amn
Erbil. "FQ 45" appears to refer to the Army's 45th
Division (firqa), based in Khalifan. This
report is one of a sequence of forty-two Amn
telegrams giving daily field updates on the period
from June 3 to September 18, 1988. These papers make
it possible to reconstruct in some detail the course
of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfals--as well as
providing a glimpse of the evident frustration of
the First Army Corps as it attempted to "purify"
these recalcitrant areas of "saboteurs."
13 Middle East
Watch interview, Ramhawej village, July 18, 1992.
14 Burning may
not be the same thing as demolition. It is worth
noting that Resool lists the date of destruction of
the two Garawans, as well as the neighboring
villages of Akoyan and Faqian, as August 28, 1988.
He also lists many villages in these sectors as not
being destroyed until December 1988. This is the
case, for example, with eleven villages in the
nahya of Salah al Din and eight in the nahya
of Harir (both qadha of Shaqlawa). See also
below, p.325.
15 This appears
to have been a frequent practice. For example, an
extensive file of Amn and army documents
dated August 18-22, 1988 indicates that many of the
villages that had been occupied during the Third and
Fourth Anfals--including the sites of important
clashes such as Sheikh Tawil and the Chemi Rezan
Valley--were not destroyed until several months
later. This campaign also destroyed any crops,
vehicles and stores that remained, with the goal, as
one document put it, of "removing any signs of life"
in the Anfal areas. Amn Kalar, "secret and
urgent" cable no. 19442 of August 20, 1988.
Similarly, even while the Fourth and Fifth Anfals
were underway, other military units were burning
scores of villages in the Qala Dizeh area, to the
east of Dukan Lake, where there were no hostilities
at this time. This parallel campaign of village
destruction was described to Middle East Watch in
aninterview with a survivor from the village of
Binowshan, May 23, 1992. These villages, however,
were not considered to be part of the Anfal
operation.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Garawan, April 29, 1992.
17 From,
respectively, "secret and urgent" Amn
telegrams nos. 1333 (Sadiq to Erbil); 3215 (Shaqlawa
to Erbil); 1293 (Sadiq to Shaqlawa) and 3550
(Shaqlawa to Erbil); and 12233 (Erbil to Shaqlawa).
18 The New
York Times, June 22, 1988.
19 Middle East
Watch conversation with PUK officials, Washington,
D.C., May 2, 1993. Documents obtained through the
Freedom of Information Act by Middle East Watch and
the National Security Archive throw scanty light on
this contentious issue.
One Defense Department cable, dated April 19, 1988,
notes that "an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish
nationals have been resettled in camps"; that
"approximately 700-1000 villages and small
residential areas were targeted for resettlement";
that "an unknown but reportedly large number of
Kurds have been placed in 'cowcentration' (sic)
camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian
borders"; and that "movement by the local population
throughout the north has been severely restricted."
The long section that follows is heavily deleted.
A second Defense Department cable, dated June 15,
1988, makes reference to Talabani's visit to the
United States and reports on a new Iraqi offensive
against Iranian forces in Kurdistan. It also makes a
clear allusion to the Fifth Anfal: "The offensive,
if confirmed, follows sweeps against Kurdish and
Iranian positions in both V and I Corps that have
continued for about two weeks. Iran and the Kurds
have accused Iraq of using chemical weapons in the
operations."
20 In view of the
chronology laid out below, this date is evidently
incorrect.
21 The 'Id
al-Adha, in the Muslim calendar, occurs 50 days
following the eighth day of Ramadan. In 1988, when
Ramadan began on April 17, this would have fallen on
July 25.
22 Security
Council Resolution 598, adopted on July 20, 1987,
called for an immediate ceasefire to be monitored by
UN observers. The full text is contained in Hiro,
The Longest War, pp.309-310.
23 Middle East
Watch interview with former mustashar,
Suleimaniyeh, June 30, 1992.
24 All these
extracts are taken from the 60-page report from the
Fifth Army Corps Commander to the Command of the
Staff of the Army, "Analysis: Final Anfal Operation,
for the Period August 28 to September 3, 1988,"
dated December 25, 1988 and coded H2/2422.
8
The Camps
"Away with them I say and show them death."
-- Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
(V, i)
"For the young, the final stage was Topzawa."
-- Rahman, an elderly man from Darbarou village,
Taqtaq.
The Popular Army Camp at Topzawa
TOPZAWA is one of the commonest place names in
northern Iraq; the map of Kurdistan is dotted with
Topzawas. Most of them were tiny anonymous hamlets,
of the sort that perished by the hundreds during
Anfal. Like many place names, it is incongruous.
Goktapa, site of the May 3 chemical attack, meant
"green hill." Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration
camp, was a "beech forest." Top, in Kurdish,
means "artillery"; zawa is betrothed.
Combined, the two words evoke sniggers among
schoolchildren, for they refer, somewhat brutally,
to the act that is performed by the male on his
wedding night.
But just as no Kurd will ever again think of "Anfal"
as a sura of the Koran, so no one will ever
again hear the secondary meaning of "Topzawa" as a
smutty joke. For the Topzawa they will remember is a
sprawling army base on a highway leading southwest
out of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Covering about
two square miles, Topzawa is bounded by two
underground oil pipelines, a railroad repair yard
and a military airfield. For the villagers who were
trucked away from their burning villages by the army
during Anfal, all roads seemed to lead to Kirkuk,
and to Topzawa. At Topzawa, any notion that Anfal
was simply a counterinsurgency campaign evaporates.
No official documents have so far come to light from
the Kirkuk headquarters of the various agencies that
were involved in Anfal. But a letter from Amn
Suleimaniyeh to the unnamed director of security of
the Autonomous Region, dated October 29, 1988,
alludes to the Topzawaoperation and gives some small
hint of its scale. Almost two months have now passed
since the completion of Anfal, and the regional
security director in Kirkuk has evidently telephoned
to ask for a progress report from the Suleimaniyeh
governorate. The reply is classified "Secret and
personal, to be opened by addressee only."
It begins, "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent,
the Merciful: Distinguished Director of the
Autonomous Region, with reference to our telephone
conversation, the statistics requested are as
follows..." There is a brief recitation of actions
taken: nine criminal subversives executed, along
with eighteen members of their families, as ordered
by Ali Hassan al-Majid's office; another nineteen
people executed for being found in prohibited areas,
in violation of directive no. 4008 of June 20, 1987;
another forty-seven subversives sentenced to death
by the Revolutionary Court; and finally this: "2,532
individuals and 1,869 families totalling 9,030
persons, who were among those arrested during the
heroic 'Anfal' operations, were sent to the Popular
Army1
camp in the governorate of al-Ta'mim (Kirkuk)."2
In other words, to Topzawa.
* * *
From the collection points at Qader Karam and Qoratu
and Leilan they came, from Chamchamal and Aliawa and
Taqtaq, crammed into the swaying IFA trucks like
farm beasts. "From Taqtaq we were taken the next day
[about May 7] in a military truck with a cow,"
remembered Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari, the
dignified old village leader of Goktapa, with a
rueful laugh. "This was insulting. You know what
cows do, they shit. At the turn-off on the road from
Redar to Erbil,they dropped off the cow. I said to
the cow, 'We're both going to be slaughtered, pardon
me if I have done something wrong to you in the
past'"--this being a traditional Muslim way of
bidding final farewell.3
The truck lumbered on to Kirkuk, where it stopped
for an hour or so outside the Ba'ath Party building.
(Many witnesses recalled making a brief halt either
here or at the Kirkuk headquarters of Amn.)
Abd-al-Qader counted fourteen young men being
hustled on to the truck by soldiers. Before long the
vehicle drew up outside the gates of Topzawa. The
minority of villagers who were literate could read
the name on a sign at the entrance.
"It was very late at night when we arrived at
Topzawa," said Yawar, a 70-year old man who believed
he was Anfal's only survivor from his home village
of Karim Bassam (nahya Qader Karam).
We were all hungry and exhausted. We were almost
dead. We had not eaten for several days. We had even
lost our sense of time. We did not know what they
wanted to do with us. When we reached the base they
announced over the loudspeakers that we should not
get out of the trucks until they told us to do so.
There were eight or nine trucks that arrived
together. Their backs were covered; we could not see
anything inside. We stayed in the truck for about
one hour before the soldiers opened up the back and
said, "The men, just the men will get off first." I
was so hungry and exhausted that I could not move,
so I was the last to get off. The young ones got off
first; as soon as they did, they were handcuffed.4
With only minor variations, this was the standard
pattern for sorting the new arrivals. Men and women
were segregated on the spot, as soon as the trucks
had rolled to a halt in the base's large central
courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal,
and it did not spare the elderly. One 70-year old
man from the nahya of Shwan was draggedout of
line for no apparent reason, beaten by an officer
wearing the three stars of a captain on his shoulder
and robbed of 3,000 dinars ($9,000 at the official
1988 exchange rate). Abd-al-Qader of Goktapa
recalled that a colonel (aqid) was in charge
of processing the new arrivals, assisted by a
captain (naqib).5
A little later, the men were further divided by
age--small children kept with their mothers, the
elderly and infirm shunted off to separate quarters,
and men and teenage boys considered to be of an age
to use a weapon herded together. Roughly speaking,
this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, but
there was no rigorous check of identity
documents--and strict chronological age seems to
have been less of a criterion than size and
appearance. A strapping twelve-year old could fail
to make the cut; an undersized sixteen-year old
could be told to remain with his female relatives. A
prematurely gray or grizzled-looking peasant could
be spared, even though he might be in his forties.
"We joined thousands of other Kurds who had been
brought there before our group," said one such man,
Jalal, a 45-year old farmer from southern Germian
who was transported to Topzawa in mid-April from the
21st Division fort at Qoratu.
We just did not know what would happen. We could not
speak; fear would not let us speak, everyone was
mute. The only sound that we heard was when the
military officers called out names. "Accused Ali
Rahman, son of so and so... Accused Mustafa Taher,
son of so and so..." They were announcing the names
of the youths over the loudspeakers. They did not
call the old men."6
It was time now to process the younger males. They
were split up into smaller groups--lines of eight,
one said; seated in a smaller courtyard, said
another. No one told the prisoners why they had
beenbrought here, or what was to happen to them.
After separation into groups, they were
body-searched by soldiers or Istikhbarat
agents. Some had their IDs removed at this point,
but not all--perhaps, as one survivor suggested,
because the guards were simply overwhelmed by the
magnitude of their task. Combs, razor blades,
mirrors, knives, belts, worry beads: everything was
taken from the prisoners but the clothes they stood
up in. "I saw a pile of watches, belts and money
taken from the villagers and heaped up on the
floor," one woman remembered. "You could weep."7
Some of the detainees were interrogated immediately,
others hauled out later from their cells at night.
In any event, for most of the newcomers the
interrogation was quite perfunctory--no more,
really, than the taking of a brief statement and a
few simple questions: name, mother's name, number of
siblings, marital status, year of marriage, number
of children.8
"How long have you been a peshmerga?" the men
were asked. "What actions did you take part in?"
Many feared to give truthful answers. "I have never
been a peshmerga," one young man answered
typically. The interrogator, who was wearing the
uniform of the army Special Forces (Quwat
al-Khaseh), wrote down "peshmerga"
anyway.9
Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustled
into a number of large rooms, or halls, each filled
with residents of a single area. One witness counted
twenty-eight of these halls, and estimates of the
numbersof prisoners held in each varied from one to
two hundred. Using these figures as a rough
yardstick, the total population of the Topzawa base
at any given time may have been some 4,000-5,000.
But the inmates shifted constantly, with most
remaining there for as little as a single night or
as much as four days before being taken on to their
next destination.
While the conditions at Topzawa were appalling for
everyone, the most grossly overcrowded quarters seem
to have been those in which the male detainees were
held. "We could not leave our hall," said one boy
from near Qader Karam, who was held with others who
were considered younger than military-service age
but too old to stay with their mothers. "It was made
of cement, heavily built and very strong with bars
on the windows and doors but no glass. The hall
measured about six meters by thirty, and was very
crowded. There was no room to lie down."10
Other men described being forced to squat on their
haunches all night, and beaten if they attempted to
stand up. Many of their companions fainted from
exhaustion.
Sanitation was non-existent. The prisoners used cans
in the room for their bowel movements, and urinated
out of the door or simply on the floor where they
stood. If they were fortunate, they might be taken
to the toilet twice a day at gunpoint, in groups of
five or ten, by guards who sometimes beat them on
the way with a strip of coaxial cable. Most were
suffering from diarrhea by this time, especially if
they ate the prison food. "It was something that it
is better not to describe," said one of the few
young men who survived Topzawa. "If you were not
hungry you would not eat it. It was a type of soup
with left-over bones and a lot of oil floating in
it. Everybody got sick." For many inmates of
Topzawa, there was not even this--merely two small
pieces of stale pita bread (samoun) each day,
and a little water. Some received no food at all.
Again, women and children fared a little less
harshly, and some of them told of occasionally being
given meager rations of rice, tea, cheese or even,
in one case, a little meat.
But the women and children suffered grievously in
their own ways. After a short time in which they
remained together, baton-wielding guards dragged the
older women away violently from their daughters and
grandchildren and bundled them away to yet another
unknown destination. In at least two reported cases,
soldiers and guards burst intothe women's quarters
during their first night at Topzawa and removed
their small children, even infants at the breast.
All night long the women could hear the cries and
screams of their children in another room. In one
instance, the children were returned to their
mothers the next morning, without a word of
explanation, after a six or seven-hour separation.
In the other, the families were not reunited until
the next stage of their ordeal, when they were
herded once more into army IFAs and transferred from
Topzawa to a prison for women and children at Dibs,
on the road that leads northwest from Kirkuk to
Erbil and Mosul. Taymour Abdullah Ahmad, the
twelve-year old boy who had been captured by the
army on April 13 in the village of Kulajo, said he
was held at Topzawa with his mother and three
sisters for a month--an exceptionally long stay.11
During that time, he witnessed the deaths of four
children, aged five to nine, apparently from
starvation. Soldiers removed their bodies, and
Taymour learned later that they were thrown into a
pit outside.12
But above all the women and children of Topzawa
endured the torment of seeing their husbands,
brothers and fathers suffer and, in the end,
disappear. Through the barred windows of their
halls, they could see their menfolk in another part
of the prison. Every two or three days, said
Taymour, the inmates of his cell were let out for
air and allowed to mingle in the central courtyard.
The children would take advantage of the moment to
slip across to the men's quarters and throw bread in
at the windows.
For the men, beatings were routine. Even old
Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari of Goktapa was beaten,
a man in his late 60s still weak and disoriented
from the chemical bombing of his village several
days earlier. On the night of his arrival, a guard
ordered him to stand. He replied that he could not,
because of the gas. The guard rushed at himin a fury
and beat him, screaming that it was forbidden for
anyone to speak of poison gas attacks.13
A young army deserter from the Qader Karam area,
known to his friends as Ozer, was held captive for
four days in Topzawa. During that time one of his
cellmates was a bearded man from the village of
Khalo Baziani, in the nahya of Qara Hassan.
The man told Ozer he had been tortured. They had to
talk discreetly because of the ever-present guards,
but Ozer was able to learn that the man had been
beaten with a cable, hung from a ceiling fan and
scorched with a piece of hot steel. Guards had
stamped on his back with their boots while he lay
face-down on the floor. The man was in great pain.
He said he had been singled out for harsh treatment
because of his beard--which was presumably taken as
a sign of Islamic fundamentalism and pro-Iranian
sympathies.14
An officer had told him that he would be executed if
the beard was not gone by the following day. That
evening, Ozer cut off the beard of this man and five
others with a small pair of nail scissors that one
of the prisoners had managed to keep hidden.
On the fourth day of Ozer's confinement, at 1:30 in
the morning, an army captain came in and ordered the
prisoners to stand. He told them that he would read
a list of names; anyone who failed to answer when
they were called would be executed on the spot in
front of the others. One after the other the
prisoners were summoned to the officer's table. Ozer
saw that each man had been assigned a serial number;
his own was 375. As their names were called, the
prisoners were led out of the room in groups of
eight. After four days on a starvation diet, they
were weakened and disoriented. Ozer found himself in
a second, empty hall. After the stuffy heat of his
previous overcrowded quarters, he was chilled by the
cold of the mid-April night. The floor was stained
with diesel oil, and there were three patches of
fresh blood. A bloodstainedKurdish headscarf lay in
a corner, along with a coat and a pair of baggy
Kurdish pants. At about 4:00 a.m. the prisoners
heard the sound of engines outside. They tried to
peer out of the keyhole, but it was impossible to
make out anything in the darkness. For another four
hours they waited, numb with cold, hunger and fear.
These early morning movements of male prisoners were
observed by women and older people in other sections
of Topzawa. "We saw them taking off the men's shirts
and beating them," said one elderly man. "They were
handcuffed to each other in pairs, and they took
away their shoes. This was going on from 8:00 a.m.
until
noon."15
Sometimes the men were blindfolded as well;
according to some accounts they were stripped to
their shorts. And at last they were packed into
sinister-looking vehicles, painted white or green
and windowless; these were variously described as
resembling buses, ambulances or closed trucks.
This was the last that was seen of the men who had
been held at Topzawa. As the windowless vehicles
left in one direction, buses drove off in another,
filled with the other detainees. For many of the
women and children--but by no means all of them, as
we shall see--the next destination was the prison of
Dibs. For the elderly, the road led south, through
the river valleys of central Iraq, before turning
southwest, into the desert. "The Kurds are traitors,
and we know where to send you," a military officer
told one old man from Naujul. "We will send you to a
hell that is built especially for the Kurds."16
Its name was Nugra Salman.
* * *
The Popular Army Camp at Tikrit
Many tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers swept up
in the third and fourth stages of Anfal passed
through the Popular Army base of Topzawa in this
way. So did smaller numbers of Kurds from the
second, fifth, sixth and seventh Anfals. A note
should also be added here about the Popular Army
barracks in the town of Tikrit, which lies southwest
ofKirkuk on the banks of the Tigris river, close to
the birthplace of President Saddam Hussein. Tikrit
appears to have performed a broadly similar function
to Topzawa, but on a smaller scale and for a much
shorter period. Indeed, all the witnesses who had
spent time in Tikrit belonged to a single large
batch of prisoners from the Daoudi tribal area along
the Awa Spi river in southern Germian. All of them
were captured in the initial stages of the Third
Anfal by army units operating out of Tuz Khurmatu,
and all of them were brought to Tikrit after first
being detained at the Tuz Khurmatu Youth Hall (see
above, pp.159).
It seems reasonable to surmise, then, that Tikrit
was pressed into service as a temporary overflow
center for a few days in mid-April, when the Third
Anfal was in full swing in Germian and Topzawa was
filled to capacity. As at Topzawa, the guards were
identified as regular army troops, with Amn
and Istikhbarat agents also in attendance.
But one man also said that he recognized members of
the Popular Army (Jaysh al-Sha'abi).
Conditions at Tikrit were extremely brutal.
According to the account of Muhammad, a man from the
village of Talau who was aged 63 at the time of
Anfal:
On the first morning, they separated the men into
small groups and beat them. Four soldiers would beat
one captive; the other prisoners could see this.
About fifteen or twenty men were in each group that
was taken a little way off to be kicked and beaten
with sticks and [coaxial] cables. They were taken
away in the early morning and returned in the
afternoon. The soldiers did not gather the men by
name, but just pointed, "you, and you" and so on.
They were Amn from Tikrit and
Kirkuk;
butchers, we know them.17
When one group of beaten men returned, they took
another and beat them. That night, I was in a group
of ten or twelve men that was taken out and
blindfolded, with our hands tied behind us. They
took us in three or four cars to somewhere in
Tikrit. We drove around all night, barely stopping.
They asked meno questions. The captured men could
not talk to each other. Everyone was thinking of his
own destiny. Of the ten or twelve they took out that
night, only five returned. The next night, when I
was back in the hall, Amn came and asked for
men to volunteer for the war against Iran. Eighty
men volunteered. But it was a lie; they disappeared.
A committee was set up by Amn to process the
prisoners, who were ordered to squat while the
Amn agents took all their money and put it in a
big sack. They also took all our documents. The
Amn agents were shouting at us to scare us.
"Bring weapons to kill them," said one. "They are
poor, don't shoot them," said another. And another:
"I wish we had killed all of them. "Later that night
the Amn came back and took all the young men
away. Only the elderly remained. The young men were
taken away in Nissan buses, ten or more of them,
each with a capacity of forty-five people. Their
documents had already been taken; they left with
nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Among the young men who disappeared that night were
Muhammad's son Salah, his brother's son, and several
other relatives. "I never heard from them again," he
concluded. "There were no messages, nothing. No one
ever saw them again. Only Saddam Hussein knows."18
* * *
The Prisoners from Bileh and Halabja
The treatment of those captured in other phases of
the Anfal campaign appears to have been slightly
different. During April and early May 1988, Topzawa
was processing Anfal victims on what can only be
described as an industrial scale. But by the end of
May, when Anfal reached the areas north of Dukan
Lake, the rules had changed somewhat. Middle East
Watch interviewed some three dozen former inmatesof
Topzawa. Of these, five were from the areas affected
by the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Anfals. Four were
from Upper and Lower Bileh; the other was a young
woman named Amina, from the nearby village of
Akoyan.19
These witnesses reported being held apart from the
other prisoners. Almost the entire group was from
Bileh, although they also recognized a handful of
people from nearby Kandour--the village whose
residents had shown such kindness to the victims of
the May 1987 chemical attack on the Malakan Valley.
All of them had been brought here after a few days
in the army fort at Spielk, near Khalifan. One man
told of an additional night in an underground cell
at the Amn headquarters in
Kirkuk;
several others reported an overnight stay in Erbil.
The Bileh group was apparently held at Topzawa for
eight to ten days, considerably longer than most of
the detainees from earlier periods. Their conditions
also seem to have been marginally less harsh, and
the women were able to take water and cigarettes to
their husbands, who were detained in a separate
large cell. After a week or so the women and
children were transferred, like their predecessors,
to another army base at Dibs. Most of the elderly
were driven south to the prison at Nugra Salman,
although one old man was taken directly from Topzawa
to Arbat, a town to the south of the city of
Suleimaniyeh. This was in mid-June. From Arbat, he
made his own way to Basirma, a government-controlled
complex that had been set up after the chemical
attacks on the Balisan Valley in April 1987.
An even more notable exception to the earlier
pattern of detentions was the case of Faraj, a
39-year old teacher from Halabja. His testimony
shows again how survivors from that town were
treated differently from those who were swept up in
Anfal. It also demonstrates that Topzawa remained in
operation until the very end of the campaign. Faraj
had fled to Iran with his wife and two of his six
children immediately after the March 16 chemical
attack. After two and a half months in Iranian
hospitals and refugee camps, the family crossed back
into
Iraq,
but they were soon picked up by soldiers at a
checkpoint in Ranya. After a period of interrogation
by Amn agents in Suleimaniyeh,Faraj and his
family were transferred to Topzawa in a bus that
contained twenty-five people from Halabja and the
Kalar area.20
The conditions that Faraj observed in Topzawa were
broadly similar to what earlier witnesses had
described. The sexes were still being segregated on
arrival; 150 people or so were crowded into a single
large cell; and they existed on starvation rations.
But there was now a Kurdish army doctor in
attendance, a man named Najib, who hailed from
Khanaqin. Faraj became aware that all of his
fellow-prisoners were from Halabja, and that many of
them had not fled to Iran as he did, but had been
captured inside Iraqi Kurdistan after the bombing of
the city.
At night, he heard the sound of weeping from other
parts of the building, and asked a guard what was
going on. "Those are the Anfal prisoners," the guard
replied, "and they are leaving the prison." Halabja,
in other words, was not part of the Anfal operation.
"Where are the Anfal prisoners being taken?" Faraj
asked another guard the next morning. "That is none
of your concern," the man answered. "If you ask that
question again, you will be sent off with them too,
to be lost forever."
From eavesdropping on their conversations, Faraj,
who could speak Arabic, learned that the Topzawa
guards had all been posted here from Baghdad. One of
them even gave the prisoner his telephone number,
and suggested that he call if he was ever in the
capital to see if "we may have a job for you."
Later, the same guard aroused the teacher's
suspicions further when he gave him a letter which
he said was from a Kurdish girl in another section
of the prison, telling her relatives in the men's
cells about her failing health and her fears of
death. Faraj refused to get involved. Some time
later his suspicions about the guard were confirmed
when the man told him point-blank that Amn
was interested in having him spy on his fellow
Kurds.
Amn's
clumsy attempts to recruit Faraj may partially
explain the leniency that was shown to him, although
it is clear from his testimony that Halabja
survivors were treated more indulgently than the
Anfal prisoners. For the first two weeks, Faraj was
even allowed brief visits tohis wife, although those
privileges were withdrawn when another prisoner was
caught trying to escape through a hole in the
ceiling. To discourage any further thoughts of
flight, guards beat the man to death in front of his
fellow inmates. The Halabja teacher remained in
Topzawa for fifty-two days altogether--a much longer
period of confinement than any other surviving
witness has described. He was eventually released
shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War and
resettled in the Bayinjan complex, between
Suleimaniyeh and Chamchamal.21
* * *
The Women's Prison at Dibs
Karim, a 20-year old technology student from Dibs,
had been aware for some time of unusual troop
movements on the outskirts of town, close to the
junction with the Kirkuk-Mosul highway.22
Residents of Dibs had seen civilian buses and
coasters approaching from the direction of
Kirkuk,
and converging on the Dibs army base--a so-called
"Fighting School" where Iraqi commando forces (Maghawir)
were trained. They had also seen sealed green police
buses leaving the base, accompanied by armed men in
olive fatigues. Local shopkeepers grew accustomed to
visits from groups of six or seven female prisoners,
accompanied by guards, and soon learned that they
came from the Dibs base.
These women, and their children, were being
transported from Topzawa to Dibs in large numbers
from mid-April onwards, part of the three-way
segregation process that took their elderly
relatives off to the prison of Nugra Salman and
their menfolk off, stripped to their shorts,
handcuffed and blindfolded, to an unknown
destination. One of the Dibsguards told a newcomer
that the camp--two buildings within a single
compound--held 7,000 Kurdish prisoners. On arrival,
some of the women found themselves reunited with the
children who had been plucked from their arms by the
guards at Topzawa. They would remain at Dibs for
between four and five months, until the Iraqi regime
declared its final victory over the peshmerga
and announced a general amnesty for the Kurds.
The women were tormented by not knowing what had
become of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Yet
after the abysmal conditions at Topzawa, Dibs
offered significant relief. There was room to
stretch out and sleep on the filthy concrete floor,
and there were no restrictions on the use of the
bathrooms. Water was readily available from a
faucet. The food was bad, but it was at least more
regular--lentil soup and hard pita bread (samoun)
or rice, twice or three times a day. After a few
weeks, there was even a little added variety in the
diet. By the time that Amina, the young woman from
Akoyan, arrived in June, the rations at Dibs
included two eggs a week, yogurt and tea, and toward
the end even a little watermelon. The guards sold
soap, tea and sugar to those women who still had
money, and the authorities provided one blanket for
every seven prisoners. The women were allowed to do
their washing in the prison courtyard, sit under
trees in the shade or even sleep outdoors if the
heat inside was oppressive. At least some were
allowed out into the town under guard to shop. One
woman who was pregnant when she arrived at Dibs was
taken (albeit under military guard) to a hospital in
the town, where her delivery was attended by a
Kurdish woman doctor. Another said that doctors
visited the base twice a week, dispensing shots and
tablets, although other witnesses disputed this.
Yet for all these comparative advantages, Dibs was
also a regime of unremitting horror. Ironically, the
inmates found that the base was run by a fellow
Kurd, a man from the Erbil area named Haji Ahmad
Fatah who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Children
who were old enough to do manual labor were forced
by the guards to sweep out the halls and clean the
bathrooms. "We were guarded by Amn,
Istikhbarat and Ba'ath Party people," recalled a
14-year old boy who spent five months at the Dibs
base. "They were always coming and beating the
prisoners without any reason. They tied up my hands
and beat me several times. Three Amn agents
beat me with a stick on my back and legs. Twice they
kept me tied up without food for a whole day for no
reason, inside thehall where I slept, from morning
until night. I could not ask why. It was impossible
for anyone to intervene in Ba'ath rules."23
This child at least survived; many, perhaps
hundreds, did not. There were few fatalities at
first, but the rate increased as spring gave way to
the heat of summer. Amina, the woman from Akoyan,
had given birth to a baby daughter in Dibs, but
within two months the child sickened and died. Four
or five children died from Bileh alone. Nabat, a
28-year old mother from Qader Karam, lost two of her
infant children within a month of each other. Her
three-year old daughter Sharo died first; a month
later, it was the turn of her two-year old son Diar.
"They died of fear," Nabat said. "They were scared,
got sick and died. They had diarrhea and were
vomiting."24
Sherzad, a boy of fourteen, counted seven infant
deaths at Dibs in a single night. Muhammad, a boy of
nine, estimated that there were fifty deaths in his
family's large cell during the five months of their
captivity; most were small children, but some older
women also died. Habiba, who was eight at the time
of Anfal, recalled being forced to sleep among dead
bodies before guards came to remove them.25
The emaciated bodies of Nabat's two children, Sharo
and Diar, were taken away by two guards from the
Popular Army, who washed the bodies and interred
them in the town's Gumbat Cemetery as Nabat watched.
Other infant corpses were simply dumped at the
town's Old Mosque, according to Karim, the 20-year
old student who had watched the Dibs commando base
fill up with prisoners earlier that spring.
Townspeople would come to the mosque to wash the
bodies, and young men from the locality--including
Karim himself--would dig the burial plots in an old,
abandoned children's cemetery just over a mile away.
Karim helped bury four infants, and between them his
friends buried at least fifty, all of them less than
a year old. The people of Dibs markedoff a special
plot for the new arrivals, and each of the tiny
graves was marked.26
At regular intervals, sealed buses would drive up to
the Dibs base and carry off large numbers of
prisoners. On at least two occasions, these groups
were made up of people from the Kalar area of
southern Germian--some five hundred women and
children in all, according to one estimate--and they
were transported to the prison at Nugra Salman, for
reasons that remain obscure.27
(See below p.304.) But thousands of others--perhaps
half the total population of Dibs--were driven off
to other, unknown destinations and vanished into the
darkness of Anfal. Sherin, for example, a 23-year
old woman from the village of Qeitoul Rasha (nahya
of Qader Karam), lost two of her young nieces in
this way: Perjin Ja'far Hassan, aged 12, and her
younger sister Nabat. Given that the survivors of
Anfal were eventually resettled in complexes that
corresponded to their places of origin, and that
five years have now passed without a word of news,
the strong presumption must be that these two girls,
and the thousands who vanished from Dibs with them,
were murdered by the Iraqi authorities.28
A Prison Camp for the Elderly
"If you know about hell, this is hell. We have seen
it."
--Muhammad Hussein Muhammad (b.1912), a survivor of
Nugra Salman.
While the trucks and buses drove north to Dibs,
others headed south from Topzawa and Tikrit, through
Iraq's Arab heartland and then further south still,
into the vast deserts that stretch toward the Saudi
border, until at last they reached the abandoned
fortress prison of Nugra Salman--the "Pit of
Salman." The prisoners came in four main batches,
and the total population of Nugra Salman during
Anfal appears to have been somewhere between 6,000
and 8,000.29
The first to arrive were thousands of captured
villagers from Qara Dagh and Germian (Second and
Third Anfals), aged from about fifty to ninety, who
came in huge caravans of sealed buses in mid-April,
1988. Next, in early May, a somewhat smaller number
of elderly people arrived from the valley of the
Lesser Zab (Fourth Anfal). Third, over the course of
the summer, several busloads of women and children
from southern Germian were transferred from the
prison at Dibs, to be housed in separate quarters at
Nugra Salman. Finally, in late August, just a few
days before the military declared a formal end to
its Anfal campaign, several hundred returning
refugees from the gas attack on Halabja were brought
to Nugra Salman, having surrendered to the Iraqi
Army as they crossed the border from Iran. According
to some reports, the Halabja contingent was of all
ages, and may even have included some young men.30
One of the Halabja survivors was a 33-year old woman
named Urfiya. One of her five children had died on
the road to Iran after the bombing. With the other
four, Urfiya crossed the border and spent five
months in the Iranian camps. On August 23, she
recalled, the Iranians bussed some 2,000 Halabja
families back to the border. The Iraqi Army was
waiting for them, and took them in military trucks
to Suleimaniyeh, where the Emergency Forces held
them on a bread-and-water diet for five days. The
place where they were confined, said Urfiya, was
"full of people from Qara Dagh." At the end of this
time, the young men were separated from their
families and driven off in vehicles that resembled
ambulances, painted white or green with a single
tiny window in the rear. They have never been seen
again. The women and children and the elderly were
crammed into civilian buses and driven via Kirkuk,
Tikrit, Baghdad and Samawa to Nugra Salman, arriving
there on August 29.31
* * *
The journey from the outskirts of
Kirkuk
to Nugra Salman took between twelve and fifteen
hours, with fifty or sixty prisoners crammed into
windowless buses designed to hold half that number.
At the head and tail of each convoy, Amn and
Istikhbarat agents rode in cars with
walkie-talkie radios. Some convoys moved off early
in the morning and arrived at Nugra Salman late the
same evening. Others left in darkness and drove all
night. By guessing at the time and direction, or by
peering out of the rear door if it was left open a
crack for air, the prisoners could tell when they
passed through a city--first Tikrit, several hours
later Baghdad, and then finally Samawa. They could
hear sirens wailing and glimpse curious Arab crowds
lining the streets to watch the sealed vehicles go
past with their human cargo. There were no stops;
the detainees weregiven no food or water, and the
presence of guards with Kalashnikovs silenced any
complaint.
At Samawa, the elderly prisoners sometimes became
aware that the convoys were dividing into two; while
their vehicles continued to head south, others
peeled off in a different direction. These were the
buses that carried the younger Kurdish prisoners
from Topzawa, and they were never seen again. After
Samawa, there was nothing but barren desert, dotted
with the rubble of destroyed settlements--"like our
villages, flattened by bulldozers," said one woman.32
Three hours to the southwest of Samawa, the
table-land dropped away sharply, and there in the
depression below, visible only at the last moment,
lay the town of Al-Salman. And a mile and a quarter
away in the desert, surrounded by a barbed-wire
perimeter fence and guarded by watch towers at each
corner, was the prison of Nugra Salman itself.
The buses entered through one of the two large gates
and came to a rest in a huge central courtyard,
"three times as long as the soccer field at
Suleimaniyeh."33
The first arrivals from Topzawa in mid-April found
Nugra Salman dark and empty. It was an old building,
dating back to the days of the Iraqi monarchy and
perhaps even earlier.34
It had been abandoned for years, used by Arab nomads
to shelter their herds. The bare walls were scrawled
with the diaries of political prisoners. On the door
of one cell, a guard had daubed "Khomeini eats
shit." Over the main gate, someone else had written
"Welcome to Hell." Over the rear entrance, another
sign read: "It is rare for anyone to survive three
months in this place."
Whatever interrogation the Iraqi authorities deemed
necessary for these elderly and infirm victims of
Anfal had already been carried out at Topzawa. Here,
at Nugra Salman, there was only a quick registration
of name, occupation and place of residence,
accompanied by jeers and threats from the guards.
"You are here to die," said one, "on the orders of
Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid." With this,
the new arrivalswere shoved into the cells, or
halls, that filled both stories of the prison. These
bare rooms varied greatly in size: some of them held
only fifty or sixty prisoners, others several
hundreds.35
The doors were locked from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
At other times, the inmates could circulate freely.
The arrival of the first detainees coincided more or
less with the beginning of Ramadan on April 17, and
during the holy month the food was better than it
had been at Topzawa.36
There was rice, vegetable soup, potatoes and
tomatoes, even meat and fruit on occasion. Water
came from a well, through a standpipe in the yard,
though it was hot, salty and bitter--"like snake
poison," said one man. Many inmates believed that
the first health crisis at Nugra Salman was
connected to drinking this water. The first deaths
occurred early in May, soon after the arrival of the
second wave of prisoners, those from the valley of
the Lesser Zab.
* * *
One of those who arrived in this batch was
Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari, the 68-year old
village head from Goktapa, who had lost sixteen
members of his family in the chemical weapons attack
on May 3. During his four months in Nugra Salman,
Abd-al-Qader--one of the few literate prisoners and
an Arabic speaker to boot--emerged as a
naturalleader of the inmates, and his testimony is
worth quoting at length here. After the first night
at Topzawa,
At 8:30 a.m. a military man came in and announced,
"Prepare yourselves." We had nothing, we were ready,
we had nothing to pack. They told us to leave the
room. We noticed 150 or 200 vehicles waiting in two
groups, like ambulances, but green.37
These could only take ten people, but they put
twenty-seven in ours. There were two doors: a small
narrow one which only the guard could enter, and a
second door through which they pushed us. It was
very hot, but they closed the door and locked it. In
our car there were only elderly people.
After an hour or an hour and a half, we called for
water. I told them in Arabic, "We are thirsty; give
us water." --"Water is forbidden for you, it is not
allowed." After a while, one friend wanted to get
out and relieve himself. I informed the soldier. "It
is not allowed for you," he said. After ten minutes
the man could not hold himself any longer and we
smelled a bad smell in the car. Five fainted from
the smell and the heat. We wished for death. Nothing
was allowed to us. All the men took their clothes
off because of the heat, wearing only their shorts.
The car went on moving and we did not know where it
was going.
One and a half hours before nightfall we arrived at
a fort and got out. It was deserted. They took us
into a long yard, with soldiers and police all
around. More cars were arriving and emptying out men
and women. The number reached 400. They brought
water in buckets without any glasses. We were like
cows, putting our heads down to get the water at
once, three at a timedrinking from the bucket. The
water was hot, the temperature to wash with, and it
was salty.
[After registration] a guard asked for newcomers and
told them to go with him. It was fifteen minutes
before dark. We went to the second floor and they
put sixty-four of us into one room, about eight
meters by six. I objected: "We are not animals to be
crowded all in one room. How can we sleep and eat."
The man in charge answered, "Shut up. This is what
we prepared for you." After three minutes he left
and another came to the door with a sack on his
shoulder. It was a prisoner. He said, "Brothers, we
know you were not given anything because you are
newcomers. We brought our shares for you tonight.
Take this bread, since they will not give you any
food until the morning."
In the morning a prisoner from another hall came and
recruited four of us to go with him to get the bread
rations for the cell. After twenty minutes the four
men came back with three sacks of bread. Each
prisoner got three samoun for the entire day,
breakfast, lunch and dinner.38
The bread was not made from wheat but from zorat
[a coarse grain normally used as animal feed].
* * *
Deaths at Nugra Salman
The Ramadan rations were now a thing of the past,
and on the new starvation diet of bread and
contaminated water, the conditions at Nugra Salman
deteriorated sharply. The prisoners were fatigued
and infested by lice. By late May there was a steady
stream of deaths, some days three, some six or
seven, and sometimes as many as a dozen.
Abd-al-Qader tried his best to keep count of the
deaths. By early September, when he was finally
released, he had tallied 517--victims of the inhuman
conditions at Nugra Salman and the depraved
indifference of the Iraqi authorities. Later, after
his release, he heard that another forty-five had
died over two successive nights in September.
Abd-al-Qader's figures, which suggest an average of
four or five deaths a day during the period of his
imprisonment from starvation, disease and physical
abuse, are extremely credible. Certainly they bear
out the more impressionistic estimates given by many
other witnesses. The additional forty-five deaths
may have been connected with an epidemic that some
survivors say broke out after the arrival of the
returned refugees from Halabja at the end of August
1988. This outbreak prompted the arrival of a dozen
white-coated doctors from Samawa, who advised the
prisoners to stop drinking the water.
The authorities at Nugra Salman appear to have
responded to the steady stream of fatalities in two
ways. The first was to arrange for a daily delivery
of water by tanker truck from Samawa; the second was
for the guards to initiate a petty extortion racket,
selling food at grossly inflated prices to those
prisoners who had managed to make it through Topzawa
with some cash still in their pockets.
The tanker usually came from Samawa twice a day,
although sometimes it missed a day altogether. When
the water arrived, there was pandemonium as the
prisoners rushed the truck. They were allowed only a
few minutes to fill their pitchers, struggling for
access to the plastic hosepipe as the guards taunted
them, allowing the precious fluid to splash on to
the ground and lashing out at people randomly with
sticks and strips of coaxial cable. Sensing easy
money, the truck driver took to selling the
prisoners buckets of water for four dinars ($12)
each. Later, he also offered to bring canned milk
and meat, lentils, tomato paste and soap.
The driver's example was quickly taken up by the
guards, who were from Amn, according to some
witnesses, or from Istikhbarat, according to
others. A cup of rice was one dinar. Cigarettes were
three dinars ($9) a pack. Tomato juice in cans past
their expiry date cost twelve ($36). According to
Abd-al-Qader:
We told the prisoners in charge of the food to speak
to the guards to find a way to get rid of the bad
food and get sugar and tea, even if we had to buy
them, becausethe deaths were very bad. They managed
to get sugar, tea and oil with our money. The food
came secretly at night. They sold us tomato paste
for four dinars, in cans which were priced for sale
by the government at six dirhams.39
We paid eighty dinars for a sack of sugar and
seventy dinars for a sack of rice--official price,
eleven dinars.
The first thing we got was the tomato paste. We
managed to borrow a pot from a cell whose prisoners
had been there longer than us, and we cooked food in
it. We put our bread into the tomato paste soup and
absorbed all the liquid. This was really like a
feast to us.
But the effects of this black market were
short-lived, other than for the lucky few who had
managed to keep money back after Topzawa. The
prisoners grew weaker, scarcely able to take
advantage of the brief afternoon exercise period,
when they were allowed to mingle in the central
courtyard. The deaths continued, and among the dead
were some of the children who had been newly
transferred to Nugra Salman from Dibs.
The dead were not permitted the dignity of a decent
burial. Indeed, they were often not even moved from
the spot where they died, but left there for as long
as three days to rot in the summer heat. This was
evidently a matter of deliberate policy. "After a
few weeks," one woman recalled, "my husband died in
my arms. He had gotten extremely weak and thin and
he had been badly beaten by the prison guards. My
husband's body lay in the prison hall for one day.
The guards did not let me bury him and I had to beg
them; the guard said the body had to remain in the
prison until it rotted."40
Eventually Amn agents would register the
names of the dead, strip them of any remaining money
and valuables and order the corpses to be stuffed
into sacks and loaded onto handcarts of the sort
normally used forgarbage disposal. The theft of
money in particular infuriated Abd-al-Qader:
One man died with 400 dinars [$1,200] on him. An
Amn man came, took the money, kissed it, and
said this was for the government. I insulted the
prisoners about this, telling them, "You are not
animals! Anything that the dead relatives leave is
yours. Do not leave it for others. Use it, you need
it." -- "What else could we do?" they answered. "We
are afraid." -- "Inside this building, nothing can
be sent to you from the outside," I told them. "You
cannot live without that money. You may be afraid of
God, but God will not punish you, I assure you. I
will answer for you on the Day of Judgment." They
followed my advice. From then on, they left only one
dinar or a half dinar in the pockets of the dead for
the guards. The guards came two or three times, but
when they found such small amounts they abandoned
the search.
The prisoners tried as best they could to wash the
bodies and prepare them for burial according to
Islamic doctrine. At first, if there was money, the
tanker driver from Samawa might be persuaded to
bring a shroud. But when the money ran out, the only
shroud available was the dead person's Kurdish
headscarf (jamadani) or one of the scarce
prison blankets. Groups of prisoners--at least two,
sometimes four or six men, weakened and fatigued by
hunger--would be assembled to carry the corpse away,
while prison guards kicked and punched them to hurry
the process along, shouting epithets all the while.
"You are saboteurs, and you deserve to die like
dogs," one guard shouted.
A ten-minute trudge through the stony desert brought
them to the gravesite, which lay a few hundred yards
to the east of the prison. It comprised a series of
long trenches, no more than a meter deep, dug by
bulldozers. There were no markers, although the
mourners tried when they could to mark the spot with
stones. The bodies were laid roughly inside and dirt
tossed over them. The guards allowed no time for
prayers for the dead. When thirty or forty corpses
filled a trench, the bulldozerwould smooth it over
to remove all traces and proceed to dig another.41
When the burial party returned the next day, broken
limbs and bloody rags would be strewn around, for
during the night the freshly turned gravesite
attracted packs of wild desert dogs. The guards were
terrified by these animals, believing that they
became rabid after eating human flesh, and shot at
any they could see. But few of the remains of those
who died at Nugra Salman were allowed to rest in
peace. "Go bury the bodies for the dogs," the guards
would taunt the survivors.
* * *
The man who presided over this cruel regime was
named Hajjaj, an Amn lieutenant by most
accounts.42
Hajjaj was a feared and detested figure, described
by one witness as a "bald, husky young man" from
Amn headquarters in Baghdad, who drove a red
Volkswagen Passat manufactured in Brazil. His deputy
was a man called Shamkhi. An uncle of Lt. Hajjaj,
one Khalaf, was one of the guards.
Hajjaj and his associates were notorious for beating
prisoners on the slightest pretext, or on none at
all. One man in his sixties was beaten for
requesting a light bulb. "Go to [PUK leader Jalal]
Talabani for bulbs," a guard told him mockingly.43
Another inmate, weakened by hunger, fell asleep one
day when Hajjaj was in his cell. "He slapped me
right away," the man recalled, "and said, 'You shall
never sleep in mypresence.' Then he made me go and
sit in the place where the garbage was kept."44
Age and gender offered no protection. "Is this child
a peshmerga?," the same man asked a guard one
day. "Is this woman?" --"Yes, they are," the guard
answered. "They are all peshmerga and they
are criminals." On another occasion, Abd-al-Qader
Abdullah Askari saw Hajjaj kicking a group of young
women who had recently arrived from Dibs and hitting
them with a length of plastic tubing.45
Hajjaj also punished prisoners by forcing them to
crawl on their bellies. If the result was not to his
liking, a guard would stamp on the small of the
prisoner's back to force him lower. But the
punishment most favored by Hajjaj, according to many
accounts, was to expose prisoners to the blazing
midday sun. Men, women and children alike were
subjected to this treatment, even if they were too
weak to walk and had to be dragged to the spot. The
prisoners would be forced to squat with their heads
lowered, normally for two hours. Any movement would
be punished with a beating. A variant on this
routine was to tie the prisoner to a metal post in
the sun. There were nine of these posts sunk in
concrete in the central courtyard at Nugra Salman,
each taller than a person and thicker than an
electricity pole.46
Some prisoners were reportedly suspended upside down
from the posts, tied at the feet by their Kurdish
cummerbund, and with their unbound hands barely
clearing the ground.
The inmates of Nugra Salman had to endure Lt.
Hajjaj's brutal custody until September 6, when the
general amnesty allowed them to go free--but not to
go home.
______
1 The Popular
Army (Jaysh al-Sha'abi) was founded in 1970
as a party-controlled militia which would provide
Ba'ath cadre with basic military training and act as
a counterweight to the regular armed forces. Despite
its nominal strength of 250,000 the Popular Army was
largely ineffective as a combat force in the
Iran-Iraq war; its most important role was to guard
buildings in the cities during the absence of the
regular army.
2 Amn
Suleimaniyeh to Amn Autonomous Region
Headquarters, letter no. 25163 of October 29, 1988.
Unfortunately, no time period is indicated, making
it impossible to extrapolate from these numbers to
estimate the total of those who passed through
Topzawa during the Anfal campaign.
3 Middle East
Watch interview with Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari,
Goktapa, May 24, 1992.
4 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
5 These officers
may have been from Istikhbarat, given the
demonstrated role of military intelligence in
overseeing the initial transit camps. See above
p.109. But they may equally well have been from
Amn, which uses the same ranks as the military.
Middle East Watch interviews with Abd-al-Qader
Abdullah Askari and with a survivor from the village
of Zijila (nahya Shwan), Taqtaq, April 24,
1992.
6 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
7 Middle East
Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, April 21, 1992.
8 These sessions
appear to have followed a standard "information
form" used by the Iraqi security agencies. Middle
East Watch has found many examples of this form
among official files. The only unusual feature of
the questioning described at Topzawa is the asking
of the mother's name; under standard procedures only
the father's name was requested.
9 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, September 12, 1992. One
survivor did recall a more extensive interrogation,
in which he was asked not only whether he was a
peshmerga, but to which party he belonged,
whether he knew any peshmerga, whether he had
relatives who were peshmerga, whether he had
any relatives living abroad, whether he had any
relatives who had been executed, and whether he was
an army deserter. Middle East Watch interview,
Shoresh complex, July 1, 1992. Both of these men
were among the handful of execution survivors
located by Middle East Watch. For their full
stories, see below, chapter 9.
10 Middle East
Watch interview with a survivor from the Jabari
village of Mahmoud Parizad, Shoresh complex, May 9,
1992.
11 Taymour has
been interviewed many times by journalists and human
rights delegations visiting Iraqi Kurdistan. See,
for example, Middle East Watch and Physicians for
Human Rights, Unquiet Graves: The Search for the
Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan, February 1992;
Taymour is also the subject of a chapter in Kanan
Makiya's book, Cruelty and Silence,
pp.151-199.
12 Middle East
Watch interview with Taymour Abdullah Ahmad, Sumoud
complex, July 29, 1992.
13 After Topzawa,
Abd-al-Qader never again saw his two sons, Omed and
Latif, or his daughter-in-law, Fahima. Middle East
Watch interview, May 24, 1992.
14 A letter from
Amn Shaqlawa, ref. Research/11408, and dated
December 31, 1987, refers to a Northern Bureau
directive of December 13, 1987, to the effect that,
"It is completely prohibited for bearded people to
have access to the center of the governorates and
other towns for any reason whatsoever, unless
permitted by the proper authorities."
15 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, April 19, 1992.
17 Most members
of Amn are drawn from Ramadi, Tikrit and
Samarra, a triangle of Sunni-dominated towns west of
Baghdad, the heartland of Saddam Hussein's political
support.
18 Middle East
Watch interview, Daratou complex, April 18, 1992.
19 Middle East
Watch interviews, Ramhawej village, July 18, 1992,
Rawanduz, May 5, 1992, Khalifan and Basirma complex,
March 24, 1993.
20 The nahya
of Kalar in southern Germian was included in the
third stage of Anfal. Thousands of villagers from
the Kalar area were brought to Topzawa in early and
mid-April, but this is the only case reported to
Middle East Watch of their being taken there any
later. The witness offered no explanation of what
had happened to them during the three months since
the Third Anfal. Middle East Watch interview,
Halabja, May 8, 1992.
21 The
supposition must be that Faraj was released under
the general amnesty of September 6, 1988. By this
reckoning, he would have been brought from
Suleimaniyeh to Topzawa on or about July 16. The
Bayinjan complex was used to resettle the survivors
of several phases of Anfal. Two other testimonies
suggest that its other main purpose was to rehouse
returning refugees from the Halabja attack. Middle
East Watch interviews, Halabja, May 8 and May 15,
1992.
22 Middle East
Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, July 6, 1992.
23 Middle East
Watch interview, Shoresh complex, May 9, 1992.
24 Middle East
Watch interview, Chamchamal, September 19, 1992.
25 Middle East
Watch interviews, Rawanduz, April 28, 1992; Shoresh
complex, May 9, 1992; and Zammaki complex, July 24,
1992.
26 The town of
Dibs lies in an area of Iraqi Kurdistan that is
still controlled by the Baghdad regime. Neither the
Gumbat Cemetery nor the old children's cemetery was
therefore accessible to Middle East Watch for an
independent forensic examination.
27 Middle East
Watch interview with a woman from Omerbel village,
Kifri, March 30, 1993.
28 Middle East
Watch interview, Shoresh complex, June 29, 1992. The
witness's nieces were from the Gulbagh Valley, from
which, it may be recalled, a significant number of
women were reported to have disappeared.
29 These figures
are based on interviews with twenty-one former
inmates of Nugra Salman, as well as a former Iraqi
military officer with first-hand experience of the
prison. The interviews included seventeen men,
ranging in age from forty-five to eighty-three, and
four women, aged from fifty to sixty. Asked to
estimate the total prison population, a dozen
witnesses gave figures ranging from 5,000 to 11,000.
Two gave much higher figures, which we have
discounted. With the exception of deaths and new
arrivals, the population of Nugra Salman remained
stable until the general amnesty of September 6,
1988.
30 One witness
also told of a number of Arab prisoners being held
in the basement of Nugra Salman, wearing distinctive
white disdashas; this could not be
corroborated in other interviews.
31 Middle East
Watch interview, Zarayen complex, July 28, 1992.
Anfal, of course, cannot explain the disappearances
of these young men from Suleimaniyeh, since Halabja
was not included in the operation. Their
disappearance may be taken, rather, as part of the
routine practice of terror by the Iraqi security
forces. Later press reports suggest that some
younger people from Halabja may also have been
disappeared from Nugra Salman. "Halabja Wounds Still
Open Years After Gas Attack," (Reuter's,
March 7, 1993), cites the case of one woman from
Halabja who has not seen her four children, aged
10-24, since they were interned there.
32 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
33 Middle East
Watch interview, Ja'faran, Qara Dagh, May 11, 1992.
34 The Iraqi
monarchy was overthrown in a military coup on July
14, 1958. Its main architect was Brigadier
Abd-al-Karim Qasem, who subsequently became Prime
Minister.
35 There are
persistent, if somewhat contradictory, reports of a
basement level at Nugra Salman, from which the sound
of weeping and screams could be heard. A former
Iraqi infantry officer who visited the prison before
Anfal said that this basement was entered through a
heavy barred trapdoor with a double lock. The space
beneath was approximately two meters high--just
enough for a prisoner to stand up. The officer also
described a punishment cell at Nugra Salman, built
"like a bird cage, with only enough room to sit
down." Middle East Watch interview, Erbil, April 26,
1992.
36 Ramadan, the
ninth month of the Muslim calendar, is a time of
fasting from sunrise to sunset. After sunset, meals
tend to be more lavish than at other times, and the
rations given to the inmates of Nugra
Salman--assuming they were intended to be eaten in
the evening--may be taken as a sign of relative
lenience by the authorities toward the elderly. (By
the same token, of course, if these foods were
offered during daylight hours, they could be
construed as a mockery, or a temptation of the
Kurds' Muslim faith. The context, however, seems to
make this explanation unlikely.)
37 Although
Abd-al-Qader's estimate of numbers here may be high,
his figures in general appeared to be unusually
reliable, especially where the numbers of deaths at
Nugra Salman were concerned. See p.232.
38 Other
witnesses said that the ration was only two
samoun a day--one at 10:00 a.m. and the other at
10:00 p.m. It may be that this varied from time to
time.
39 The dinar is
made up of 1,000 fils; 50 fils are one dirham, and
20 dirhams one dinar.
40 Middle East
Watch interview with a woman from Qala village (nahya
Naujul), Benaslawa complex, April 20, 1992.
41 The only
exception to this harsh behavior was if the guard
was a Shi'a Muslim; witnesses described the Shi'a
(including even Shi'a military officers commanding
troops during Anfal operations) as having shown the
Kurds numerous small kindnesses.
42 One witness
queried this, and thought Lt. Hajjaj was an army
officer. The same witness identified the "head of
the prison" as a man named Sa'id Hama, but was
unable to specify to which agency he belonged. There
was a general and understandable confusion among
witnesses when it came to identifying particular
government agencies by their uniforms or other
visible signs. At Nugra Salman, as at Topzawa and
the earlier processing centers, witnesses variously
identified their oppressors as being from Amn,
Istikhbarat, the regular army and police.
43 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
44 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
45 One even more
lurid account spoke of a large group of single women
being kept apart from the other prisoners and
regularly raped by Amn agents. One of these
women reportedly killed herself with a knife as a
result. The rape of female detainees in Iraq has
been well substantiated elsewhere, and is even known
to have been recorded on videotape. Middle East
Watch did not succeed, however, in speaking to any
witnesses or victims of rape at Nugra Salman. The
Kurds, it should be noted, are reluctant to talk to
outsiders about matters involving sexual abuse.
46 The
description strongly suggests that one original
purpose of these posts would have been for the use
of firing squads. Prisoners can be seen tied to
similar posts in captured videotapes of the
execution of Kurdish prisoners.
9
The Firing Squads
"Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men
That I have sent from sundry foughten fields
To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven."
--Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
(V, i)
"It was God's wish."
-- Mustafa, who escaped a mass execution during
Anfal.
Muhammad's Story
At least six people--the youngest a boy of twelve,
the eldest a man of thirty-eight with nine children
of his own--have survived to tell the truth about
what happened to the tens of thousands of Iraqi
Kurds who were driven away in the convoys of sealed
vehicles from the Popular Army camp at Topzawa. All
six were from the Germian area, scene of the Third
Anfal.
Muhammad, the 32-year old member of the peshmerga
backing force from the village of Aliyani Taza in
southern Germian, had arrived with his family at the
army fort at Qoratu on about April 16. (see above
p.145) They spent three days there before being
moved to Topzawa, where Muhammad was separated from
his two wives and seven children. None of his family
ever returned alive, with the exception of his
parents, who survived Nugra Salman.1
Muhammad spent two days in Topzawa. He was not
questioned. He was given nothing to eat. On the
third day the guards came to his "hall," which held
about 500 prisoners. They handcuffed the men in
pairs and took them to a line of vehicles painted in
camouflage colors. Each vehicle held twenty-eight
prisoners; Muhammad counted the seats. It wasthe
middle of the afternoon when the convoy moved off.
They drove for perhaps six hours, but Muhammad
quickly lost all sense of direction and had no idea
where they were going. All he could tell was that
most of the journey was on the paved highway; the
final hour was on a bumpy dirt road.
When the convoy eventually stopped, the driver kept
the motor running. Over the throb of the engine,
Muhammad could hear the sound of gunfire outside.
The prisoners were hustled out into the darkness and
searched for any identity cards and money that might
have been missed earlier. Muhammad lost his last 700
dinars. When the search was completed, the guards
removed the handcuffs that bound Muhammad to his
neighbor, a man from the village of Babakr, close to
Aliyani Taza. In place of the handcuffs, the guards
brought a length of string, which they used to tie
the twenty-eight prisoners in a single line by their
left hands. The men were ordered to stand facing the
edge of a freshly dug trench, just long enough to
accommodate the twenty-eight bodies as they fell.
The knot binding Muhammad's left hand had been
carelessly tied, and he managed to tug it free of
his wrist and bolt a moment before the soldiers
opened fire. Beyond the trench was an open field,
and the springtime grass had grown tall enough to
conceal Muhammad from the truck headlights that were
now trained in his direction. To his astonishment,
the guards did not give chase. Behind him, the
clatter of gunfire continued.
Muhammad ran and walked for four days without food,
drinking rainwater from puddles along the way.
Trying to chart his route by the sun, he set out in
what he thought was the direction of Germian, across
an endless flat plain planted with wheat and barley.
From the clothes of the shepherds he spotted at
intervals, he could tell that he was in an Arab
area. After four days, so exhausted that he could
not walk another step, he stumbled into an Arab
village. The people gathered around to stare.
"Look," they said, "it is a Kurd who has fallen out
of an airplane."
The remainder of Muhammad's odyssey is too long to
recount in detail here. Imprisoned and beaten by the
Arab villagers, handed over to the police,
interrogated, taken to Mosul, jailed again,
transferred to the Kirkuk police and then to
Suleimaniyeh, to Kalar and back once more to
Suleimaniyeh, amnestied and finally inducted into
the army. Miraculously, the police believed his
story--which he never varied--that he was a member
of the jahsh of Fatah Beg, the mustashar
from Kalar. The ordinary Iraqi police, who were
almost certainly not privy to the truthabout the
Anfal mass executions, never realized that they were
dealing with an Anfalaki. Amn, which
would certainly have pressed the matter further, was
never brought in to elucidate Muhammad's case. The
man was truly blessed with a talent for survival.
* * *
Ozer, Omar and Ibrahim
Remarkably, four of the other five survivors of the
Anfal firing squads travelled together to their
execution site as part of a single convoy. Three of
them were even in the same vehicle--although one of
the three did not know the others, and has not met
them since. It is possible, then, to reconstruct
their composite story in considerable detail.
Ozer, the young man who had spent his last night at
Topzawa shivering with cold as he listened to
revving bus engines and contemplated the pools of
diesel oil and fresh blood on a cement floor, was
perhaps the most articulate of these witnesses. Ozer
was twenty-five at the time of Anfal, an unmarried
construction worker who had seen action in the war
against Iran and deserted several times from the
Iraqi Army. He had been born not ten miles from
Topzawa, in the village of Tarjil, on the main road
between Kirkuk and the nahya of Leilan. But
he had moved around a lot before settling in nearby
Jafan, a tiny hamlet of just seventeen houses. There
he stayed until April 1987, when the army attacked
and burned the village. This time Ozer moved to
Khidr Reihan, a peaceful village two and a half
hours on foot from the nahya of Qader Karam
that was home to several other deserters and draft
dodgers.
Like so many others, Ozer took to the hills when the
Third Anfal approached his home on about April 10.
Hearing the rumor of a temporary amnesty in Qader
Karam, he was one of the thousands who surrendered
to the jahsh forces commanded by Qasem Agha,
the one-eyed mustashar from Koysinjaq. Over
the next few days, Ozer passed through the Qader
Karam police station and the army brigade
headquarters in Chamchamal. The truck that took him
from there to the local office of Amn was
part of the convoy that was caught up in the
attempted revolt of the townspeople of Chamchamal.
But Ozer was not one of those they succeeded in
rescuing, and finally, on April 14, he arrived at
Topzawa.
At this stage, Ozer met up with an acquaintance whom
we shall call Omar, a 22-year old draft dodger who
had also fled from Jafan the previous year and
resettled in Khidr Reihan. Omar had fled to the
hills when Anfal began, and surrendered to Qasem
Agha's men two days after Ozer. From Chamchamal,
they were trucked together to Topzawa, where most of
their cellmates were strangers. But two of these men
were destined to share with Ozer and Omar what was
intended to be their final journey.
Both of them were draft dodgers from peshmerga-controlled
villages in the nahya of Qader Karam. The
elder of the two was "Mustafa," a 38-year old
resident of Top Khana; the other, "Ibrahim," was a
23-year old father of four from Kani Qader Khwaru.
Neither man was an active fighter, but Ibrahim had
carried an Iranian-made Kalashnikov rifle as a
member of the civilian "backing force," and was a
friend or blood relative of most of the peshmerga
who had died in the army's bloody assault on the PUK
base at Tazashar, at the opening of the Third Anfal
campaign. Like Ozer and Omar, both Mustafa and
Ibrahim had been fooled by the phony offer of a
three-day amnesty in Qader Karam. Mustafa had turned
himself in to the jahsh led by Sheikh
Mu'tassem; Ibrahim had surrendered to the forces of
the mustashar Raf'at Gilli. Both men had
passed through the first-stage collection facility
at Aliawa.
The testimonies of these four men contain some minor
discrepancies over dates. But at some point between
April 15 and April 17 (the first day of the holy
month of Ramadan), at about
8:00 in the morning, they were hustled, together with
hundreds of others, into the prison yard at Topzawa.
A caravan of sealed vehicles waited under military
guard, with their engines running. They were of two
kinds. Some (eighteen, by one count) were windowless
police buses, painted green or white, and Ozer,
Ibrahim and Omar were shoved into one of these. Ozer
had time to notice that it had a
Mosul registration; its license plate read "Nineveh
Police," and the number was 5036 or 5037. Mustafa
traveled in a second type of vehicle, which
resembled a large ambulance or covered truck. The
smaller police buses held thirty-four or thirty-five
people each, in forward-facing rows two abreast,
divided by a central aisle. Mustafa's truck held
between fifty and sixty prisoners, squashed together
on four benches that ran lengthwise along the
vehicle.
To the last, it appears that the prisoners were
grouped together according to their places of
origin. Ozer recognized faces from a number of
places in the Leilan-Qader Karam area--Khidr Beg,
Qashqa andQarachiwar--as well as two others from his
own home village of Khidr Reihan. Everyone in the
bus was young, aged from 20-40, Ibrahim recalled.
But Ozer thought that some of the men were much
older, "with white beards."
The inside of the buses was hellish. The vehicle in
which Ozer, Ibrahim and Mustafa rode was thick with
old urine and human feces. Its previous occupants
had scrawled brief messages in Kurdish on the
seat-backs: "To the Saudi border"..."To the Kuwaiti
border"..."To Ar'ar."2
In these smaller buses, the prisoners were separated
from the driver's compartment by a padlocked sliding
door. The driver himself entered by a separate door
on the right of the bus. A military guard rode
alongside him, armed with a Kalashnikov with a
folding stock and wearing the distinctive uniform of
the army's Special Forces (Quwat al-Khaseh)--camouflage
fatigues of yellow drab with irregular green
splotches and a red beret with the golden insignia
of a bird of prey with outstretched wings.
Set into the sliding door that separated the two
compartments was a small wire-mesh opening, perhaps
six inches square, through which the prisoners
closest to the front could see the road ahead and
the driver's rear-view mirror. Ozer estimated that
his was the thirty-fifth vehicle in the convoy.3
To the front and rear of each bus, he could glimpse
pick-up trucks of the sort used by Amn, with
mounted machine-guns.
Seated toward the front of the bus was a man named
Anwar Tayyar. A dark, stoutly built man, Tayyar was
a former peshmerga; he had also worked as a
driver, and knew the roads intimately. For this
reason, his fellow prisoners asked him to figure out
where they were heading. Sneaking glances through
the wire grille, Tayyar at first reported that they
were following the road to Mosul. There was a gasp
of fear,because, as Ibrahim recalled, "most of the
government's killers are in Mosul."4
The passengers were convinced they were going to
die.
Soon, however, the bus swung off the Mosul road and
turned to the southwest. "We have been saved," said
Anwar Tayyar with a sigh of relief. Perhaps, the men
speculated, they were merely being transferred to
another prison. But the buses drove on, stopping
occasionally for a few minutes. At intervals, the
men begged the Quwat al-Khaseh guard for
water. "Just a minute," the man would answer, but
the water never arrived. In the airless heat and
stench of Mustafa's bus, the prisoners were reduced
to drinking their own urine from their shoes.
As the afternoon wore on, Anwar Tayyar began to lose
his bearings. "Samawa!" he exclaimed at one point,
but then someone else recognized Falluja, a sizeable
town on the Euphrates. Just outside Falluja, Ozer
noticed that the convoy was splitting into two
parts. The majority of the vehicles continued in a
different direction; five, including Ozer's bus and
the larger green truck carrying Mustafa, drove due
west, into the rapidly approaching sunset. Before
long, they passed the larger city of Ramadi to their
left. After leaving Ramadi behind them, they
continued for at least another fifteen minutes,
perhaps as much as a half-hour, on the paved
highway, turning right once at a junction to cross a
heavily guarded bridge over a river--presumably the
Euphrates once more.
At the far end of the bridge, the five vehicles
halted. It was now about 6:30 p.m., and ten hours
had passed since their departure from Topzawa.
Through the wire-mesh screen, the prisoners could
see that they had stopped outside a police station,
under a clump of date palms. They could hear a
conversation between one of their army guards and an
officer at the police station. Although the man was
addressed as "sir," his uniform bore no insignia of
rank. It was clear that the guard was transferring
the prisoners into this officer's custody. He handed
over a list of their names, and told the officer
that the vehicles were to remain with the police
"until the mission is completed," at which time they
should be returned.
The drivers and Special Forces guards climbed down
from the vehicles at this point. Their replacements
were dressed all in green with black berets--a
uniform that is characteristic of both Amn
and the Ba'ath Party, as well as the regular Iraqi
police. The officer and several othermen jumped into
two Toyota Landcruisers. There were also two
bulldozers.
With the bulldozers in the lead, the new
nine-vehicle caravan drove west along a bumpy paved
road that ran parallel to the
Euphrates.
In the fading light, the silhouettes of date palms
fringed the road to the right. One of the prisoners
in Ozer's bus was weak and faint, and a prisoner who
spoke a little Arabic begged the new driver for
water. This was not allowed, the driver answered.
"Let the man die," he said. "You are all men of
Jalal Talabani."
After half an hour, the convoy turned right on to a
dirt road. Ahead the prisoners saw only desert and
darkness. Some began to pray, muttering the
Shehadeh--"There is no God but Allah, and
Muhammad is his Prophet..." Remembered images of his
family flashed through Ibrahim's mind. By now all
the men were weeping, asking what they had done to
deserve such a fate, kissing each other's beards and
exchanging words of forgiveness, as is the Muslim
custom among those who know they are about to die.
* * *
It was almost dark, and the meaning of time had
begun to dissolve. Ozer thought that the sealed
buses traveled along this rutted desert track for
about ten minutes; Omar estimated that the journey
took from 15-30 minutes; Ibrahim said that it felt
more like an hour. Suddenly, the bus lurched to a
stop, bogged down in the deep sand. The vehicle
behind, the last one in the convoy, swerved to the
right to avoid it and got stuck as well. Through the
wire-mesh screen in the sliding door, Ozer could see
that the three remaining buses, as well as the two
Landcruisers and one of the two bulldozers, had
driven on ahead. In the half-light he could just
make out the tops of the vehicles bobbing as they
crested a rise and dipped into a shallow depression
in the desert a quarter of a mile or so ahead. The
driver turned off the engine.
Since the final turn on to the dirt road, there had
no longer been any room for denial or wishful
thinking. The men knew exactly what lay in store for
them, and they began to plan feverishly, speaking in
Kurdish in the knowledge that neither the guard nor
the driver could understand them. When the guards
arrived to kill them, they would put up a struggle.
"Even if only one of the thirty-five survived, it
was worth the try," said Ibrahim.
In the sudden quiet, the prisoners could hear the
steady chatter of gunfire from automatic weapons,
and the churning, whining sound of bulldozer
engines. After perhaps twenty minutes, the guns fell
silent. Out of the darkness, a bulldozer lumbered
toward them and took up position behind the bus.
Gears screaming, it tried several times to push the
vehicle out of the sand, but the front wheels only
dug in deeper. Next it tried to lift the bus out by
its rear end, and Ozer thought the driver meant to
tip them headlong into a trench, bus and all. At
last, the bulldozer managed to drag the stalled
vehicle out frontwards. The driver climbed down from
his cab, exhausted by the effort, and took out his
hip flask. The prisoners begged for water, banging
on the windowless steel walls. The driver drank
deeply and jeeringly held up his flask as the rest
of the liquid trickled away into the sand.
It was now 7:30 p.m., and quite dark. The men were
just able to tell the time by squinting at a watch
that a prisoner from the village of Khidr Beg had
somehow managed to hang on to at Topzawa. Twice
more, there were volleys of gunfire and the sound of
screams. After about half an hour, the two
Landcruisers returned, with the officer who had
joined the convoy at the bridge over the Euphrates.
The driver of Ozer's bus climbed down from his seat,
walked around to the back of the vehicle and turned
off the overhead light in the rear compartment.
Having done this, he went back to his cab and turned
his headlights on full-beam. As Ozer and his
companions whimpered in panic, the three dozen
occupants of the second stalled bus were dragged
into the pool of light, and a uniformed firing squad
opened up on them with Kalashnikovs and pistols.
When the firing stopped, the men were dragged into a
freshly dug pit. Ozer noticed that some of the
bodies were still moving. Only one busload of
prisoners now remained.
The men's plan was this: When the first guard
entered the bus to take the prisoners away, the
strongest of them would overpower him, grab his
weapon and try to wedge the door open. Most of the
men were too weak to assist, but Ozer, Omar and a
handful of others watched the sliding partition
door. Ibrahim waited fearfully at the back, ready to
bolt if he could. Through the grille, Ozer could see
that two guards with pistols had taken up position
on either side of the door; another, who carried a
Kalashnikov stood by the driver's seat; while a
fourth man, also armed with a Kalashnikov, guarded
the outer door, with one foot planted on the step
and the other on the ground.
After a few moments, one of the uniformed guards, a
burly man with a thick neck, removed the padlock and
slid back the connecting door to the driver's
compartment. As soon as he did so, a prisoner named
Salam lunged forward to strike him. But a second
guard in the driver's cab opened fire with his
pistol, killing Salam instantly, and slammed the
door shut again. Ozer heard the first guard,
apparently an officer, declare that he would execute
the prisoners one by one.
Seizing command of the situation, Ozer issued his
instructions. When the guards took the first
prisoner out, Omar would throw his weight against
the rail of the sliding door to prevent it from
being closed. The other men would hurl themselves
into the breach. And that is essentially what
happened. The burly guard returned, pulled one
prisoner into the open doorway and tied a white
cloth around his eyes as a blindfold. As he turned
to drag the man away, half a dozen prisoners rushed
forward. Several of them laid hold of the shoulder
strap of the guard's Kalashnikov, while he kept a
firm grip of the stock and the barrel. Ozer yelled
at another prisoner to punch the officer in the
face. Although the man, like everyone, was weakened
by several days without food, he succeeded in
landing a blow on the officer's eye. Ozer wrenched
the rifle free, but the officer managed to break
loose, unclip the magazine and hurl it out of the
bus behind him, rendering the weapon useless.
Pouring through the open door, the prisoners cut off
the escape of the guard who had been standing by the
driver's seat. Gunfire erupted, and two men fell
dead on top of Ozer. Another prisoner tried to leap
from the bus and was also cut down. As Ozer
struggled to free himself, he saw the second of the
four guards--the one who had killed Salam--stagger
toward him, bleeding profusely from the shoulder.
The man was screaming, "Abu Saleh, come and help
me!" It appeared that he had been shot by his own
side. Ozer reached for the man's pistol but could
not find it; instead, he wrestled him to the ground
by his injured arm, and the guard lay still,
apparently unconscious. Meanwhile the soldiers or
police outside continued to rake the bus with
gunfire, and the men in the passenger compartment
cowered under the bus seats. Bodies piled up inside
the bus, and Ibrahim took a painful flesh wound in
the right buttock. He was also dimly aware that he
could no longer see through his right eye. In the
confusion, Omar managed to wriggle under the vehicle
as bullets ricocheted from it on all sides. Ozer
felt his leg grazed by a flying piece of shrapnel.
As he lay there, he heard a strange sound between
the bursts of firing. At first he could not place
it; then herealized that it was the sound of blood
dripping from the bus. Almost all of his fellow
prisoners were dead.
* * *
Mustafa's Story
The remaining three vehicles that had accompanied
the convoy from Kirkuk had come to a halt a few
hundred yards ahead, in the shallow depression that
Ozer had glimpsed through the driver's window. Here,
the executions had proceeded in a more orderly and
efficient fashion. It was maghreb--sunset--when
guards flung open the rear door of the truck in
which Mustafa, the 38-year old father of nine from
the village of Top Khana, had travelled from
Topzawa. The men were dragged out in pairs. In his
fear, Mustafa left his shoes behind; he had taken
them off in the bus because of the heat. He, too,
was aware of the constant rat-a-tat of gunfire,
which seemed not to come from a single site but from
many directions at once. But he could see nothing,
only darkness and desert.
The guards carried out a hasty body search,
stripping Mustafa of his military ID papers but
somehow failing to find the 200 dinars that he had
managed to keep hidden in his clothing at Topzawa.
He felt his hands being roughly bound behind him
with his Kurdish cummerbund. His eyes were
blindfolded with his headscarf, as were his
companion's. The two men were ordered to walk.
Mustafa, knowing that he was to die, began to recite
under his breath the Ayat al-Kursi from the
Koran. "God: there is no god but He, the Living, the
Everlasting..."5
He moved forward for about twenty yards, then felt
himself stumbling down a slight incline. From a
distance, the voice of a guard ordered the two men
to liedown on their backs. As he obeyed the command,
Mustafa felt himself sandwiched between his
companion and another, inert body. His ears picked
up the sound of a bulldozer's engine revving.
The next thing Mustafa heard was automatic weapons
firing. To his side he felt a jolt and heard a
groan. The clatter of gunfire ceased, and Mustafa
heard the guards walk away. He realized that the
bullets had missed him. Praying that he was
unobserved, he tried to wriggle sideways, feeling
more dead bodies as he moved, and struggling to
loosen the cummerbund that bound his hands. Minutes
later, he heard the guards return with another two
prisoners, who lay down in the trench and were
riddled with gunfire; then another pair, and another
round of firing, this time a little further away.
Mustafa was still unharmed. "It was God's wish," he
thought.
This time, when the guards departed, Mustafa managed
to work his blindfold loose. He saw that he was
lying in a long, shallow trench, perhaps twenty feet
wide and eighteen inches deep. The end of the
trench, where the bulldozer had exited, was close
by: this was the shallow incline into which he and
his fellow prisoner had stumbled. In the other
direction, the trench stretched away as far as
Mustafa could see. It was filled with hundreds of
corpses.
This macabre scene was illuminated by the headlights
of the bulldozer, which now stood at the shallow
entrance to the mass grave, its engine running. The
driver appeared to be waiting for orders to cover
the bodies with dirt when the trench was full, as it
now almost was. Over the lip of the trench, Mustafa
could still make out the dark shape of the vehicle
that had brought him here. For fifteen minutes he
lay where he was, listening to staccato gunfire and
screams. After a while he realized that the sound
was not in fact coming from all sides. The area
behind him was silent, and Mustafa began cautiously
to clamber over the bloody piles of dead bodies,
away from the noise of the firing squads. Peering
out, he saw that his was the last of many trenches.
Behind him there was only desert. Mustafa ran.
He ran until morning, stopping only occasionally to
catch his breath. Wild dogs chased him, smelling
blood, and he kept them at bay by throwing stones at
them. He saw lights in the darkness, but was afraid
to go toward them. When the sun rose, he stumbled on
to a dirt road. In the distance, he could see a
city. But before he could reach it, he realized that
the nearest building was a military base; two
soldiers caught sight of him and waved him away on
to another dirt road, but did notcome close enough
to see the bloodstains on his clothes. The road that
the soldiers had indicated brought Mustafa to a
river. When he had washed the bloodstains from his
clothes, he set off once more in the direction of
the city. Before long, he ran into a shepherd, and
asked the old man where he was. "Ramadi," the
shepherd answered.
The old man explained that he was an Iranian Kurd
who had been resettled in a nearby mujamma'a.6
He was curious about why Mustafa was barefoot.
Thinking quickly, Mustafa replied that he was a
government public works employee, and had been in a
car crash. Since he had left all his papers in the
wreck, he was anxious to avoid military checkpoints.
The old man gave Mustafa an address in the complex
and told him how he could sneak in without being
observed by the guards.
Reaching the house, Mustafa smelled the aroma of
fresh bread. He found a woman baking. What was this
place, he asked. She told him it was a complex that
had been built for Iranian Kurds, although she
herself was an Iraqi Kurd from Khanaqin.7
Her husband was at market, she explained, but would
return before long. When the man arrived, Mustafa
repeated his car-crash story and asked for advice on
how he could get back to Baghdad. A bus would soon
be leaving the complex for Ramadi, the man said. He
gave Mustafa instructions on how to evade the
checkpoints, and pressed on him some food and a pair
of slippers. When Mustafa got to the entrance to the
complex, the bus was just pulling away, but he
flagged it down and the driver stopped. As Mustafa
boarded the bus, he recognized one of the other
passengers. It was someone he knew from the Jafan
area. It was Ozer.
* * *
After the massacre in the bus, Ozer had managed to
slip away into the darkness. He ran for a while,
confused and angry, before tripping headlong into a
trench. He fell on top of a body. It was bleeding
from the nose, but the man was still breathing. This
trench was very different from the one in which
Mustafa had been laid for execution. It was ten or
twelve feet deep, Ozer remembered, and only about
six feet wide. He estimated that it contained 400
bodies. Scrambling out again, he fled into the
desert. Fearful of being recognized as a Kurd, he
stripped off his clothes and rolled them into a
bundle, which he carried on his shoulder. Like
Mustafa, he had left his shoes behind.
He walked or ran for hours. "I passed only trenches
filled with bodies; I could tell what they were by
the smell," he recalled. "I also saw many mounds
made by bulldozers. The whole area was full of
trenches with corpses."
At one point he crossed a paved road and came to
water, perhaps a lake. On the other side he could
see the tall shapes of date palms. He knelt down to
drink, but stopped short when he saw the headlights
of a vehicle approaching. Afraid that it was one of
the Landcruisers from the execution squad, he
plunged into the water and started to wade toward
the far shore. But when he was waist-deep, he
noticed with relief that the car had turned in
another direction. Now, Ozer also saw the lights of
distant buildings, and he headed toward them. It was
perhaps 4:00 a.m.
It turned out to be the same complex that Mustafa
had reached. Ozer later learned that it housed
thousands of people from the Qaser Shirin border
area, who had been kept here as virtual hostages
since the early days of the Iran-Iraq War. The
complex was encircled with barbed wire, and its
residents were barred from leaving, other than on
eight-hour passes that allowed them to shop at the
market in Ramadi.
Ozer peered through the doorway at the first
building he passed. He saw two people asleep in an
inner courtyard, and knocked. A man's voice called
out in Kurdish, "Who's there?"
"A poor man in need of bread and water," Ozer
answered.
Neighbors, aroused by the noise, came out from the
building next door to see what was happening. But
when they saw Ozer, they promptly slammed their door
shut again. In answer to his repeated knocking, it
was opened once more, and Ozer saw an old man and
his two sons brandishing sticks at him. When he
blurted out his story to the men, they agreed to
give him some food--bean soup and bread. But they
were too afraid to shelter a ragged Kurdish fugitive
in their home. In the earlydawn, Ozer went begging
from door to door, until a man named Ahmad agreed to
take him to the terminal where he could catch a
minibus to Ramadi. On the bus, he met Mustafa. The
two men traveled together as far as the Baghdad bus
terminal, where Mustafa thought he recognized an
Istikhbarat officer he had seen in Topzawa, and
fled on his own into the crowds. Ozer eventually
reached the Kurdish quarter of Kirkuk. That night,
watching television, Ozer saw himself in a news
flash that showed the Iraqi Army watching over
captured "Iranian agents"--the film shot at the
Qader Karam police station on April 10.8
* * *
Taymour's Story
Through a series of chance occurrences in the
desert, five men--Muhammad, Ozer, Mustafa, Omar and
Ibrahim--survived the culmination of the Iraqi
regime's Anfal campaign. From the testimony of these
five survivors, it is apparent that one of the
principal purposes of Anfal was to exterminate all
adult males of military service age captured in
rural Iraqi Kurdistan. Firing squads murdered these
Kurds by the tens ofthousands with no semblance of
due process, by virtue of nothing more than their
age, their ethnicity and their presence in
"prohibited areas" supposedly influenced by the
parties of the Kurdish peshmerga. As Ali
Hassan al-Majid had insisted on many occasions,
paragraph five of Northern Bureau Command directive
SF/4008 was being carried out to the letter.9
The bodies of many of the victims of Anfal lie in
mass graves outside the Iraqi town of Ramadi,
ploughed under by bulldozers in a desert area that,
for the moment, remains inaccessible to outside
observers. But it is apparent that this was not the
only mass execution site used during Anfal. On this
score the testimonies of Ozer, Mustafa, Omar and
Ibrahim leave a number of enigmas still unanswered.
Their accounts indicate that thousands lie buried
outside Ramadi; yet they also say that only five
buses from an original convoy of more than thirty
took the road to Ramadi that night. The remainder
broke off outside Falluja and drove off in another
direction, and the inference must be that these
prisoners were taken to be executed elsewhere.
Middle East Watch has received detailed reports,
based on hearsay, of at least three other mass
execution sites that were used during the Anfal
campaign. One of these was in the vicinity of the
archeological site of Al-Hadhar (Hatra), some sixty
miles south of the city of Mosul. (There is ample
material here for the connoisseur of historical
irony, since Saddam Hussein had spent lavish
resources on excavating Al-Hadhar as part of his
search for the ancient origins of the Iraqi Arab
nation--only to dig it up again as a burial place
for his non-Arab enemies.)10
Another reported execution site was near Hamrin
Mountain, to the south of Tuz Khurmatu. One account,
citing an eyewitness, speaks of forty busloads of
Kurds, in the custody of Republican Guards, being
machinegunned by a dirt road leading to the Otheim
river. A third report speaks of mass executions at
another part of Hamrin Mountain, between Tikrit and
Kirkuk--this one involving an estimated 2,000 women
and children.
The lists of those who disappeared during Anfal,
which are routinely pressed on all visitors to Iraqi
Kurdistan, are by no means restricted to the names
of young and middle-aged men. Indeed, from the
fragmentary lists given to Middle East Watch, it is
apparent that more than half of those who
disappeared from southern Germian and the Lesser Zab
Valley were women and children. Some of those who
disappeared were no doubt infant refugees who
perished on the freezing roads to Iran or Turkey.
Many other small children were allowed to die of
starvation and disease in the prison at Dibs.
Hundreds of children (whose fates are known, and
thus do not figure in these lists of the
disappeared) were among the victims of the chemical
gas attacks on Halabja, Goktapa and other sites. But
many children also went before the firing squads.
One of these children of Anfal was Taymour Abdullah
Ahmad, the 12-year old from Kulajo in the nahya
of Tilako in southern Germian, just six or seven
miles from Muhammad's home village of Aliyani Taza.
Taymour was the first--and until recent Middle East
Watch interviews the only--known survivor of a mass
execution during Anfal. He remains the only
eyewitness to the mass killing of women and
children. His story has been well documented
elsewhere, but it bears repeating here in its proper
context.11
Taymour had lived in Kulajo from the age of three.
His father, Abdullah, was a wheat farmer, and the
family--Taymour, his parents, and his three younger
sisters--lived in a humble four-room mud house.
Thesiblings were closely bunched in age. In 1988,
Taymour was twelve. His eldest sister, Jelas, was a
year younger; Laulau was ten, and Sunur nine. Kulajo
was swept up in the massive three-day army sweep
through southern Germian in the second week of
April, and fleeing before the advancing troops,
Taymour and his family were funneled through the
first collection-point at Melistura. They hoped to
make their way to the complex of Sumoud, where some
relatives had been relocated in 1986 and 1987, but
this was impossible. From Melistura they were taken
by tractor-hauled cart to the fort at Qoratu, and
thence, after ten days, to the Popular Army camp at
Topzawa.
By now Taymour knew that this campaign was different
from any of the past, and even in Qoratu he began to
fear that he and his family were to be executed. At
Topzawa, his father was taken away, and Taymour
never saw him again. Through the window of his hall,
he watched as male prisoners were handcuffed
together, stripped to their undershorts and hustled
away. The rest of Taymour's family remained at
Topzawa for a month, and were fed on bread and water
and a little cheese. During this time Taymour saw
several younger children weaken and die.
One day in late May, at about six in the morning,
the guards led Taymour, his mother and sisters out
into the courtyard and checked their names off on a
list. A convoy of vehicles awaited, apparently the
same kind in which Mustafa had been driven to Ramadi
about a month earlier. They were painted green or
white, and Taymour thought that the absence of
windows made them look like oversized ambulances. He
counted fifty or sixty women and children, seated
along the four benches that stretched the length of
each bus. To enter the passenger section, the
prisoners had to pass through two small guards'
compartments, connected by an interior door. Other
guards rode in front with the driver. The only
ventilation came from a small wire-mesh opening at
the rear. Taymour could not see outside.
They drove until sunset along a paved highway,
halting only once. Taymour craned to look out
through the wire-mesh screen, but all he saw of
their stopping place was a large water tank painted
in camouflage colors. The heat was oppressive, the
doors remained locked, and there was nothing to
drink. As the bus drove on, three children collapsed
and died, all of them younger than Taymour. But
still they did not stop. No one spoke: "They were
too afraid," Taymour remembered, "too exhausted, too
hungry and thirsty, too desperate."
It was nightfall when the caravan stopped and the
guards took the prisoners outside. In the darkness,
Taymour could see nothing but endless desert. But he
could see now that there were about thirty vehicles
in the convoy. Dozens of soldiers milled around;
they appeared to have been accompanying the buses in
Toyota Landcruisers.12
They gave the prisoners a little water to drink from
their canteens and then blindfolded each one with a
strip of white cloth. Since there were hundreds of
people, the process took a long time--about an hour,
Taymour thought. When it was over, the prisoners
reboarded the buses, and Taymour promptly removed
his blindfold. The jolting of the bus told him that
they had left the highway and were driving along a
dirt road into the desert.
After half an hour the bus stopped again and the
guards threw open the rear doors. Taymour saw that
each vehicle was neatly positioned next to its own
burial pit, some fifteen feet square and less than a
yard deep. A fresh mound of dirt rose up behind each
pit. The guards shoved the prisoners roughly over
the edge, and in the panic and confusion Taymour was
separated from his mother and sisters. Almost at
once an officer and a soldier opened fire with their
Kalashnikovs. Taymour was hit in the left shoulder.
Despite the pain, he began to stagger toward the
soldier who had shot him. He remembered noticing
that the man had tears in his eyes. But as Taymour
tried to grab hold of him and climb out of the pit,
the officer barked out an order in Arabic, and the
soldier fired again. This second bullet caught
Taymour on the right side of his back, just above
the waist. This time he lay still.
Apparently satisfied, the soldiers walked away.
Taymour could no longer see the men, but he could
hear their voices in the darkness some distance
away. He also became aware of a movement next to
him. He could see that it was a young girl, and she
appeared to be unhurt. "Let's run," Taymour
whispered to her.
"I can't," the girl answered. "I'm too afraid of the
soldiers."
Without stopping to argue, Taymour clambered on to
the hard-packed mound of dirt behind the grave. He
later heard a rumor that a young Kurdish girl had
been found alive in the desert at this time, and
surmised that it was the companion he had left
behind. As for his motherand three daughters, they
did not survive the execution squads that night.13
Like the girl, Taymour was at first too scared to
run, since the Landcruisers were still driving
around the execution site, their headlights sweeping
in circles through the darkness. Taymour scooped out
a shallow hole in the top of the mound and lay down
flat. Each time the headlights moved away, Taymour
dragged himself to the next trench. His had been the
last one filled with bodies; in the direction he was
now heading, the pits were still empty. As he
reached each one, he stopped and flattened himself
against the earth mound, hoping that he was
invisible from below.
The next thing he knew, it was much later. He had
passed out on top of the fifth or sixth mound. The
blood was still flowing freely from his wounds. But
the whole area was quiet now. The sealed buses and
landcruisers had gone, and although Taymour never
saw or heard any bulldozers, the pits that contained
the bodies of that night's execution victims had
been filled with dirt and smoothed flat. No fresh
bodies were visible, and Taymour passed another
twenty empty trenches as he fled into the darkness.
He remembered thinking just one thing as he dragged
his injured body away from the killing grounds: "If
I get out of this alive, I will give five dinars to
the poor."
There was no moon. Once he saw car headlights in the
distance behind him. He came to the intersection of
two dirt roads and struck out blindly along one of
them. After a couple of hours, he discerned the
shadowy outline of a Bedouin encampment. Dogs
barked, and the noise woke the owner of the nearest
tent, who emerged with a flashlight. Seeing a boy in
Kurdish dress, covered in blood, he yanked Taymour
inside. They could not communicate--the Bedouin
spoke no Kurdish, and Taymour knew not a word of
Arabic. And the man could do nothing to treat
Taymour's wounds--although these proved not to be
life-threatening. But he kept him safe in the tent
for three days and then drove him in his truck to
the nearest town. This was Samawa, the city south of
Baghdad that had been the final stop for the convoys
of sick and elderly people who were taken to Nugra
Salman. Taymour stayed there, sheltered by a
friendly Arab family, for more than two years.
Eventually the family managed to smuggle a message
through intermediaries to a surviving uncle of
Taymour's in Kalar, letting him know that the boy
was alive and well. In October 1990, Taymour and his
uncle were reunited. The following year, after the
failed Kurdish uprising, Taymour's story began to
filter out, giving the outside world its first real
glimpse of the horror that was Anfal.
______
1 Muhammad's
story is based on a Middle East Watch interview with
him on the site of Aliyani Taza village, March 30,
1993.
2 Ar'ar, an
Iraqi-Saudi border post and a way-station for
pilgrims traveling to Mecca, was mentioned in
several interviews as a site for internments and
mass executions during Anfal. A guard at Nugra
Salman, for instance, told one elderly detainee that
Kurdish prisoners from Anfal were being held there.
3 Again there are
some minor discrepancies in the witnesses' estimates
of the size of the convoy. But the various figures
given to Middle East Watch would suggest that it
contained between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners.
4 The reference
is apparently to the high proportion of Republican
Guards from Mosul.
5 The Ayat
al-Kursi, "the Throne," is verse 255 of the
second Sura of the Koran. It reads in full,
"God: there is no god but He, the Living, the
Everlasting. Slumber seizes him not, neither sleep;
to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the
earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him
save by His leave? He knows what lies before them
and what is after them, and they comprehend not
anything of His knowledge save such as He will. His
Throne comprises the heavens and the earth; the
preserving of them oppresses Him not. He is the
All-high, the All-glorious." Arberry (trans.),
The Koran Interpreted, p.65.
6 The old
shepherd was presumably one of the thousands of
Iranian Kurds relocated from their border villages
after the Iraqi Army's occupation of portions of
Iran's Kermanshah province in 1980. The location
described by Mustafa is strongly suggestive of a
camp called Al-Tash, outside Ramadi, which once held
as many as 30,000 people. According to the
International Committee of the Red Cross, which had
access to this camp, some 12-15,000 prisoners
remained there in mid-1992. Middle East Watch
interview, Geneva, July 14, 1992.
7 And therefore
probably a victim of the Arabization campaign of the
mid-1970s. Khanaqin lies in the extreme southeastern
part of Iraqi Kurdistan, in the Arabized section of
Diyala governorate.
8 Ibrahim and
Omar, the remaining two survivors of the massacre in
the bus, also made it back to Kurdistan. But for
both men the ordeal was not yet over. Ibrahim, who
like Ozer and Mustafa passed through the complex of
Iranian Kurds on his way to Ramadi, was recaptured
as a deserter in Baghdad, and passed through a
series of military jails before taking refuge with a
contingent of jahsh in Suleimaniyeh. Omar
spent a further period in hiding in Kurdistan before
eventually surrendering to the army in September,
after the general amnesty. He was forced into
another period in the military and sent to serve in
Kuwait (as was Ozer) after the August 1990 Iraqi
invasion. He deserted for the last time three days
before the beginning of the air war in January 1991.
Anwar Tayyar, who
had been on the same bus as Ozer, Ibrahim and Omar,
also escaped from the execution site and was seen in
late May or early June by peshmerga hiding
out in the Qader Karam area. He had sustained four
flesh wounds during the shooting in the bus, and had
been left for dead. After the encounter near Qader
Karam, Anwar Tayyar disappeared for good. The last
peshmerga to see him alive speculate that he
either starved to death or was captured by the army
and killed. Middle East Watch interview with former
PUK commander, Kalar, March 30, 1993.
9 This, it should
be recalled, stated that, "All persons captured in
those [prohibited] 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." See above p.64.
10 Saddam
Hussein's fascination with Al-Hadhar is detailed in
Baram's Culture, History and Ideology,
pp.53-54. Al-Hadhar may also be the site referred to
by a former Zakho mustashar interviewed by
Neil Conan of National Public Radio in the U.S.;
this man spoke of 12,000 Kurdish men being executed
at an unknown site in August 1988 after being
imprisoned in Mosul. Conan's interview is cited in
Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, p.144. There are
also persistent but unconfirmed reports of mass
Anfal graves near Ar'ar on the Iraqi-Saudiborder,
and in Diwaniyah and Naseriyah governorates in
southern Iraq.
11 See for
example, Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human
Rights, Unquiet Graves: The Search for the
Disappeared in Iraqi Kurdistan, February 1992,
pp. 23-25; and Makiya, Cruelty and Silence,
chapter 5. Taymur has also been featured extensively
in television reports, including "Saddam's Killing
Fields," CBS "60 Minutes," February 23, 1992.
12 Although
Taymour referred to the executioners as "soldiers,"
he had no specific recollection of their uniforms,
and it is much more likely that the men belonged to
another agency, such as the Ba'ath Party or Amn.
13 Taymour, in
fact, lost a total of twenty-eight relatives in
Anfal. In addition to his father, mother and three
sisters, they included his uncle, Omar Ahmad Qader;
his aunt, Ayna Ahmad Qader, her husband, Hama Sa'id
Mohi-al-Din Abd-al-Karim and their three young
children; his aunt, Mahsa Muhammad Mahmoud and her
nine children; an unmarried aunt, Hamdia Muhammad
Mahmoud; his uncle, Osman Muhammad Mahmoud, his
wife, Amina Ali Aziz, and four of their fourteen
children. Middle East Watch interview with Taymour
Abdullah Ahmad, Sumoud Complex, July 29, 1992.
10
Final Anfal: Badinan, August 25-September 6, 1988
"There was medicine from the airplane."
-- victim of the August 25 chemical attack on the
village of Gizeh, Amadiya.
With only the last remnants of the PUK continuing to
resist, Baghdad's plans for wiping out Mas'oud
Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) now began
to advance rapidly. On August 7, 1988, as we have
seen, Ali Hassan al-Majid personally stepped in to
urge the Iraqi Army to hasten the completion of the
Anfal operation. The following day, the Army High
Command issued its "communique of communiques," to
announce that a ceasefire had come into effect on
Iraq's terms, putting an end to the eight-year
Iran-Iraq War that had cost as many as a million
lives.1
The ceasefire gave the Iraqi Army the critical boost
it required to bring Anfal to a close. The First
Corps, which had handled the earlier phases of Anfal
from its base in Kirkuk, would now mop up the
lingering resistance in the Shaqlawa-Rawanduz
valleys. The Fifth Army Corps, based in Erbil, would
take charge of operations in Dohuk governorate,
along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Other divisions,
reportedly including elements of the Third, Sixth
and Seventh Armies, were now redeployed to Iraqi
Kurdistan from the southern war front around Fao and
Basra.
In his review of the Final Anfal campaign, Fifth
Corps commander Brig. Gen. Yunis Zareb wrote, "The
morale was so high and was clear on the faces of the
fighters from the beginning, and especially after
the collapse of the Iranian enemy in the victorious
campaigns starting from the eternal battle of Fao
through the battle of Muhammadthe Prophet of God.2
The formations which took part in [Anfal] had also
taken part in those battles."3
This massive concentration of firepower was
necessary, the general felt, because of the
difficult logistical problems that his troops had to
face in classic guerrilla warfare country:
The land is generally hilly with a hard terrain in
its northern and eastern parts which lie parallel to
the border line of Iraq and Turkey. There are many
gardens, forests and natural trees. The surface of
the earth consists of rocky lands and a sedimentary
surface in the highlands. And the lowlands are a
combination of hard land with a mixed soil of sand
and mud which gradually descends westward and
southward in the direction of the Sleivani and Aqra
plains. This area has many rivers and valleys which
run from the north and east toward the south and
west, forming streams. The movement of the forces
and machinery is greatly hindered by the series of
mountains, high knolls, valleys and other obstacles.4
It was a military planner's inelegant description of
Badinan, the traditional mountainous heartland of
Mullah Mustafa Barzani and his sons, the "offspring
of treason."
Although the terrain complicated the logistical
needs of a regular army, the campaign against the
KDP was in other respects more straightforward than
the drive to destroy the PUK. The KDP peshmerga
were largely concentrated in a single geographical
area, Badinan, whereits operations were run from a
headquarters at Zewa Shkan, an abandoned village
hard up against the Turkish border.5
* * *
Although the Ba'ath Party had devoted five months to
"purifying" the areas that were under the control of
the PUK, it had never abandoned its particular
hatred for the KDP. Once allied with the Shah, the
KDP had rekindled a close relationship with the
clerical regime in Teheran, and on several occasions
acted as scouts for the Iranian army on the northern
front. The strength of this alliance was curious in
a sense, for religious fervor had never been a part
of the KDP's identity. Instead, the party was deeply
imbued with the traditional values of the steep,
narrow valleys of Badinan, a 4,000 square-mile chunk
of the Zagros Mountains bounded to the east by the
Greater Zab river and to the north by Turkey. There
are no major cities in this inhospitable terrain.
Badinan has none of the cosmopolitan sophistication
of a Suleimaniyeh, none of the thriving industry of
an Erbil or a Kirkuk. Tribal structures and
loyalties remained powerful, and the KDP had long
made common cause with conservative local aghas
and sheikhs who were still touched by a
certain nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman
Empire, when tribal fiefdoms in Kurdistan were
granted a large measure of autonomy.6
While the KDP inspired a devoted partisan following,
historically centered on the Barzan Valley, it had
also made powerful enemies among other tribal
leaders. These schisms in turn meant that the final
stage ofAnfal had some characteristics that set it
apart from the rest of the operation. Some of the
tribal groups who had made a separate peace with
Baghdad managed to avoid the worst of Anfal. A
considerable number of villages survived in Badinan
and on its fringes, at least for a time--especially
those of the Surchi, the Zebari, the Bradost and the
Dolamari. And Kurdish villagers who might otherwise
have died were spared if the local mustashar
could convince Baghdad that they were not
contaminated by peshmerga sympathies.
It was never easy for outsiders to guess the numbers
of active peshmerga in the KDP. According to
one 1985 estimate, the party had some 6,000
fighters, compared to 5,000 for the PUK.7
A later estimate put the strength of each group at
10,000 in 1988.8
In fact these figures, cited by sympathetic writers,
may have been inflated. Military and civilian
intelligence reports told the Fifth Corps Commander,
Brig. Gen. Zareb, that the total strength of the
"saboteurs" in Badinan was no more than 2,600.9
Against this puny force, and against the civilian
population of Badinan, Ali Hassan al-Majid's
Northern Bureau sent as many as 200,000 troops.
According to several former Iraqi military sources
interviewed by Middle East Watch, between fourteen
and sixteen regular army divisions of 12,000 men
each took part in the Final Anfal campaign, in
addition to a Chemical Weapons Battalion, units of
the Iraqi Air Force and the National Defense
Battalions, or jahsh. The regime's strategy,
wrote Gen.Zareb, was "based on the guidelines issued
by the Northern Bureau and those of the Chief of
Staff in the August 7 Kirkuk conference." The
underlying doctrine was the simple one that worked
so well in the earlier phases of Anfal--the
application of overwhelming force, "to operate by
moving from the outside toward the inside in order
to encircle the saboteurs, with "different forces
act[ing] simultaneously to guarantee the
encirclement."10
Larger geopolitical considerations also seem to have
played a part in this thinking. "The area of
operations was adjacent to the international
Iraqi-Turkish border," Gen. Zareb observed, "and
this caused some perplexity....Accordingly, all
forces were ordered to tackle the matter in the best
possible way and ensure the secrecy of the operation
by not transgressing the frontier."11
The general's final headache was a logistical one.
"The magnitude of the engineering work needed for
the destruction and removal of the remnants of the
saboteurs and their premises in the areas covered by
the operation...was so great that it put an extra
burden on the shoulders of the command of the unit."12
The removal of the remnants of the "saboteurs" and
their premises: in other words, the destruction of
some 300-400 Kurdish villages of Badinan.
* * *
Badinan on the Eve of the Final Anfal
In the days that preceded the Final Anfal, there
were ample signs of what was to come. The massive
buildup of ground troops was visible along the main
highways of Dohuk governorate, and the area was
softened up by intense shelling and aerial bombing,
sometimes with cluster bombs. In the village of
Spindar, for example, on the southern slopes of Gara
Mountain, aircraft dropped cluster bombs on August
24,killing two small boys, cousins aged four and
five, as they tended their family's goats in the
fields.13
Even as these preliminary attacks began, some
families began to flee, especially if their villages
lay within walking distance of the Turkish border.
But others stayed where they were, waiting for the
violence to pass. After all, they reasoned, villages
like Spindar had been attacked many times since the
mid-1960s. Although Spindar itself had been burned
down more than once, the government had never
prevented the inhabitants from returning to rebuild.
The regime's control of Dohuk governorate had
dwindled to a handful of towns and complexes along
the main roads. From these strongholds, army troops
had maintained brutally thorough checkpoints since
the mid-1980s. "No food was allowed through," one
villager recalled, "not even small cans of infant
formula, and produce was not permitted to be taken
to market."14
Another villager added, "For three or four years
before Anfal only women were able to pass through
the checkpoints. People resorted to
smuggling--flour, rice, salt, oil, kerosene, soap,
detergent and sesame paste--but everything cost much
more this way. At the checkpoint [in the town of
Sarseng] the soldiers confiscated anything they
found and set fire to it. Sometimes women were able
to hide things underneath their dresses."15
But several witnesses told stories of boys and men
being arrested, and disappearing, if they were found
concealing food, which was presumed to be destined
for the peshmerga.
In Badinan, as in the Sorani-speaking areas to the
south, the Kurds had long grown accustomed to the
harsh routines of wartime. Aircraft bombed, strafed
and rocketed them whenever the armed forces received
intelligence reports of peshmerga movements.
When the planes approached, villagers fled to caves,
makeshift shelters or "shades." Occasionally,
helicopters would drop infantry troops into a
village for house-to-house searches for
draft-dodgers and deserters. Artilleryemplacements
in the nearest large town or military base rained
down poorly directed shellfire, which would
sometimes kill some luckless farmer working his
fields. As if these Iraqi attacks were not enough,
the inhabitants of some border areas also had to
contend with raids from Turkish aircraft on
search-and-destroy missions against contingents of
guerrillas from Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK), which maintained bases inside northern Iraq.16
In the spring of 1987, in accordance with the first
decrees issued by the newly appointed Ali Hassan
al-Majid, virtually the whole of Dohuk
governorate--an area a little smaller than the state
of Connecticut--was "redlined." As in the
Sorani-speaking areas, there was a fresh flurry of
village-burning that April and May, with some
forty-nine villages being destroyed in various parts
of Badinan.17
The "redlining" was announced over the official
radio, said a man from a village near the town of
Mangesh. Those who came over to the government side
would be considered "our people," the broadcast
declared. Those who did not would be regarded as
Iranians. To drive home this message, the government
blocked off the dirt roads leading to prohibited
villages with mounds of earth.18
When the October census came, it had only a very
limited effect in rural Badinan; many villages,
Middle East Watch was told, did not even know of its
existence.
Despite the grim news about Anfal that had filtered
through to Badinan via KDP radio broadcasts from
Iran, villagers do not appear to have believed that
the government campaign of 1988 would be any
different from its predecessors. Inexplicably, this
absence of any unusual alarm afflicted not merely
the civilian population but the KDP itself, whose
central committee was meeting inside Iran as the
Final Anfal approached, and seemed not to be
anticipating anything out of theordinary. Although
local peshmerga alerted villagers to the
possibility that chemical weapons might be used, the
KDP leadership does not appear to have broadcast any
emergency alert. "After Halabja, we thought the
international community would stop Saddam Hussein,"
one regional commander said--an astonishingly
sanguine attitude, in view of the dozens of chemical
attacks that had followed that spring and summer.19
Even in its own highly classified internal
documents, the Iraqi military was evasive--almost to
the point of silence--on the matter of chemical
weapons during the Final Anfal.20
Gen. Zareb's report noted only that a battalion
specialized in their use had played "a unique role"
in the campaign, "just like all the other groups."
The unit was kept in a state of readiness and
supervised the use of flamethrowers by infantry
troops. Otherwise, Zareb wrote, "It did not have
another role during the battle because the battle
was within the national geographical boundaries"--a
curious scruple on the general's part, given how
widely chemical artillery had been used on Iraqi
soil in the earlier stages of the Anfal campaign.
Gen. Zareb's assertion may appear contradictory,
given that the use of chemical weapons in the
Badinan campaign was given wide publicity by the
international press. But the explanation is quite
simple: chemical bombing operations during the Final
Anfal were the exclusive responsibility of the Iraqi
Air Force, and the army's chemical artillerypieces
that reportedly were deployed in a half dozen
locations remained silent.21
Through the testimonies of traumatized Kurdish
refugees in Turkey, the world learned quickly of the
use of mustard gas and nerve agents in Badinan.22
Listing forty-nine villages that had been "exposed"
to gas, Galbraith and Van Hollen concluded that Iraq
had "used chemical weapons on a broad scale against
its Kurdish population beginning August 25, 1988,"
and that the attacks had "been accompanied by large
loss of civilian life."23
* * *
"Apples and Something Sweet":
The Chemical Attacks of August 25
The first gas fell on the KDP headquarters at Zewa
Shkan, close to the Turkish border, late in the
evening of August 24. Ten peshmerga
reportedly died. The next morning, August 25,
between about 6:30 and8:30 a.m., Iraqi warplanes
launched a number of separate and almost
simultaneous attacks, perhaps a dozen in all. Many
of them were probably carried out by the same flight
of aircraft, since they were concentrated within a
strip measuring approximately sixty miles wide and
twenty deep. Some of the aircraft targeted a single
village or peshmerga base, but in at least
two cases the planes hit a whole string of villages
in rapid succession. (see map) The intent seems to
have been less to kill than to spread mass terror.
Perhaps twenty civilians died on the spot, and about
the same number of peshmerga. But hundreds
more, especially children, succumbed in the weeks
that followed.
The precise cause of their deaths remains
unknowable; it may have been the lethal
after-effects of a combination of mustard gas and
Sarin nerve gas; or the consequences of exposure,
cold and hunger in the mountains where they fled; or
the malnutrition and disease they endured in the
camps after they were captured; or a combination of
all three. In a sense, the question is academic;
whatever the precise cause may have been, it was the
Iraqi government that was responsible for their
deaths.
In one interview after another, those who lived
through the chemical attacks of the Final Anfal told
very similar stories.
·
The village of Birjinni, in the nahya of
Zawita, had the misfortune to lie almost midway
between two of the KDP's most important bases--one,
the party's regional headquarters, located due north
in the village of Tuka, just across the Khabour
river, and the other a little way to the east, in
the village of Gelnaskeh. All three places were hit
by chemical weapons at breakfast time on August 25.
The people of Birjinni had been watching the sky
since dawn. For several days they had been aware of
unusual numbers of aircraft overhead, and they were
fearful of a conventional bombing attack. As eight
airplanes came into view, many of the villagers fled
in fear to the shelters they had built nearby. Three
of the planes made a low pass over the village, from
east to west, and dropped four bombs each. Surviving
villagers told of clouds of smoke billowing upward,
"white, black and then yellow, rising about fifty or
sixty yards into the air in a column. Then the
column began to break up and drift. It drifted down
into the valley and then passed through the village.
Then we smelled the gas."
It was a pleasant smell at first; "it smelled of
apples and something sweet." Others said it reminded
them of "pesticides in our fields." Soon, however,
"it became bitter. It affected our eyes and
ourmouths and our skin. All of a sudden it was hard
to breathe."24
The villagers later found that four people from a
single Birjinni family had died, including a 58-year
old man and his five-year old grandson. The aircraft
continued to circle overhead for perhaps a half
hour, apparently observing the results of the raid.
Others came later that day, dropping conventional
weapons that set the tinder-dry late summer fields
ablaze. From the mountain saddle on which Birjinni
was built, the villagers could see that the
surrounding area was filled with refugees, all
fleeing northward in the direction of the Turkish
border.25
·
A few miles to the north of Birjinni, close to the
Khabour river, the planes hit Tilakru, a large
village that was home to many army deserters. A
woman named Halima was preparing breakfast for her
children when the bombs fell. She heard muffled
explosions and looked out to see clouds of white
smoke turning yellow. Her husband, a peshmerga
on active duty, had told her how to recognize the
signs. Having served in the Iran-Iraq War, he knew
very well what a chemical attack looked like.
Halima's children had been asleep on the roof, so
she pulled them down as quickly as she could, one by
one, and bundled them into the family's air-raid
shelter, a hole in the ground covered with wood,
leaves and dirt. Looking round in horror, she
realized that her one-year old baby, Zozan, was
missing. Halima found her crawling around in the
courtyard. But by the time she reached her, the
child's face had turned yellow and she was gasping
for breath and trying to vomit. Halima rushed her
into the shelter and flung wet blankets over the
walls. Buther infant daughter could not be saved,
and she died several days later in a prison camp, as
did several other children from Tilakru.26
·
From a vantage point in the village of Spindarok, on
the far bank of the Khabour, a farmer named Suleiman
watched through binoculars as two aircraft attacked
the KDP base at Tuka and the hamlet of Barkavreh, a
few hundred yards away. With his radio tuned to an
air force frequency, Suleiman even overheard
snatches of the two pilots' cockpit conversation:
"They are firing at us."
"Drop the bombs on the high places."
"Don't fire while you are behind me. Hold your fire
until you are next to me."
Suleiman concluded that the pilots were responding
to ground fire. A friend, Obeid, said that in this
area at least, there had been specific warnings of
reprisals: "The government had told people that if a
single bullet were to be fired from a village, a
chemical bomb would be dropped. People came from
government-controlled areas bringing this
information." In the course of some 350 Middle East
Watch field interviews, this was virtually the only
example cited of the government issuing any prior
warning of its intentions.
Suleiman counted thirteen bombs in all. Although
most of them fell outside the village, he learned
later that two bombs had landed close to the
peshmerga headquarters, on the western outskirts
of Tuka. According to three separate accounts,
fourteen peshmerga died there, and one
civilian. Since the wind was blowing from the east,
all the farm animals on the western side of the
village died, although no one inside the perimeter
of the village was harmed.27
·
The village of Warmilleh lay a little nearer to
Turkey, between the Khabour and the western edge of
Mattin Mountain, a peshmerga stronghold. The
nearest guerrilla camp was in Bazeh, a three and a
half hour walk across the mountains to the east. The
people of Warmilleh, like those of Birjinni, had
been expecting an attack on the morning ofAugust 25.
Again, it came at about 8:00 a.m. This time, they
counted six aircraft, but only two of them took part
in the attack, dropping six bombs each. "We were
lucky," a villager remembered, "for the wind was in
the opposite direction to where the people were
sheltering under the trees, half a kilometer away."28
Five people were affected by the drifting gas. They
vomited; their skin turned black and peeled off. But
a peshmerga doctor arrived later that
afternoon, administered injections, and the five
injured villagers joined their families' northward
flight to the Turkish border.
Directly across the river, the planes also hit the
village of Bilejaneh. The chemicals drifted on the
wind to a hamlet called Bani. "I got sick and had to
vomit," said a man who lived there. "We left Bani
that afternoon and went to Bilejaneh and Girka.
After that we had to cross the main road [from
Begova to Kani Masi]. The army was not there yet.
The first troops arrived at 2:00 a.m. on August 26
and cut off the escape route to Turkey. Those who
crossed the main road before this were lucky. We got
there at about 1:00 a.m., just before the soldiers."29
·
North of the main road, one direct route to Turkey
led through the villages of Ruseh and Nazdureh.
"When the military came and began camping out on the
road to Nazdureh, people expected an attack and
fled," according to a KDP peshmerga from
Ruseh, who had sent his family on ahead to Turkey.
The army attacked the next morning. The Iraqis were
trying to seal the border area. People who were
close to the border managed to cross, but those who
failed were arrested and disappeared. I was near the
border when the chemical attack happened. I saw
yellow smoke. I was on top of the mountain, but
people in the valley below were affected. My
brother, who was two or three hundred meters away
from me on the mountain side, was also affected by
the chemicals. He began frothing at the mouth and
choking and his skin became dark. Thenhe died. His
name was Salim, and he was 45-years old. We buried
him there on the spot.30
·
The most concentrated attacks, however, came along
Gara Mountain, the great ridge that begins near the
town of Sarseng and stretches east for twenty miles
or more. Here, the air force targeted at least
fifteen and perhaps as many as thirty separate
villages.31
On the southern slopes, the neighboring villages of
Avok, Swareh, Sidara and Spindar (nahya of
Sarseng) were all hit at about 8:00 a.m. on the same
morning, August 25. There was a peshmerga
base in the mountains nearby, and the people of
Swareh had moved to the ravines and caves of Avok a
year or so earlier in response to the government's
continuous bombing and shelling.
A young women named Khadija was in one of these
caves with her nine children when the bombs fell.
Her elder sister, Aisha, had just gone outside to
wash the dirty plates from breakfast. Khadija heard
a series of powerful explosions, as if the bombs had
fallen right overhead, and the mouth of the cave was
quickly obscured by white smoke. The smoke smelled
like "the same medicine that is sprayed on apples,"
and everyone inside the cave grew dizzy and found it
hard to breathe. Their eyes burned and teared. Two
teenage boys who had been hiding among the bushes
outside tried to sprint to safety. But the planes
cut them down with machinegun fire, and both
youngsters died.
After about an hour, when the smoke had cleared, the
family ventured out fearfully to look for Aisha.
They found her lying on the ground outside the cave.
She was sighing and moving her lips as if she wanted
to speak, but no words came. She had vomited, and
her skin was black. A few yards away the grass was
blackened and burned, and dead farm animals lay all
around. Aisha lived only another two or three hours.
When the family washed her body that night for
burial in the villagecemetery, her dry and blackened
skin came off in their hands.32
Another young woman, Amina, also died in the attack.
Others died later as they tried to hide out in the
mountains, but many families managed to escape by
walking through the narrow Ashawa Valley, close to
the extravagant mountaintop palace which President
Saddam Hussein had recently built himself.
·
To the north side of Gara Mountain, the villages of
Bawarkeh Kavri and Mergeti ("Meadow of the Mulberry
Tree") lay next to each other in a small valley,
separated only by a 10-minute walk. The army had
burned Bawarkeh Kavri four times before Anfal, but
the village had always been rebuilt. The valley had
been "redlined" by the government in 1987, and both
villages housed peshmerga bases.
Again, the bombing began at about 8:00 a.m. on
August 25. Five or six bombs fell in Bawarkeh Kavri
and nine or ten in Mergeti, witnesses said, but they
struck some distance away from the KDP base. There
was white smoke, and all the chickens and birds
died, as did the goats. But none of the villagers
lost their lives in the attack, even though those
who were downwind of the gas suffered the usual
symptoms--vomiting, tearing and dizziness. They
ascribed their good fortune to the peshmerga,
who had warned them a few days before that an attack
might be imminent and showed them how to protect
themselves by closing all the doors and windows and
shrouding their heads in wet towels and blankets.
That same evening, the villagers saw the ground
forces approaching and fled to the mountains.
·
It was a similar story in Sarkeh and Gizeh,
neighboring villages deep in the folds of Gara
Mountain, about ten miles south of the town of
Amadiya.
There were no guerrilla bases here, although
fighters did pass through at frequent intervals. As
the villagers sat down to breakfast, Mushir, a
peshmerga in his early twenties, saw six
aircraft discharge their bombs over Sarkeh before
flying on to attack Shirana, the next village to the
east. Mushir ran west toward Gizeh, the village of
his birth. But it was deserted; the warplanes had
already paid their visit.
"There was medicine from the airplane," said Khadija
Sa'id, an old, partially sighted woman from Gizeh.
"We noticed smoke, felt dizzyand fell down. My
sister went blind. The smoke smelled like old
alcohol, but the smell did not stay."
"I felt dizzy, about to faint," added her sister,
Fahma. "Tears were coming from my eyes, and I fell
down. I tried to wash my face. I vomited. Those who
vomited survived. Others died at the beginning. Now
I am like this; I can see only a little bit." The
villagers of Gizeh fled to caves in the mountains,
as they had in the past. On the evening of the same
day, they watched ground troops enter the village
and burn it to the ground.33
* * *
In psychological terms, these attacks were every bit
as devastating as the regime presumably intended
them to be. The raids terrified peshmerga and
civilians across Badinan. With no village farther
than twenty miles from the chemicals, word of them
spread rapidly. The suddenness and intensity of the
attack on so many fronts at once threw the KDP into
disarray, and many peshmerga simply abandoned
their posts to try and rescue their families and
reach the border. Said one fighter,
I could not find any of my fellow peshmerga.
They had all gone to help their relatives, and the
chemical weapons had created a lot of fear among the
people. We did not know how to fight them. We knew
how to fight tanks, how to chase a military caravan
until we ambushed it, and how to escape aerial
bombardments. But we did not know how to fight
chemicals.34
Immediately after the bombs had fallen, word reached
the villages that resistance was useless. According
to a young man who was a peshmerga in
Spindar, the next village to the west of Swareh,
Even before the army entered our village we received
a message from Mas'oud Barzani not to resist. The
[KDP]leadership command told us, "Everything has
ended; the revolution is over; we cannot fight
chemical weapons with our bare hands; we just cannot
fight chemical weapons." The KDP's First Branch told
us, "You have a choice: if you want to surrender, do
so in order to save the civilians, because the party
does not have the ability to care for so many
civilian casualties." We could not take so many
elderly people and children to the border.35
Such scattered fighting as did take place after the
first wave of chemical attacks cannot properly be
called resistance. The best that the KDP could
manage was a string of isolated rearguard actions,
in which splintered groups of peshmerga tried
to slow the army's advance. But their efforts were
useless, for the places where the peshmerga
tried to make a stand, such as the narrow defile
known as Darava Shinyeh (or "Shinyeh Passage"), were
also acutely vulnerable to renewed attacks from the
air. According to one KDP veteran, these battles
were "all very short ones, like pinpricks," and
military helicopters continued to harass the fleeing
peshmerga throughout the next day, August 26.36
Perhaps the most cowardly of all the chemical
attacks was the bombing of the bridge at Baluka, one
of the main crossing points on the fast-flowing
Greater Zab river. The village of Baluka itself had
been emptied during the border clearances of 1976,
although a few families had straggled back,
accompanied by the peshmerga. Now, with the
sanctuary of Turkey barely four miles away across
the mountains, villagers had begun to converge on
the Baluka bridge from all directions, in flight
from the army. At about 1:00 p.m. on August 25, the
warplanes appeared over Baluka. They released two
bombs on the village and several more over the
river. The bridge was quickly covered in a greenish
cloud and the corpses of farm animals piled up on
the bridge, making it impassable.
By nightfall on August 26, the combat was
effectively over. "The zealousness of the [army]
fighters was boosted by the collapse of thesaboteurs
and their complete inability to resist," Gen. Zareb
noted with satisfaction in his written report on the
Final Anfal.37
In many cases, the ground troops and jahsh --
or chatta ("bandits"), as they are known in
the Kurmanji-speaking areas--moved into the
abandoned villages on the same day as the chemical
attacks. In others, they waited a day or two. But
the occupation of Badinan was effectively complete
by dawn on August 28, exactly on Gen. Zareb's
original schedule. Tens of thousands of refugees
headed for Turkey; others were captured in their
homes, or surrendered after a brief, vain attempt at
flight; others hid in the mountains until the
September 6 amnesty.
* * *
In coordination with the first wave of attacks, the
Iraqi Army occupied the highway that runs east from
the small border city of Zakho until it meets the
Greater Zab river at Baluka. The idea was evidently
to seal off the Turkish border and stem the flood of
refugees. In this, however, the army was strikingly
unsuccessful. Although many died along the way, some
were caught, and others were chased and strafed by
fighter aircraft, between 65,000 and 80,000 Kurds
did manage to make the crossing. In the impromptu
camps that a reluctant Turkish government found
itself obliged to open along the border, the
refugees told their stories and displayed their
injuries to the few members of the foreign press who
managed to gain access. Those who lived in villages
south of the highway found it more difficult to
escape, and a lower proportion of them reached safe
havens in Turkey.38
Many of those who could not break through the
blockade line along the Zakho-Baluka road still
managed to evade capture by hiding out in the
mountains. They watched impotently as the bulldozers
crawled back and forth through the valleys below,
crushing everything in their path. Along the great
east-west spine of Gara Mountain, south of Amadiya,
the scattered peshmerga fighters took charge
of a sprawling caravan of thousands of refugees. On
foot and on horseback, they travelled east for three
days, but found it impossible to get across the
Greater Zab, because all the bridges were now
controlled by the army. Retracing their steps to the
west again, the refugees heard on the radios that
the peshmerga carried that thousands of their
fellow Kurds had found sanctuary in Turkey. As news
of the recent chemical attacks spread, the
peshmerga tried to keep up the morale of the
civilians by telling them that foreign pressure on
the Iraqi regime would soon force Saddam Hussein to
declare a halt to the fighting.
Although they had no bread or other supplies, there
was meat aplenty in the form of abandoned farm
animals. But the most pressing problem was the lack
of drinking water: all the rivers and springs lay in
the valleys below, and these were in the hands of
the army and jahsh, who were shooting at
anything that moved. The fugitives went for three
days without water, and according to at least one
account many young children died on Gara Mountain as
a result of diarrhea and dehydration.39
But a surprising number did survive the ordeal, and
on their twelfth day in hiding, just after the radio
had broadcast noon prayers, news came that the
Revolutionary Command Council had decreed a general
amnesty.
Many thousands of others were less fortunate. The
villagers of Gizeh, for example, which had been
attacked with chemical weapons on August 25, held
out in the mountains for ten days--not quite long
enough to benefit from the amnesty. Starving and
exhausted, they wereeventually hunted down by
soldiers who made them walk for four hours to
Amadiya. There they were hustled into trucks that
drove off to the west, in the direction of Dohuk.
Gizeh was one of the worst hit villages in the whole
of Badinan: according to Mushir, the young
peshmerga from Sarkeh, ninety-three of its men
were captured by the army and were never heard from
again. Only Mushir and two others survived.
Some were captured in their homes on the first day
of the assault. Part of the population of Mergeti,
on the north side of Gara Mountain, did flee
immediately after the August 25 chemical attack, but
almost a hundred other people, including many of the
older residents, were seized as soldiers and Kurdish
chatta forces reached the village that
evening. The troops warned them that if there was
any resistance from peshmerga in the
vicinity, they would all be executed on the spot.
In Warakhal, some way to the east in the nahya
of Nerwa Reikan, a local mustashar told the
village elders that their people should turn
themselves in to the army; since they were not
peshmerga, they had nothing to fear. The
villagers obeyed, and were rounded up and packed
into trucks. Their first destination was the complex
of Deralouk, built where the main east-west highway
crosses the Greater Zab. They remained there for
three hours, crowded into animal pens, before being
separated by age and sex. The women counted as
eighty-three men from Warakhal were loaded into IFAs
and driven off. They asked the jahsh what was
to become of them, but were ordered to shut up. But
there is evidence that the militiamen knew the
answer only too well, for some of the women heard
them muttering among themselves that it would be "a
great loss for these people to disappear."40
From this point on, the story of the Final Anfal
closely parallels what had happened during earlier
stages of the campaign. The captured villagers were
detained, for a few hours or a few days, in
temporary holding centers on or near the main
east-west highway. Sometimes there was a rudimentary
interrogation. Several of these processing points
were complexes like Deralouk, built to house
displaced Kurds during earlier periods of the
Iran-Iraq War. Captives from the area around Gara
Mountain were kept briefly in the complexes of Sori
Jeri and Kwaneh, and in a school in Sarseng. In the
town of Amadiya itself, the police station, the army
base and the headquarters of the Teachers Union
wereall used. The temporary facilities were badly
stretched, and transportation of so many prisoners
also proved to be a problem, with many of the army
IFAs breaking down. One civilian truck driver told
Middle East Watch that his vehicle was commandeered,
along with two civilian buses, to transport fifty or
sixty prisoners--men, women and children--from the
army brigade headquarters in Amadiya to Sarseng, and
thence to Dohuk.41
Closer to Zakho, the complexes of Bersivi and Hizawa
served the same purpose. Many people also told of
being taken to the army fort in Mangesh, or to a
primary or intermediate school in that town,
sometimes lured there by false promises of amnesty.
They remained in Mangesh for up to three days. Some
were given meager rations of Kurdish flat bread and
sun-heated water; others received nothing at all,
although sympathetic townspeople reportedly threw
food in at the windows.42
After three days, the IFAs were set to move again,
this time to the south, toward Dohuk.
* * *
On-the-Spot Mass Executions
In the Sorani-speaking areas of Iraqi Kurdistan,
faced with orders to exterminate their prisoners on
an industrial scale, the executioners were sometimes
sloppy about their work. From the Third Anfal alone,
the Germian campaign, at least six survivors have
surfaced to tell their stories. This is not the case
in Badinan, where after more than a year of
intensive research Middle East Watch has been unable
to find a single male who emerged alive from the
camps and the firing squads.
Between April and September 1992, and again in April
1993, MEW staff travelled extensively in Badinan,
conducting dozens of interviews with survivors of
the Final Anfal--Khatimat al-Anfal. In
eachformer village group, surviving witnesses were
asked to construct a list of those who had died or
disappeared. In many cases, they were able to do so,
giving complete names where possible and identifying
anyone who had been an active peshmerga, a
draft dodger or an army deserter. The lists provided
by villagers from Badinan invariably included only
adult and teenage males--with the signal exception
of Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, as well as
Yezidi Kurds, whose fate is detailed below.
The numbers reported to MEW from thirty-six villages
give some hint of the probable death toll from the
Badinan campaign. Some places went unscathed, with
everyone making it across the border into Turkey;
some lost a single man; many a dozen or twenty; a
few suffered brutally, losing almost their entire
adult male population--seventy-four from the village
of Ikmala in the nahya of Al-Doski, for
example, either eighty-three or eighty-seven
(according to two separate accounts) from the
village of Warakhal in the nahya of Nerwa
Reikhan, and ninety-three from Gizeh. In all, these
thirty-six villages lost 632 of their menfolk to
Anfal, including a few boys as young as twelve or
thirteen.43
All of these men and boys were last seen alive in
Iraqi Army custody, either crammed into IFA trucks,
handcuffed by the roadside at their place of
capture, or (predominantly) in the fort at Dohuk,
which functioned, so to speak, as the Topzawa of the
North.44
None of them has been seen alive since their
disappearance almost five years ago, and the only
possible conclusion is that they were killed en
masse by firing squads, just as their predecessors
had been in the earlier stages of Anfal.
Hundreds of women and young children perished, too,
as a result of the Final Anfal campaign. But the
causes of their death were different--gassing,
starvation, exposure and wilful neglect, rather than
bullets firedfrom an AK-47. In the first seven Anfal
operations, the mass disappearance of women and
children frequently mirrored the pattern of
peshmerga resistance. In the Final Anfal, there
was no resistance to speak of. The KDP was simply
routed, and this may help explain why the women and
children of Badinan were spared. As for their
menfolk, the standing orders could not have been
clearer:
"We received orders to kill all peshmerga,
even those who surrendered," Middle East Watch was
told by a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi
Army. "Even civilian farmers were regarded as
peshmerga if they were working within a
prohibited area. All men in the prohibited areas,
aged from 15-60 [sic], were to be considered
saboteurs and killed. The prohibited areas were
shown in red on the army maps, and they covered
everything except the paved highways." These orders,
the officer explained, were conveyed in writing to
the divisional level (tahriri) and then
passed on orally to the lower-ranking officers. The
reference is clearly to Northern Bureau directives
3650 and 4008 of June 1987, which contained the
standing orders for the two-year period including
Anfal. The lieutenant-colonel went on to explain
that women and children in his own local area of
operations, were to be rounded up, trucked to the
army's divisional headquarters at Begova where he
was stationed and then later resettled in a
government complex.45
"Ali Hassan al-Majid's orders were clear," agreed
another former officer who had served in the
Istikhbarat. "They were to kill all men aged
from 15-60. He did not want to see them again, they
must be killed off." However, "people were killed
according to the mood of the officer in charge. Some
were good-hearted and let people go, while others
killed them."
The "good-hearted" behavior of some officers is
borne out by the testimony of witnesses. A Yezidi
Kurd from the village of Mezeh (nahya of
Sarseng) was among the thousands who hid out in the
mountains after fleeing before the army's attack at
the end of August. "Some forty to fifty women could
no longer bear the hardship," he recalled, "and
surrendered to an army unit in Shkafkeh village. The
commander, who was friendly, gave them food and
water, but told them he was under orders to kill
everyone. So he sent them back into the mountains,
saying that he was incapable of killing women and
children, and told them to wait for anamnesty."46
Chatta units in this area also crossed
peshmerga lines to warn everyone to stay where
they were, since there was a general order to kill
anyone who surrendered.
At least one large group of villagers was spared as
the result of a private deal with the army. This
startling case involved a group of 160 families from
the village of Spindarok, who tried to flee toward
Turkey on the first day of the Final Anfal. They had
only made it as far as the main road when they
encountered an important tribal leader, the father
of one of the mustashars. They assured the
man that there were no peshmerga in their
ranks, and he in turn approached military
intelligence on their behalf. The following
afternoon they surrendered to the army, which
trucked them to the Zakho headquarters of
Istikhbarat. There they handed over their
weapons and gave statements. After this they were
allowed to go free, moving in with relatives in
Zakho. (Their own village of Spindarok was burned
and bulldozed.)47
* * *
Some of the captured men and boys of Badinan were
lined up and murdered at their point of capture,
executed by firing squads on the authority of a
local army officer. The most notorious case is that
of Koreme, a village of some 150 households just two
and a half miles north of the town of Mangesh.48
Koreme was known locally as a pro-government
village, and many of its men served as agents of
Amn. Bythe time of Anfal, however, Koreme was
already a village-in-hiding; since the previous year
its population of 1,000 or so had taken refuge
beneath damp rock overhangs in the ravines nearby.
In the aftermath of the August 25 chemical attacks,
Koreme--like innumerable other villages--held a
fierce debate about what to do. By the 27th, several
hundred people had decided to risk fleeing to
Turkey. But later that same day other terrified
villagers they encountered in the mountains warned
them that they had left it too late; all routes to
the border were now blocked by soldiers.
The Koreme refugees turned back, accompanied by a
number of people from the village of Chalkey who had
joined them in the ravines. They walked all night,
in constant fear of attack. By the afternoon of
August 28, they had reached the outskirts of Koreme
once more. The soldiers and the jahsh,
however, had got there first. As soon as they saw
the troops, the men raised their hands high in the
air to signal surrender.
The officers in charge, two young lieutenants in
their twenties, had the villagers separated on the
spot by age and sex. This done, they appeared unsure
of what they should do next, but after a pause one
of the lieutenants ordered a group of thirty-three
men and teenage boys to stand apart from the others.49
Their ages ranged from thirteen to forty-three. As
the other villagers were led away behind a hill, out
of sight, the men were made to squat on their heels.
The soldiers continued to tell them that no harm
would come to them, and even offered them cigarettes
and water. While they waited, one of the officers
called his superiors in nearby Mangesh on his
walkie-talkie. He reported that he had captured a
group of "armed subversives" and asked for
instructions. As soon as he put the radio down, the
lieutenant shouted the order to his men to open
fire. Twenty-seven of the thirty-three prisoners
were killed--eighteen from Koreme and nine from
Chalkey. Remarkably, however, six survived--even
though the soldiers later went down the line to
administer the coup de grace.50
The bodies were left to lie where theyhad fallen and
to rot in the hot summer sun for more than a week
before soldiers returned to bury them in two shallow
pits.
To this day there is considerable speculation as to
why Koreme should have been singled out in this way.
Of all the theories that have been floated, the most
plausible may be that their former role in Amn
holds the key to the mystery. As a loyalist village,
Koreme would have been expected to abide by the
"redlining" of 1987 and register its inhabitants
under the October census. Instead the village went
into hiding. The regime would therefore have
regarded its former Amn agents as especially
traitorous, and captured official documents make it
clear that this kind of desertion was punishable by
summary execution.51
Koreme was not the only case of a mass execution in
the field. Something similar took place on a smaller
scale in Mergeti, the village on the northern slopes
of Gara Mountain that had been attacked by chemical
weapons on August 25. Most of the men were
peshmerga, and they escaped to the mountain. But
as we have seen, as many as one hundred villagers
were captured in their homes by soldiers that same
night. They were held for an hour or so by the
spring that was Mergeti's only source of water. As
they waited there, the soldiers set fire to their
homes.
An Istikhbarat officer then reportedly called
his superiors by walkie-talkie and told them that a
number of "saboteurs" had been arrested. A member of
the jahsh, who was standing nearby and spoke
some Arabic, quietly told the villagers what the man
had been ordered to do: "Separate the men and women
and kill all the men older than fifteen." Twelve men
were made to stand aside, and at nightfall the women
were taken away on foot to the nearby town of
Sarseng. In the confusion and darkness, an
apparently tender-hearted infantry officer managed
to conceal four of the men in the larger group of
women in anattempt to save them.52
The other eight were taken by their captors to the
nearby village of Bawarkeh Ka'ba, away from the
mountains.
The soldiers' commanding officer was furious. "Why
did you bring them here?" he shouted. "I ordered you
to kill them. Why did you not implement my orders?"
The man repeated his command: the men were to be
taken back to their place of capture and shot. At a
spot about 300 yards outside Mergeti, the prisoners
were bound together hand and feet, blindfolded and
handcuffed, and shot with Kalashnikovs.53
* * *
Thanks to Brigadier General Zareb's meticulous
account of troop movements during the Final Anfal,
it is possible to say with some precision who was
responsible for the Mergeti and Koreme murders.54
Although Mergeti is not mentioned by name in Gen.
Zareb's report, the village clearly fell within the
area of operations of the Iraqi Army's 41st Infantry
Division. The 41st controlled a detachment of
commandos from the Sixth Army Corps, as well as
three infantry brigades, numbers 103, 114 and 706.
The commander of one of these three brigades--it is
not specified which--was in charge of the division's
first joint task force that was deployed against
Gara Mountain from its base in Sarseng and wouldhave
moved eastward through Mergeti in the first hours of
the campaign.55
Within the plan of attack devised by the Fifth Army
Corps, Koreme was part of the Khabour Basin area of
operations. (see map) Stretching from Zakho and
Batufa in the north to Mangesh in the south, this
theater was in the hands of the 29th Infantry
Division. Three infantry brigades were also assigned
to the operation--numbers 84, 238 and 435--together
with a tank battalion, an assortment of mechanized
forces, field engineers, artillery units and
waterborne troops, and sixteen National Defense
Battalions, or jahsh.
The campaign was further subdivided into eight joint
task forces, two of which--the sixth and
seventh--were based in Mangesh.56
While the seventh task force was instructed to drive
eastward and take the villages of Majalmukht and
Alkushki, the sixth was to move north, as far as the
twin villages of upper and lower Baroshki, on the
south bank of the Khabour river. A secondary
detachment was to peel off to the northeast, and to
take Koreme. It was this unit that carried out the
executions, and from the testimonies of witnesses,
the assumption must be that the order came from the
sixth task force commander of the 29th Infantry
Division, based in Mangesh.
Gen. Zareb was well pleased by the performance of
his officers. By August 29, he was able to report
that the 29th and 41st Infantry Divisions had
"occupied all [their] target places" and "completed
all the duties assigned to [them]."57
Over the course of the next week, other units and
task forces continued mopping-up operations and
drove the last of the peshmerga into Turkey
and Iran. By September 6, the last strategic border
hilltop had been occupied, and from a military point
of view the Final Anfal was complete. Gen. Zareb
applauded the "military and civilian security
authorities" for laying the groundwork for the
successful campaign, and paid tribute to the
comrades of the Ba'ath Party for "raising the degree
of enthusiasm and zealousness of the fighters."58
The general detected the same sterling fighting
qualities in the jahsh. "The combatants of
the National Defense Battalions zealously and
enthusiastically fought to achieve the target of
destroying the saboteurs in their positions," he
wrote. "In all the convoys, they used to march ahead
of the troops because they knew the area and also
because of their good physical fitness, especially
for mountain-climbing. They...played an active role
in the destruction of villages and the collection of
plunder."59
There was a meticulous inventory of the "plunder":
cattle and goats; rugs, mattresses and blankets;
watches, cash and pieces of gold; picture albums,
eating utensils, packets of powdered milk,
toothpaste...60
His forces had met "almost no resistance," the
general reported, and this was reflected in the
army's casualty figures. Only thirty-one men died in
the Final Anfal, and eighteen of those were jahsh,
who had dutifully played the role of cannon fodder
assigned to them by the army and the Ba'ath Party.
As for the "saboteurs" taken into army custody
during the Badinan campaign, they were listed as
follows:
Saboteurs Surrendered 803
Saboteurs Captured 771
Men 1,489
Women 3,368
Children 6,964
Total 13,395
Others, of course, had died in the field. But these
were not tallied accurately, with the exception of
forty-eight peshmerga reported killed in
clashes with the 29th Division. Instead, Gen. Zareb
contented himself with a terse notation: "Too many
bloodstains were seen in all the places cleaned by
our forces."
* * *
The Fort at Dohuk and the Women's Prison at
Salamiyeh
The Dohuk Fort squats by the roadside at Nizarkeh,
on the eastern outskirts of the capital of the
governorate. It is a huge concrete structure, built
of Soviet design in the 1970s and protected by a
battery of four anti-aircraft guns on the roof. Of
the 13,395 "saboteurs" captured in Badinan, most
were taken to the fort, trucked there in army IFAs
from their place of capture. Some male prisoners
from the southern part of Badinan were reportedly
also taken to the city of
Mosul,
but no one has apparently returned alive to tell the
story of what happened there.
Most of the inmates were held on the second floor of
the fort, which was so crowded that the prisoners
spilled over into the corridors. They stayed in
Dohuk between two and five days, although some old
people were kept there longer, for periods of as
much as a couple of weeks. Some women spent the
whole of the first night in the courtyard of the
fort, confined to the same trucks that had brought
them. As in Topzawa, the newcomers were segregated
on arrival: men and boys of military service age to
one side and women, children and the elderly to the
other. Soldiers took brief statements from the men
and confiscated their IDs, but no one else was
questioned. With their customary fondness for
keeping documentary records, security agents made
videotapes of these brief interrogation sessions.
As their wives and sisters stood by, powerless to
help, the men were beaten with wooden batons and
lengths of plastic tubing, kicked, punched and
slapped. Army guards amused themselves by putting
lighted matches to the prisoners' beards and
mustaches. Children screamed and tried to run to
their fathers, but were driven back with kicks and
blows. Iram, a young woman from Gizeh, on Gara
Mountain, watched as soldiers beat her
brother-in-law bloody. She begged them, "by God and
by the Prophet," to let her cross the courtyard to
wash his wounds. The soldiers refused. "You have no
God and no Prophet," they sneered.61
When the registration process was completed, the
prisoners were dispersed to filthy communal cells
that were strewn with human waste. "It was like
living in a toilet," one elderly woman recalled in
disgust. There were thousands in the fort, men
packed into the ground level cells and women,
children and the elderly on the floor above.
Hundreds morearrived each day. They were from all
the major tribes of the Badinan area--Doski, Sindi,
Reikan, Barwari, Sleivani and others. Several
hundred of the prisoners were from Yezidi and
Assyrian Christian villages, and these people were
segregated from the Muslim detainees by a partition
wall.
In many respects the conditions at Nizarkeh were
even more squalid than at Topzawa. Most strikingly,
there was no attempt to feed the inmates. Although
there were faucets in the courtyard, guards barred
the prisoners from using them. Small amounts of
insanitary, sun-warmed water were available from
barrels in the yard, but there was no effort to
distribute this systematically. There was not even
bread. "You Kurds have been sent here to die," was
the comment that many prisoners reported hearing
from their guards.
Small gestures of sympathy from local townspeople
helped to ward off starvation--something that
happened at a number of other detention facilities
for Kurds during Anfal. Once, a Kurdish guard dumped
two sacks of bread in the courtyard, and the fitter
children scrambled for these. But other children,
and some of the older adults, did succumb to hunger
and disease. As many as twenty died in one two-day
period in early September, according to one account.62
Over time, the longer-term elderly inmates were able
to buy food from their jailers, in the same way as
their fellow Kurds in Nugra Salman. When only the
elderly remained, security also became more lax, and
some relatives even managed to slip inside the fort
for brief visits. At night the prisoners would slip
out to the barbed wire perimeter fence to collect
large plastic sacks of food that the people of Dohuk
left there.63
For the younger inmates, the guards' brutality
continued as a matter of daily routine. New arrivals
saw recent bloodstains on the floors and walls. Any
woman attempting to visit her husband on the lower
levelof the fort was beaten back. Men were savagely
beaten with pruning hooks of the sort that Kurds
customarily use in their fields. One overweight
young man was pummeled senseless, stuffed into the
trunk of a Volkswagen Passat and driven out of the
fort. He was not seen again. Others were pounded on
the head and upper body with concrete blocks,
sometimes when they were tied to posts in the
courtyard. "I saw it myself when officers killed one
young man with such a block," said an old man from
the Amadiya area. "I cried and prayed to God to save
us all."64
On another occasion, a prisoner saw soldiers and
Istikhbarat officers taking turns to beat a
group of twelve young men in peshmerga dress.
The army men were yelling and cursing them: "Are you
not ashamed of being saboteurs, donkeys, sons of
dogs!" Later, the witness saw the bloodied bodies of
the twelve young men being dragged away by soldiers.
He was told by a guard that they were peshmerga
who had surrendered or been captured by helicopter
on Mattin Mountain.65
Another young man who was a carpenter in Dohuk
learned that a friend's father was among the
detainees in the fort, and rushed there immediately
with sacks of bread and grapes. At the gate of the
fort he asked an Amn agent for permission to
enter. "How could you go in?" the man asked. "You'll
get beaten. Let me show you what happened to some of
the people in there." The Amn man took the
carpenter to a patch of lower ground outside the
fort and pointed to a number of bloodstains, as well
as what appeared to be the remains of human brains.
The guard explained that these belonged to people
from the villages of Spindar and Swareh, on the
slopes of Gara Mountain. Eighteen of them had been
killed here, summarily executed.66
After a few days in this hellish atmosphere, the
first groups of women and children were told to
assemble in the huge central courtyard, where
vehicles were waiting to take them away to a new
destination. Sometimes these were closed buses with
two small windows in the rear,sometimes minibuses or
coasters, sometimes ordinary army IFAs. Armed
guards--identified as Amn and Istikhbarat--waited
to accompany the convoys. The final images that the
women took with them from Nizarkeh were of the
continued sufferings of their menfolk. As one group
waited to depart, they saw cursing soldiers beating
a number of men in the courtyard with cement blocks
and sticks. The men were blindfolded and handcuffed.
As the buses pulled away, one woman cried, "Let our
children die too, now that their fathers are dead."67
And in the days that followed, the older inmates of
the Dohuk Fort saw more buses come--some of them
khaki-colored, others blue--to take away the younger
men.68
With hardly an exception, they have never been seen
again.
* * *
The vehicles carrying the women and children headed
south toward Mosul, before turning on to the Baghdad
road. In one truck, a pregnant woman from the
Amadiya area began to go into labor. The other women
yelled at the driver to stop, but he refused, and a
belligerent soldier aimed a kick at the pregnant
woman. But as the crowded truck continued to bump
along the highway, she gave birth to her baby. The
child survived, and they called it Hawar, or
"scream."
About five hours after leaving Dohuk, the convoys
pulled up outside a prison, or military base, in the
small town of Salamiyeh, on the east bank of the
Tigris a few miles south of Mosul. On arrival, there
was a brief registration process and Istikhbarat,
which had overseen the Dohuk Fort, handed the women
and children over into the custody of new guards,
whom witnesses identified as belonging to the Iraqi
police and Popular Army. The prisoners found
themselves in a huge single-story building, divided
into perhaps two dozen large, overcrowded halls,
each some fifty yards in length. Every hall held
people from a particular region, but all the inmates
were from Badinan; not a word of Sorani washeard.
Here the women were to stay for anything between ten
days and two weeks.
The prison regime at Salamiyeh was a distinct
improvement on the Nizarkeh fort, and none of the
women reported being specifically harassed or
abused. Recollections of Salamiyeh varied from case
to case. Perhaps memory is dimmed by time and
trauma; on the other hand, it may well be that
prison conditions changed over time. Some women
recalled a diet of nothing but "hard, rough bread"
and water from tanks in the yard; other said that
they received three meals a day, including bread,
rice, soup and jam, and that water was readily
available from faucets. There were even iceblocks to
counter the summer heat, and a small prison shop
that sold a few basic staples. Although there was no
soap, the women could wash their clothes each day in
the courtyard.
Even so, conditions at Salamiyeh were grim. The
prisoners were detained here with no semblance of
legal process; no charges were ever brought against
them, and they were never given any reason for their
confinement. Women and children slept on the bare
concrete floor without blankets and used filthy,
overflowing toilets. The inmates of different halls
were forbidden to communicate with each other. There
was no medical attention, and at least two deaths
were reported during the two weeks that the
Salamiyeh prison was in service. One of the dead was
a child from Gizeh village, who was crushed beneath
a water tank. Soldiers removed the body, and refused
to tell the child's mother where they were taking
it.
Above all the women suffered the constant mental
torment of not knowing what had become of their
husbands and brothers. At least two witnesses said
that some of the Badinan men were taken for a
time to Salamiyeh, although they were held in
separate quarters. One woman from the nahya
of Guli learned from the guards that her husband and
three brothers were alive in the prison. Another,
who was held in Hall No.7 with other prisoners from
the Sarseng area, found one day that the steel door
of her cell had been locked. It remained that way
for six days. On the sixth morning, it was left open
for two hours. From her vantage point close to the
door, the woman had a partial view of the courtyard
outside. "I saw men, blindfolded with their hands
cuffed behind them," she told Middle East Watch.
"They were wearing Kurdish cummerbunds and
headscarves (jamadani)." It was the first
time she had been aware of male prisoners at
Salamiyeh. "I saw those men being put into military
vehicles, closed vehicles with only a small hole in
the back." As each pairof vehicles was loaded up,
they drove away. Another two took their place, then
another two, and another. She saw many men moved out
of Salamiyeh in this way. She surmised that this had
been going on during the six days that the door of
Hall No.7 had remained locked: "It had to be for a
purpose; otherwise the doors were always left open."69
Shortly after the removal of these blindfolded male
prisoners, there was a sudden burst of gunfire. But
it turned out to be nothing more ominous than joyful
guards letting off their weapons into the air.
President Saddam Hussein had declared a general
amnesty, they told the women. Now their husbands
would be safe. There was to be music, a big party.
They even expected the Kurdish women to dance with
them.
______
1 Cordesman and
Wagner, op. cit. p.3, calculate that there
were between 450,000 and 730,000 Iranian and between
150,000 and 340,000 Iraqi deaths. These figures are
based on unclassified CIA estimates.
2 The Battle of
Muhammad the Prophet of God was the Iraqi drive to
remove Iranian troops from the mountainous northern
front in mid-June 1988.
3 Analysis:
Operation End of Anfal, p.39.
4 ibid.
5 While the PUK
had regional commands (malband), the KDP had
four branches, or lak, which handled both
political and military affairs. Zewa Shkan housed
the first lak; the second lak, based
in the Smaquli Valley, handled operations in Erbil
governorate; the third, in the Qara Dagh village of
Ja'faran, ran KDP affairs in al-Ta'mim (Kirkuk)
governorate; and the fourth, in the Chwarta area,
was responsible for Suleimaniyeh. The KDP also had
special units known as the Barzan Forces in Hayat (nahya
Mergasur). Middle East Watch interview with Hoshyar
Zebari, Washington, D.C., June 7, 1993.
6 Among Kurdish
tribes, aghas are the secular and sheikhs
the religious leaders. The definitive work on the
subject is Martin Van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh
and State, op. cit..
7 Van Bruinessen,
"The Kurds Between Iran and Iraq," p.27.
8 A. Sherzad,
"The Kurdish Movement in Iraq, 1975-1988," in
Kreyenbroek and Sperl, eds., The Kurds: A
Contemporary Overview, p.138.
9 The Army
estimated that the KDP itself had between 1,800 and
2,000 fighters in Badinan, divided into a half-dozen
local committees. In addition to the KDP, there was
a unit of 250-300 PUK peshmerga in the valley
of Zewa Shkan, close to the Turkish border and
northeast of the summer resort of Amadiya; 200-220
combatants of the Iraqi Communist Party; and seventy
"saboteurs" of the Kurdistan Popular Democratic
Party of Sami Abd-al-Rahman, a KDP breakaway group.
The KDP continues to dispute the accuracy of the
army figures. According to senior KDP officials, the
organization's combat strength on the eve of Anfal
was 8,000, with an additional 36,000 villagers
formally registered as members of the civilian
"backing force." Middle East Watch interview with
Hoshyar Zebari, Washington, D.C., June 7, 1993.
10 "Analysis:
Operation End of Anfal," p.2.
11 ibid, p.32.
12 ibid, p.33.
13 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 10, 1992.
14 Middle East
Watch interview, Gund Kosa village, September 5,
1992; see also the 1987 government recommendations
on tightening the economic blockade, above p.90.
15 Middle East
Watch interview, Kwaneh complex, August 29, 1992.
16 Since the
1930s, Turkey and Iraq had frequently cooperated in
suppressing Kurdish dissent. In 1982 the two
governments signed an agreement authorizing Turkey
to send its armed forces into Iraq in pursuit of
rebel Turkish Kurds or in joint operations with the
Iraqi Army against Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga.
See The Economist, June 18, 1983.
17 According to
surveys by the Kurdistan Development and
Reconstruction Society (KURDS), a local relief
agency.
18 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, September 4, 1992.
19 Middle East
Watch interview, Zakho, September 1, 1992.
20 Even in
internal communications, the Iraqi government
evidently treated the matter of its chemical weapons
with the utmost secrecy. Letter no. Sh 5/19299 from
the Amn director of the governorate of Erbil
to all branches, dated December 17, 1988 and
classified "secret and personal for addressee only,"
reads: "Pursuant to the memorandum from the
Honorable Office of the Presidency, no. 4/4/11/44154
of December 4, 1988, a decision has been taken to
give all letters (memoranda) which contain
information about the production of chemical weapons
the highest degree of secrecy. Take all necessary
measures, keep this memorandum to yourself, and sign
for its receipt."
21 One
mustashar did allege that chemical artillery was
used against the village of Warmilleh, but this
could not be confirmed in interviews with residents.
Middle East Watch interview, Zakho, September 1,
1992. On the events in Warmilleh, see below
pp.272-273.
22 There have
also been persistent rumors about Iraq's use of
biological weapons, including reports of mysterious
and localized outbreaks of disease in peshmerga-controlled
areas. At least one document proves that the Iraqi
Army did possess stockpiles of such weapons. In a
"highly confidential and personal" letter no. H1277,
dated August 8, 1986, Erbil district commander Gen.
Abd-al-Wahab Izzat instructs all units in his area
to carry out a half-yearly stocktaking of all
biological and chemical agents in their possession.
23 Galbraith and
Van Hollen, op. cit., pp.1, 42. Their list
appears to include a number of villages that were
affected by windborne gas from other locations. A
persistent difficulty in documenting Iraqi chemical
attacks is in distinguishing primary sites from
other places suffering the secondary effects, and
the list on
pp. 323-327 includes only proven primary targets.
This is not only a problem of methodology; it is
also the most vivid illustration of the
indiscriminate character of these weapons.
24 Soil samples
from Birjinni were collected on June 10, 1992 by a
forensic team assembled by Physicians for Human
Rights (PHR) and Middle East Watch. They were
subsequently analyzed at the Chemical and Biological
Defence Establishment of Great Britain's Ministry of
Defence at Porton Down, and found to contain trace
evidence of the nerve gas GB, also known as Sarin,
as well as of mustard gas. See the PHR-Human Rights
Watch statement, "Scientific First: Soil Samples
Taken from Bomb Craters in Northern Iraq Reveal
Nerve Gas--Even Four Years Later," April 29, 1993.
25 A full account
of the chemical attack on Birjinni is contained in
Middle East Watch/Physicians for Human Rights,
The Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan: The
Destruction of Koreme, pp. 31-44.
26 Middle East
Watch interview, Gri Gowr complex, August 27, 1992.
27 Middle East
Watch interviews, Hizawah complex and Zakho,
September 1, 1992.
28 Middle East
Watch interview, Warmilleh village, August 31, 1992.
29 Middle East
Watch interview, Batufa, April 9, 1993.
30 Middle East
Watch interview, Batufa, April 9, 1993.
31 A number of
Middle East Watch interviews produced strikingly
similar lists of the villages attacked with
chemicals along Gara Mountain: to the northern side,
Dehukeh, Bawarkeh Kavri, Mergeti, Havintka,
Birozana, Drisheh, Mijeh, Kavna Mijeh, Spindar
Khalfo and Geyrgash; on the mountain itself, Garagu,
Goreh, Zewa Shkan, Baluti, Gizeh, Zarkeh, Razikeh,
Sarkeh, Rodinya, Shirana and Ikmala; and on the
southern side, Spindar, Swareh, Avok and others.
32 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 10, 1992.
33 Middle East
Watch interviews, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992 and
Sarseng, April 11, 1993.
34 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 6, 1992.
35 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 2, 1992.
36 Middle East
Watch interview, Amadiya, August 29, 1992. According
to this fighter, the helicopter attacks included the
renewed use of chemical weapons.
37 "Analysis:
Operation End of Anfal," p.39.
38 It is clear
that a very serious incident occurred either in the
Bazeh gorge, through which thousands of civilians
fled in an attempt to cross the main Zakho-Baluka
road, or in nearby Bazeh village, a peshmerga
headquarters. During their September 1988 interviews
with refugees in Turkey, Galbraith and Van Hollen
spoke with two people who reported witnessing a
massacre of some 1,300 people, including women in
children, in Bazeh village. According to these
accounts, the victims were machinegunned and then
buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers. The British
film-maker Gwynne Roberts interviewed two teenage
refugees in Turkey, who claimed to have witnessed a
chemical attack on the Bazeh gorge in which "more
than 3,000" people died. According to one of these
witnesses,"thousands of soldiers with gas masks and
gloves" entered the gorge the next day, dragging the
bodies into piles and setting fire to them. However,
Middle East Watch interviews in Bazeh and
surrounding villages turned up no recollection of
such an event four years later. Neither were there
any reports of significant deaths or disappearances
of women and children that might have occurred
during an attack such as those described. Exactly
what took place at Bazeh remains an enigma.
39 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, September 7, 1992.
40 Middle East
Watch interviews, Jezhnikan complex, May 3 and July
13, 1992.
41 Middle East
Watch interview, Amadiya, August 29, 1992. Gen.
Zareb, in his "Analysis: Operation End of Anfal,"
acknowledged the problem of frequent vehicle
breakdowns.
42 There is a
brief account of conditions at the fort in Mangesh
in The Destruction of Koreme, p.58.
43 According to a
dossier compiled by the Kurdistan Reconstruction and
Development Society, some 310 villages were
destroyed in the Dohuk governorate during the Final
Anfal. The internal Iraqi Army figure for the total
number of males taken into custody during the Final
Anfal, including "saboteurs" who surrendered or were
captured, is 3,063. See below p.289. The pattern of
male disappearances from villages surveyed by Middle
East Watch suggests that the total numbers may be
rather higher.
44 It should be
noted, however, that at least some of the Dohuk
prisoners were subsequently transferred to Topzawa,
which remained in operation to the very end of the
Anfal campaign.
45 Middle East
Watch interview, Zakho, June 24, 1992.
46 The commander
himself is extremely unlikely to have been under
orders to kill all those he apprehended, regardless
of age or gender, since there are no documented
instances of this occurring. If this report of his
comments is accurate, he may have had in mind what
would happen later to those he handed over into the
custody of Amn and Istikhbarat. Middle
East Watch interview, Khaneq complex, August 27,
1992.
47 In a curious
footnote to this story, the families were detained
after the September 6 amnesty by Amn, which
sent them on via the fort at Dohuk to the complex of
Baharka--entirely in line with the bureaucratic
logic of Anfal. Middle East Watch interview, Hizawa
complex, September 1, 1992.
48 The story of
this village is told in considerable detail in
The Destruction of Koreme, especially pp.12-29,
45-52.
49 There was some
debate among the villagers as to whether all the
members of this group had been carrying weapons when
they surrendered. See The Destruction of Koreme,
pp.45-47.
50 The sloppiness
of the Koreme execution was remarkable in itself.
Even more surprising was the fact that one of the
six who survived, a 34-year old man, was wounded by
the gunfire, but removed to the hospital in Mangesh
the nextday by a jahsh unit. He was treated
there and eventually transferred to the fort at
Dohuk--which he also, inexplicably, survived. See
The Destruction of Koreme, pp.51-52.
51 According to
Ba'ath Party membership forms found in the Iraqi
government archives, merely concealing prior
membership in another political party constituted
grounds for the death penalty.
52 These four
were later disappeared from the fort at Dohuk,
according to a Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk,
June 9, 1992.
53 This account
is based on the testimony to relatives of one of the
eight men, who was wounded in the shooting, escaped
temporarily to a nearby jahsh post in the
complex of Qadish, but was later handed over by his
fearful family to Amn in Sarseng. From there
he disappeared. The seven men who died were Muhammad
Saleh Abd-al-Qader (b.1938), Serdar Sa'id Muhammad
(b.1957), Mustafa Abd-al-Qader Mustafa (b.1926 or
1928), Suleiman Sha'aban Checho (b.1956), Adel
Muhammad Khaled (b.1961), Ramadan Ahmad Hamou
(b.1968) and Hamid Ahmad Hamou (birthdate unknown).
The temporary survivor was Banjin Mustafa
Abd-al-Qader (b.1966). The full names of the
twenty-seven men executed in Koreme are given in
The Destruction of Koreme, p.50.
54 "Analysis:
Operation End of Anfal," pp.17-19.
55 ibid, p.16.
56 ibid,
pp.17-19.
57 ibid, p.27.
58 ibid,
pp.38-39.
59 ibid p.39.
60 ibid pp.57-60.
61 Middle East
Watch interview, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992.
62 Middle East
Watch interview, Telkabber complex, August 28, 1992.
63 Apart from a
handful who reportedly died of disease and
starvation, the elderly prisoners survived Nizarkeh.
So, by a curious quirk, did at least two younger men
who were confined with the elderly because of their
injuries. One was the wounded survivor of the
execution squad at Koreme; the other was a man
suffering from the effects of the poison gas attack
on Warmilleh, the only adult male to survive from
that village. Middle East Watch interviews, Koreme
and Warmilleh villages, May 30 and August 31, 1988.
64 Middle East
Watch interview, Jezhnikan complex, May 3, 1992.
65 The witness
identified two of the peshmerga as Muhammad
Taher Musa, age twenty-five, from Zewa Shkan village
(Sarseng), and Lazgin Omar, age between twenty and
twenty-two, from Ikmala village (Mangesh). Middle
East Watch interview, Bateli, Dohuk, June 12, 1992.
66 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, September 4, 1992.
67 Middle East
Watch interview, Kwaneh complex, August 29, 1992.
68 One witness
described the blue vehicles as being "as long as
buses, but not looking like buses," with a single
small window high up on one side, near the driver's
compartment. This witness saw between seven and ten
of these buses leaving the fort each day for several
days. Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, September
4, 1992.
69 Middle East
Watch interview, Bateli, Dohuk, June 12, 1992.
11
The Amnesty and its Exclusions
"We were useless. They said it was unjust to waste bread on us."
-- Rahman Hamid Nader of Darbarou village, Taqtaq,
on his release from Nugra Salman prison.
Decree no. 736 of the Revolutionary Command Council
was read out on the radio early on the afternoon of
September 6, just after the mid-day prayers. It
declared "a general and comprehensive amnesty for
all Iraqi Kurds...both inside and outside of
Iraq"--with
the sole exception of "the traitor
Al-Talabani...because of his wilful and repeated
violations of law and order, even after he was
granted opportunities to reform his ways." Ali
Hassan al-Majid was infuriated by the amnesty, he
later told aides, but went along with it as a loyal
party man.1
The optimists among the peshmerga believed
that the amnesty came as the result of outside
pressure, that the regime of Saddam Hussein had been
compelled to back down by the international reaction
to revelations that chemical weapons had been used
during the Final Anfal. But such outrage as there
was over the Badinan attacks was not a significant
contributing factor to the amnesty. The most
scathing comments, and those likely to have had the
greatest influence on Iraq, came from U.S. Secretary
of State George Shultz. But these comments were not
made until September 8, a full two days after the
amnesty hadbeen declared.2
It is clear from the Fifth Corps report on the Final
Anfal that the decision to declare a general amnesty
was made because Baghdad was convinced by September
6 that the peshmerga forces had been crushed.
In the words of the press release that accompanied
the amnesty, "These [traitorous] Kurds had
relinquished control of their cities and villages to
Khomeini's troops, but God foiled their evil plans."3
The next day, September 7, the Presidential Cabinet
issued an additional order granting Ali Hassan
al-Majid and the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party
special powers to facilitate the return of refugees
from Turkey, where their stories had been causing
Iraq considerable embarrassment and
annoyance--despite the best efforts of the Turkish
government to minimize the tragedy.4
The refugees would only be allowed to return at two
approved entry points, where special reception camps
would be set up. One was the Ibrahim Khalil
international bridge outside Zakho. The other site
was "to be determined by the First Army Corps with
all due swiftness." After processing by a newly
constituted Returnee Reception Committee (Lajnet
Istiqbal al-'A'idin), which would operate under
Ba'ath Party control, the refugees would be assigned
to complexes. There, they would have the
responsibility of building their own homes; the plot
allocated to them would become their property free
of charge after five years--"on conditionthat the
family receives a favorable assessment by the Party
and Security authorities of its conduct from the
point of view of loyalty."5
Once the assignment to a mujamma'a had been
made, the Kurds who returned under the amnesty would
not be allowed to move. They were obliged, in fact,
to sign or affix their thumbprint to a sworn
statement which read: "I, the undersigned (....)
testify that I live in the governorate of (....), in
the section of (....), residence number (....), and
I recognize that I will face the death penalty
should the information indicated be false, or should
I alter my address without notifying the appropriate
administration and authorities. To this I affirm my
support."6
The refugees were granted only until 6:00 p.m. on
October 9, barely a month, to "return to the
national ranks." Anyone who surrendered to the
government after this grace period had expired would
be taken into military custody and handed over to
the Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau Command--for what
purpose it was not stated.7
A flurry of other decrees followed, for although the
regime spoke of a "general" amnesty, it by no means
intended that all Kurds should escape further
punishment. First, on September 8, the Revolutionary
Command Council decreed that any amnestied Iraqi
Kurds who had been affiliated with the armed forces,
the domestic security services or the jahshwere
henceforth discharged and barred from re-enlisting
as volunteers.8
The authorities were also worried that those
"returning to the national ranks" would offer
fertile soil for any attempt at reorganization by
the peshmerga--even if the "saboteurs"
seemed, for the time being, to present no further
threat. Accordingly, Ali Hassan al-Majid resolved
that it was necessary for those who benefited from
the amnesty to have their civil rights radically
curtailed and their activities strictly monitored.
"Kurdish citizens shall be treated by the same
standards applied to any other Iraqi citizen in so
far as their rights and duties are concerned," the
Northern Bureau ordered, "with the exception of
those Kurds who benefited from the amnesty decree
no. 736 of September 8, 1988."
These shall not be treated on an equal footing with
other Iraqis in terms of rights and duties, unless
they can effectively match good intentions with
proper conduct and demonstrate that they have ended
all collaboration with the saboteurs, and that they
are more loyal to Iraq than their peers who have
benefited from the above-mentioned amnesty decree.
In dealing with such cases, the following parameters
shall apply:
1: These Kurds shall not be entitled to be nominated
for membership in the National Assembly (Al-Majlis
al-Watani), the Legislature (Al-Majlis
al-Tashri'i), the People's Councils (Majlis
al-Sha'ab), the Municipal Councils (Majlis
al-Baladiya) or mass organizations.
2: Those Kurds who took advantage of the Amnesty
Decree shall not be entitled to sell, buy or lease
state lands or concerns for which ownership is
attributed to the state. Nor shall they be entitled
to enter into any contract with any state organ or
to engage in private business, whether as
professionals or workers, until a period of two
years has elapsed since their return to the national
ranks.
3: The competent authorities will monitor the
behavior of those who benefited from the amnesty
decree, and will determine their inclinations
through the placement of thorough and diligent
informers in their midst.9
In its attempt to understand the thinking of the few
"saboteurs" who survived, Amn scrutinized a
communique in which the Kurdish opposition-in-exile
gave its response to the general amnesty decree.10
Kurdish propagandists were presenting the decree as
a victory, Amn reported; it had been issued
"to try and absorb part of the resentment inside the
country, and to ease the worldwide campaign of
protest." In the wake of its crushing of the Kurds,
the regime no doubt found this show of bravado
amusing. "The subject has been brought to the
attention of the Struggling Comrade Ali Hassan
al-Majid, Secretary General of the Northern Bureau,"
the Amn report concluded, "and his
excellency's view of the matter was this: that those
who betray Iraq or remain abroad should no longer be
entitled to keep their nationality."11
* * *
Guards broke the news of the amnesty to the women
and children at the Dibs army base and the Salamiyeh
prison, to the old people who had survived the
summer in Nugra Salman, and to the last groups of
prisoners who remained at the Popular Army camp of
Topzawa. Refugees in Iran and Turkey learned of the
amnesty from Baghdad Radio and reported by the
thousand to army border posts. According to former
field officers in Badinan, the order came down
instructing them no longer to kill their prisoners.12
Even fighters returning from Iran were not
mistreated at the border. One group of former
peshmerga who turned themselves in at the
military base at Piramagroun, close to the destroyed
PUK headquarters at Sergalou, was briefly questioned
before being released. "We were asked about the size
of our forces, the kinds of weapons we used, and our
reasons for fleeing to Iran. They asked us what we
wanted. I answered that we were Kurds and that we
wanted our rights. The government gave us one
document to get us through the checkpoints, and
another that gave us permission to be in the new
mujamma'at where we had been assigned to live."13
One group, however, seems to have been singled out
for a harsher welcome. These were the draft dodgers
and deserters who had eluded capture in the
mountains, warding off starvation by eating wild
grasses and the crops that had been left in the
fields outside abandoned and bulldozed villages.
Some of these Kurds were returned to their old units
and detained for as long as five months--in the
custody, ironically, of the same army that had
"Anfalized" their families and destroyed their
homes. One group of sixty deserters from the Shwan
area surrendered to the army in Kirkuk after four
months on the run. Each man was given a letter to
his old military unit and detained at that unit's
base. "We were put in small overcrowded rooms with
no space to sleep and very little food, and soldiers
and officers beat me with cables," said Rezgar, a
young man who was imprisoned at the army's Khaled
camp, outside Erbil. From here, he was transferred
to a training camp in the city, where he spent weeks
being drilled and listening to lectures from a
Kurdish officer on the virtues of the Ba'ath Party.
"'What good is theBa'ath Party?' we asked. 'If the
Ba'ath Party is so good, where are our families and
our villages?' They had no answer to this." After
two months the men were released, but not before the
army confiscated ten dinars (then $30) from each of
them--"for the rebuilding of Fao," scene of the
costliest battle of the Iran-Iraq War.14
Dispersal of the
Camp
Survivors
For the inmates of Topzawa, Dibs and Nugra Salman,
the regime used two principal dispersal points, and
a number of secondary ones. Most of the detainees
were abandoned either in Suleimaniyeh city or in
nearby Arbat. A few were taken on as far as
Chamchamal, where they were eventually resettled in
the new Shoresh complex, or to Kalar, where their
final home would be the complex of Sumoud. One old
woman from the Taqtaq area reported being left off a
little closer to her former home, at a government
building in Dukan. Officials there asked her only a
few questions. Had her sons been peshmerga?
they wanted to know:
"No," she replied, "they are with the government."
"Al-hamdu lillah," the men replied. Thanks be
to God.
* * *
"Stand in line, you criminals," a guard snapped at
the several thousand elderly inmates who had
survived the rigors of Nugra Salman. "You must
remember this experience forever, and you shall
never think of doing anything against our leader,
Saddam Hussein. You have been granted amnesty." The
Amn guards registered their names once more
and began to sort everyone out into different
groups. It was time to get rid of these useless
people by dumping them in the cities, the loathsome
Lt. Hajjaj was heard to remark.15
The prisoners were released from Nugra Salman at
weekly intervals. Convoys of vehicles arrived every
Saturday, and took them away in fearful and crying
groups of about five hundred at a time. Occasionally
army IFAs were used, sometimes windowless military
transports of the kind used for the mass execution
victims, but more often large civilian buses--"open
and pleasant" vehicles with seats, accommodating
fifty or sixty people each. The lame, the blind and
the infirm were the first to be allowed to leave. If
a person was sick or ailing, then his or her entire
family was let go from Nugra Salman at the same
time.
The final releases from "the pit of Salman" were not
complete until well into November. One woman who
left at the end of October said that many of those
who remained were originally from the Qara Dagh or
Halabja areas.16
But the greatest mystery surrounds the two large
groups of women and children from southern Germian,
who had been brought here from Dibs--the first after
about six weeks, and the second not until August.
Numbering about five hundred in all, they were held
in separate quarters at Nugra Salman and forbidden
to have any contact with the elderly prisoners.
During their detention, dozens reportedly died of
starvation and disease.
The survivors of this group were the last to be
released from Nugra Salman, with the exception of
three old men from the Kifri area of southern
Germian who refused to go until their daughters went
too. "When I was released [in November]," said a
teenage girl from Omerbel, "there was no one left
there. We were the last ones."17
Yet some of the group were never accounted for, such
as two adult women and four children from the
village of Benaka (nahya of Tilako). Their
disappearances added to the already immense weight
of tragedy that struck this part of southern Germian
in the wake of the Third Anfal.
After release from Nugra Salman, the first stop was
sometimes Topzawa, sometimes Samawa. Sometimes the
buses and their Amn guards travelled north in
dog-legged fashion, stopping in both places. Many of
those who were processed through Topzawa had the
unnerving experience of passing once more through
the same building--even in some cases spending a
night in the same cell--that had housed them on
their outward journey several months earlier. Others
had their namestaken one more time at the Kirkuk
office of the Ba'ath Party. Some of the deportees
were issued with new ID papers that bore the words
"Affected by Anfal Operations."18
At Samawa, the nearest town to Nugra Salman, the
newly released prisoners spent anywhere from an hour
to a week. The fittest of them paused only briefly
to have their names registered yet again. Those who
were sick were "treated very kindly" by army
personnel in an empty school or in the wards of an
old military hospital. Everyone was cleaned up; the
old men were shaved. "We looked like monsters,"
commented an old man from the nahya of
Aghjalar, "we had to be made presentable."19
After the privations of Nugra Salman, the diet was
almost too rich. There was meat, fruit and rice.
"They wanted to show that the government was
treating us well," remembered a middle-aged man from
the Qara Dagh region. "We were given medicine and
good food, like chicken and fish. The guards told us
we had to sing and enjoy ourselves. The government
is nice, they told us; it is going to set you free."20
On arrival at Suleimaniyeh and Arbat, there was one
final name check. Fingerprints were taken, release
papers signed. In the provincial capital some of the
prisoners were taken to a security building "like a
big hospital," where friendly city residents tossed
food in over the high walls. Others ended up at the
Suleimaniyeh soccer stadium, where the huge crowds
were divided into groups according to their nahya
of origin and told that they were free to
go--anywhere but to their home villages (which, in
any case, no longer existed). Anyone who strayed
into the prohibited areas, one group was warned,
"will be taken in a helicopter to heaven and dropped
to the ground, or executed without trial."21
At the Ba'ath Party office in Arbat, the message was
the same. Here, a few prisoners were asked to fill
in questionnaires about their family members and
issued with new papers. "Do you know why you were
released?" one Ba'ath "comrade" asked a man from the
Kalar area. "Because God saved me," the man
answered. After some brief ritual questioning of
this sort, the deportees were told that they should
now proceed to "modern villages"--mujamma'at--such
as Sumoud and Bayinjan, where they would be given
good housing.
The few who were driven on to Chamchamal had a
somewhat different experience. Here, the newcomers
were received by the qaym maqam, the civilian
head of the qadha of Chamchamal. There were
the usual harsh warnings: "They told us not to go to
the villages, it was forbidden. We could not go
beyond the paved highway. If they found us out
there, we would be punished."22
New housing would be made available in local
complexes such as Shoresh and Benaslawa. But more
significantly, the prisoners could not go free until
local citizens vouched for them and agreed to take
them temporarily into their homes. In some cases
these guarantees were demanded for prisoners in
groups of four. There was no shortage of guarantors:
the residents of Chamchamal distinguished themselves
once more, as they had during the April protest to
free the Anfal prisoners, by their spontaneous
display of generosity toward their fellow Kurds.
* * *
The Mujamma'a Dumping Operation
The survivors of Anfal ended up in more than a dozen
complexes, according to their place of origin. Those
from the southern part of Germian gravitated above
all to Sumoud ("Steadfastness"), the large complex
outside the town of Kalar. Most people from northern
Germian found their way to Shoresh ("Revolution"),
on the outskirts of Chamchamal. Those from the
Lesser Zab Valley were mainly relocated in Benaslawa
and Daratou, on the plain south of Erbil. But the
harshest fate of all awaited the survivors of the
Final Anfal in Badinan, who were dumped in their
tens of thousands on the barren earth north of
Erbil.
Sumoud and Shoresh had both existed in rudimentary
form since a year before Anfal, having been laid out
originally to house the relocated inhabitants of the
1987 program of village clearances in Germian and
the Erbil plain. As Anfal swept through these areas
in 1988, many fleeingvillagers found refuge in the
two complexes, though without official permission.
After the September amnesty, both were enormously
expanded to house the survivors. According to
estimates of the Kurdish administration, the
population of Sumoud had grown by 1992 to 50,000, 85
percent of whom were Anfalakan. Shoresh was
even larger. Subdivided into four geographical
areas, it housed 60,000 people, including the entire
population of the former district center of Qader
Karam, who were brought here after the town was
bulldozed in May 1988. Fully seventy percent of
those housed in Shoresh were Anfal survivors.23
The word "housed" may give a misleading impression,
for all that the new arrivals ever received from the
Ba'ath government was a piece of paper giving them
nominal title (subject to good behavior) to a small
plot of land and, in a few cases, a bare cement
floor. "Build your house," a former inmate of Nugra
Salman was told when he was released in Kalar. "But
how could I build?" he asked Middle East Watch
rhetorically. "I had no children, no son, no food,
no money, no mats."24
Gradually, however, two squalid townships came into
existence, with rough cinderblock homes and
eventually electric power lines and running water.
The complexes were controlled by police and army
posts, and no one could venture beyond the perimeter
without an official pass.
To this arrangement there was no alternative. The
villages and their adjoining farmlands were
prohibited, on pain of death, and Iraqi government
files contain many references to individuals and
groups of people executed after being found in
"prohibited" areas in the post-Anfal period as
residents of the towns left standing after Anfal
were warned over loudspeakers that anyone sheltering
Anfalakan would be punished. The sweeps even
went into the cities, especially Suleimaniyeh; most,
if not all, of the families in the complexes had
lost their male breadwinners, and there was no
question of compensation for the lives, homes and
property that had been destroyed and pillaged. There
was also no foodwithout ration cards. Entitlement to
these had been based on the 1987 census; each
person's card, stamped with the seal of the Ba'ath
Party, was marked with the village and nahya
of residence. Now they could only be obtained by
registering as a resident of one of the
complexes--or by the time-honored means of bribery.
Some residents of the mujamma'a of Ber
Hoshter were reportedly told by Ba'ath officials
that they would receive food and other privileges if
they joined the ruling Party.25
Those who did so found that the promise was an empty
one.
Many Anfalakan also found it impossible to
obtain new identity documents, without which there
could be no public sector employment, no education
for the children, no access to health care, or other
government services. According to one Anfal widow
who was shuttled between the complexes of Shoresh
and Jedideh Zab:
When I went to look for a job, I was told that Anfal
families were not allowed to work. At the school, I
was told that Anfal families could not register
their children. At the hospital, we were denied
treatment for the same reason. I wanted to get IDs
for my children, but the authorities were not
allowed to issue them. At the school they told me I
needed a citizenship card for the children. They
sent me to Chamchamal and Erbil, and from there to
Baghdad, to the Secretary General of Amn. I
finally got a letter saying my husband was lost in
Anfal, but this was less of a help than a hindrance.
It marked me. The police station at the Jedideh Zab
complex told me this letter should make things
easier for me, but when people saw it I was always
turned down.26
* * *
A half-dozen camps--for want of a better
word--straggled across the barren, windswept
scrubland northeast of the city of Erbil. At a
Northern Bureau meeting on September 7, Ali Hassan
al-Majid decidedto have the survivors of the Badinan
campaign trucked to this inhospitable area from the
prison at Salamiyeh, from the fort at Dohuk, from
the smaller army posts at Atrush and Aqra, and from
the Turkish border, where they had now begun to
arrive in response to the previous day's amnesty.
The largest single contingent was to be dumped, in
many cases at dead of night, on a patch of wasteland
near the complex of Baharka. The site came to be
known as Jezhnikan, after a nearby Kurdish village
destroyed in an earlier army campaign. Over time,
the twin settlements of Baharka-Jezhnikan, housing
4,241 families, effectively merged into one single,
huge complex.27
There was nothing here to welcome the new arrivals:
just bare earth, thorn bushes and guard towers with
machine guns. It was September, and while the days
still brought fierce heat, the nighttime chill
heralded the approach of winter. There was no
protection from the elements. "They gave us nothing,
we had to sleep on the ground, we were starving,"
said one man who came to Baharka.28
With no infrastructure, no food or water, no housing
or shelter, it was clearly a matter of complete
indifference to the planners of Anfal whether these
deportees lived or died, and the camp guards
frequently told them as much.
Yet most of them survived as the result of a
prodigious private voluntary relief effort. The
Kurdish citizens of
Erbil
were the first to help, bringing food, water, tea,
sugar and blankets to the Anfalakan, often at
great personal risk. In time they were helped by
relatives of the camp inmates--those who had
survived Anfal because their place of residence was
a town or a mujamma'a. The first volunteers
were fired on as they tried to approach Baharka and
Jezhnikan across the open scrub; laterthey were
detained by soldiers, questioned and beaten. But in
the end the authorities turned a blind eye to the
relief operation, perhaps because they feared the
spread of disease from the camps.29
By the end of the year, epidemics were rife. There
were outbreaks of typhoid and hepatitis, as well as
the more routine--but still deadly--scourges of
influenza and dysentery. Despite the best efforts of
the people of Erbil, many of the camp residents
failed to make it through that first autumn and
winter.30
The great majority of those who died were children,
many of them from villages in Dohuk governorate that
had been exposed to chemical weapons. Villagers from
Tilakru, Warmilleh and Warakhal all reported burying
many of their infants in Baharka, and one elderly
woman from Gizeh, herself injured in a poison gas
attack, lost three small grandchildren in Jezhnikan.
They were Zana Muhammad Sharif (age two), Nahida
(age two) and her brother Saman Abd-al-Rahman (age
four).31
For the first few months the deportees lived in
makeshift "shades" of blankets or plastic sheeting
on a crude framework of wooden stakes or poles.
During this time the only solid structures were the
guard towers, and the offices of Amn and
Istikhbarat. Although the camp residents--having
been victims of Anfal--were not able to obtain
building loans from the state Real Estate Bank,
after a year or so they had begun to build more
substantial homes, thanks to the cheap sale or
outright donation ofcinderblocks from a local
factory. Gradually, the complexes began to take on
the semi-permanent appearance of the dozens of
others that the Iraqi regime had built during
earlier waves of Kurdish resettlement. At first no
one was allowed to leave the camps for more than an
hour a day, and then only with a permit. But after
three months or so these rules were relaxed, and the
Ba'ath Party issued passes that allowed people to
travel to Erbil to shop and, eventually, to work.
Some of the able-bodied teenage boys and elderly men
managed to find jobs as laborers on construction
sites, although most families remained without any
significant source of income.
Free now to move outside the camp, many of the women
journeyed to Erbil to inquire after their missing
husbands and brothers. The police and officials at
the governorate gave them the runaround: "We have no
information...perhaps in a couple of days...don't
worry, they are on their way." The more persistent
women were referred to the authorities in Dohuk, or
Mosul, or Baghdad. But there was never any news, and
none of their men were ever seen again.
By the summer of 1990, with government control of
Iraqi Kurdistan fully restored, the inmates of
Baharka-Jezhnikan were told that they were free to
leave. There was no question of their being allowed
to return to their home villages, which were now
rubble. But many accepted the alternative of
resettlement in one of the smaller complexes in
Dohuk governorate--Hizawa, Gri Gowr, Telkabber and
others--that were closer to their former homes in a
Kurmanji-speaking area. Others stayed where they
were, and two years after they arrived the
government finally supplied the complex with water
and electricity and opened primary and secondary
schools. And there some 15,000 of the Badinan
deportees remained until the spring of 1991, the
Gulf War and the failed Kurdish uprising (raparin)
that followed. As the uprising spread to the bleak
camps on the Erbil plain, their inmates tore down
the Amn post and the police station and took
control of their own affairs for a few short days.
But then the Republican Guard retook the complexes
and drove the Anfalakan of Baharka-Jezhnikan
into exile in Iran, leaving them homeless and
destitute once more.
* * *
The Fate of the Christians and Yezidis
Barely two weeks after the arrival of the first
deportees at Baharka--a number of testimonies
suggest that the exact date was September 23 or 24,
1988--the official loudspeakers announced that a
number of the camp's inmates should present
themselves at the police station without delay.
Those who were singled out in this way were either
Assyrian and Chaldean Christians or members of the
Yezidi sect of ethnic Kurds. What happened to these
two groups remains one of the great unexplained
mysteries of Anfal: a brutal sideshow, as it were,
to the Kurdish genocide.
Despite Kurdish demands for autonomy, Iraqi
Kurdistan is far from ethnically homogenous.
Although its minority populations have declined
sharply in number in the course of the 20th century,
as the result of massacre, flight and religious
conversion, the region is still home to three
important groups. In addition to the Yezidis and the
Assyrians (and their Catholic subgroup, the
Chaldeans), there is an important Turkoman
concentration in the mixed city of Kirkuk and
several neighboring towns. With the exception of
male deserters and draft dodgers, the Turkomans have
long lived in government-controlled areas and have
sometimes had tense relations with the Kurds. The
Assyrians and the Yezidis are quite different cases,
and despite violent conflicts with the Kurds earlier
this century, the two groups have made common cause
with them since the 1960s, sharing a common legacy
of oppression by the regime in Baghdad.
The Assyrians, who number more than a million, are
one of the oldest Christian communities in the
Middle East. Most of them now live in the
cities--Mosul, Dohuk and Erbil all have large
Christian populations, as does the resort town of
Shaqlawa. By the time of Anfal their once large
rural presence had dwindled to a handful of villages
in the mountains of Badinan. These were attractive
places, with pretty churches, neatly laid out
gardens and orchards, and sophisticated irrigation
systems. Those Christians who live in Iraqi
Kurdistan speak Kurmanji as well as their own
Aramaic dialects. Although they are not ethnic
Kurds, they also wear Kurdish clothes. Yet the
regime officially classified them as Arabs in the
1977 census, a designation that many Assyrians and
Chaldeans indignantly reject. "Saddam Hussein calls
us Arabs unfairly," one Chaldean Christian told
Middle East Watch, pointingindignantly to the
headscarf that he wore as any Muslim Kurd would.32
Having taken an active part in the Kurdish movement
for years, they are sometimes referred to in
everyday parlance as "Christian Kurds."33
The Yezidis are a quite different matter.
Kurmanji-speaking ethnic Kurds, they belong to a
syncretist sect that worships the Peacock Angel (Malak
Tawus), and are sometimes incorrectly spoken of
as "devil worshippers."34
In northern Iraq, the Yezidis are mainly
concentrated in the hilly plains that stretch from
the southern edge of the Badinan mountains as far as
the Tigris river, to the north of the city of
Mosul--areas that are also home to a number of
Assyrian Christians.
This pattern of settlement had left the Yezidis and
Christians prey to a number of earlier campaigns of
village destruction by the Iraqi regime, and it left
them prey to Anfal too. Several thousand Yezidis
were displaced from their homes in Jabal Sinjar,
west of
Mosul,
in early 1973. Along with their Muslim Kurdish
neighbors, many Yezidis and Christians in the
Sleivani and Sheikhan areas were removed from their
villages during the Arabization campaign of the
mid-1970s. The border clearances of 1977 destroyed a
dozen Christian churches in Badinan, some of them
more than a thousand years old.35
Yet more Yezidis were removed from their homes and
resettled in complexes to make way for the
construction of the gigantic Saddam Dam on the
Tigris in 1985. It is apparent that Ali Hassan
al-Majid had nothing but contempt for the Yezidis.
"We must Arabize your area," he snaps at an unnamed
official from Mosul in one taperecorded meeting
during the Anfal campaign. "And only real Arabs--not
Yezidis who one day say that they are Kurds and the
next that they are Arabs. We turned a blind eye to
the Yezidi people joining the jahsh in the
beginning, in order to stop the saboteurs from
growing. But apart from that, what use are the
Yezidis? No use."36
Al-Majid seems to have little more regard for the
Assyrians, and the "first stage" of his 1987 program
of village clearances leveled a number of Christian
villages in the north. The death of the village of
Bakhtoma that April was vividly described to Middle
East Watch by an Assyrian priest in Dohuk:
I had been told that they would destroy Bakhtoma
because they had already destroyed most of the
surrounding villages. It was around noon when I went
to the church of St. George to remove the furniture,
but Iraqi Army tanks and bulldozers were already
beginning to roll into the village. I was the last
one to pray in the church. After finishing my
prayers, I removed the furniture to take it with me
to Dohuk. It was a very sad day. The Iraqi soldiers
and army engineers put the equivalent of one kilo of
TNT at each corner of the church. After five minutes
they blew up the building, and then went on to
demolish every house in the village. Later they paid
me compensation of 3,000 dinars. I went to the head
of the Ba'ath Party in Dohuk, to ask why they were
destroying our villages. He replied, "You are Arabs
and we decide what you should do. That is all there
is to it." I left his office then; what could I say?37
* * *
In Anfal there was not even the hope of
compensation, and Assyrian villages like Kani Balaf
(in the nahya of Berwari Bala), Mezeh
(Sarseng) and Gund Kosa (Al-Doski) were burned and
bulldozed along with those of their Muslim Kurdish
neighbors. Some of the people from these villages
took to the mountains together with the fleeing
Kurds. Hundreds more sought refuge in Turkey. All of
them waited where they were until they heard news of
the September 6 amnesty, at which point they
surrendered. A few days after the amnesty a large
contingent of Christian and Yezidi refugees crossed
the Khabour river in Turkish buses and gave
themselves up to the Iraqi Army at the border post
of Ibrahim Khalil. The Istikhbarat officers
monitoring the repatriation asked the Yezidis and
Christians to identify themselves and then ordered
them to form a separate line off to one side. They
said only that the men were to be returned to their
army units if they were deserters, and that the
women and children would be sent back to their
homes. The Muslim Kurds who were present were given
a piece of paper, marked "To be sent to
Erbil";
the Assyrians and Yezidis left empty-handed. The
Kurds were at a loss to explain this, but assumed
that their neighbors were being shown some special
favor.38
After surrendering under the amnesty, the Christians
and Yezidis were sent to Dohuk, like everyone else.
The majority of the group were Yezidis, according to
a witness who saw them there, and they occupied six
rooms on the second floor of the fort, segregated
from the Muslim Kurdish prisoners. Word of the new
arrivals spread rapidly, and relatives who heard the
news rushed to Dohuk in an attempt to visit them.
Isho, an elderly Chaldean Catholic from the village
of Mezeh, came to inquire after his four sons. None
of them was a peshmerga, although three were
deserters and the other a draft dodger. But it was a
fruitless visit; Isho learned that all the Christian
and Yezidi men had been taken away the day before in
nine sealed vehicles. It was the last time they were
seen alive. The women and children and the elderly,
meanwhile, after a single night in Dohuk, were
bussed to the barren camps of Baharka and Jezhnikan.
And there, after two weeks or so, came the curious
call that the Christians and Yezidis should all
report to the police station or the camp'sBa'ath
Party office. Istikhbarat officers drove
through the complexes in a Toyota Landcruiser to
broadcast the announcement. The agents were
thorough: later, they went around the camps to
deliver the message individually to each family in
turn, as they huddled beneath their temporary
"shades." But there seemed nothing to fear,
especially when an Assyrian priest repeated the
request. "You are going to be taken back to the
places where we took you from," one Istikhbarat
agent said. "We are going to take you to your men,"
said another--a choice of phrasing that may have
euphemistically conveyed the brutal truth.
At the police station, names were read out and
checked off against a master list. One witness
recalled that Istikhbarat then ordered the
prisoners to divide themselves up into three groups:
Christians; Yezidis who had surrendered in Dohuk
governorate; and Yezidis who had turned themselves
in to the army at Aqra, in the neighboring
governorate of Nineveh. This last distinction made
some people suspicious, and several of them lied
about their place of capture, lining up with those
who had surrendered in Aqra.39
Other residents of the camp said they watched
enviously as the Yezidi prisoners waited by the main
gate for the minibuses that they believed would take
them to their homes in the Sheikhan area. A few days
later, a single khaki-colored military bus arrived,
accompanied by an army officer and nine or ten
soldiers, to pick up twenty-six people from the
Assyrian Christian village of Gund Kosa. Now only a
handful of Christians remained, along with the
Yezidis who had surrendered in Aqra--and these
people stayed in Baharka-Jezhnikan until the summer
of 1990, when the restrictions on movement were
lifted. None of those who were bussed away from the
camps ever reached their homes, and none was ever
seen in the complexes, like Mansuriya (Masirik) and
Khaneq,that were set aside for relocated Christians
and Yezidis. The inescapable conclusion is that all
of them were murdered. An Assyrian priest
interviewed by Middle East Watch said that he had
assembled a list of some 250 Christians disappeared
during Anfal and its immediate aftermath.40
Isho, the elderly Chaldean man from Mezeh village,
embarked on a long and anguished search for his four
missing sons. He wrote a petition to President
Saddam Hussein, but received no reply. He begged
Amn and Istikhbarat agents at the Baharka
camp to tell him what could have happened to his
sons. They answered that the four would not have
been covered by the September 6 amnesty, since it
only applied to ethnic Kurds (although evidently not
to Yezidis). "If we had known that," the old man
replied bitterly, "we would never have surrendered."
At some risk to his own life, he even visited the
fort at Dohuk, only to be told that the Christian
and Yezidi men had already been taken away to an
unknown destination.
Although the old man's petititon to the president
went unanswered, it did trigger--unknown to him--an
internal inquiry by military intelligence. The
results of that Istikhbarat investigation
came to light during Middle East Watch's analysis of
the captured Iraqi documents. Detailed below at
pp.340-342, they shed important light on the chain
of command of the Anfal operation. But they do not
explain why the Christians and Yezidis should have
been disappeared en masse, even after an amnesty was
in force.
One plausible explanation is this: These obstinate
minorities had refused to be part of the "national
ranks" as defined by the Iraqi authorities. To
aggravate their crime, they also refused to accept
the regime's designation of their ethnicity. Not
only did they want to be treated like Kurds, they
also acted like bad Arabs. Accordingly, they were to
be considered traitors on two counts, and punished
accordingly.
1 Iraqi News
Agency, as reported in Al-Thawra, September
7, 1988. Other, broader amnesties were also decreed
in the immediate post-Anfal period. On November 30,
1988, Revolutionary Command Council decree no. 860
announced "a comprehensive and general amnesty" for
all "persons who have engaged in dissident political
activities and subsequently gone into hiding." On
February 28, 1989, RCC decree no. 130 declared a
general amnesty for all Iraqis who have fled the
country, although again "with the exception of the
traitor Jalal al-Talabani and agents of the Iranian
regime." Al-Majid's comments on the amnesty are from
an audiotaped meeting held on April 15, 1989.
2 At its noon
briefing on September 8, after Shultz had met with
Iraqi Minister of State Saadoun Hammadi, the State
Department described Iraq's use of chemical weapons
against the Kurds as "unjustifiable and abhorrent"
and "unacceptable to the civilized world." See
Middle East Watch, Human Rights in
Iraq
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp.
108-110.
3 Al-Thawra,
September 7, 1988.
4 Two versions of
the document spelling out al-Majid's powers over
refugee resettlement have come to light. One,
apparently the original order, is an unclassified
letter to various departments from the Presidential
Office of the Iraqi Republic, no. Q/1509 of
September 7, 1988. The other, dated September 12, is
"secret and confidential" letter no. Sh 3/13631,
from Amn Erbil to all Security Directorates
in the governorate.
5 Letter no.
Q/1509, dated September 7, 1988, from the
Presidential Office of the Iraqi Republic to
"[illegible] Deputy Commander in Chief of the Armed
Forces, Respected Defense Minister, Respected
Interior Minister and Ali Hassan al-Majid, Respected
Secretary General of the Northern Bureau."
6 Middle East
Watch has examined many files of these sworn
statements, duly filled in by returnees and dated at
various times in September and October 1988. The
documents also bear the signatures of
representatives of the civil administration, the
police, security and intelligence agencies and the
local Ba'ath Party branch.
7 This procedure
is spelled out in two documents, both issued by the
local office of Amn in Shaqlawa. One is a
letter to the Ba'ath Party's Returnee Reception
Committee, dated October 7, 1988; the other is a
letter (#5823) to all police stations, dated October
11, 1988.
8 The reader
might imagine that this would hardly constitute
punishment for a Kurd. However, entry into the
military, the jahsh or the security forces
had always been seen as an option that offered
economic benefits as well as immunity from the
regime's anti-Kurdish activities. The prohibition
was therefore a blow to Kurdish aspirations as well
as a further erosion of the civil rights of the
Iraqi Kurdish minority. These modifications to the
amnesty were set forth in Revolutionary Command
Council decrees nos. 737 (September 8, 1988) and 785
(September 29, 1988).
9 Letter
no.14951, dated November 23, 1988 and classified
"Secret and Confidential" from the Secretariat of
Amn for the Autonomous Region to Amn
Suleimaniyeh, citing instructions of the Northern
Bureau Command.
10 The
organization in question here is the Political
Command of the Iraqi Kurdistan Front (Al-Qiyadeh
al-Siyasiyeh lil-Jabha al-Kurdistaniyeh al-Iraqiyeh),
a seven-party body (later eight) dominated by the
PUK and the KDP.
11 "Reactions to
the General Amnesty for the Kurds." Letter no. Sh.S
Sh 3/5089, dated October 18, 1988 and classified
"Secret and Confidential," from Amn
Chamchamal to all security directorates.
12 Middle East
Watch interview, Zakho, June 24, 1992.
13 Middle East
Watch interview, Taqtaq, April 24, 1992.
14 Middle East
Watch interview, Taqtaq, April 24, 1992.
15 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Zarayen complex, July 28, 1992.
17 Middle East
Watch interview, Kifri, March 30, 1993. This account
of the southern Germian women in Nugra Salman also
draws on interviews in Basirma complex, March 24,
1993; Suleimaniyeh, April 1, 1993; and Zakho, April
8, 1993.
18 Middle East
Watch interview, Benaslawa complex, April 20, 1992.
19 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
20 Middle East
Watch interview, Ja'faran, Qara Dagh, May 11, 1992.
21 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
22 Middle East
Watch interview, Taqtaq, April 24, 1992.
23 These figures
were provided by Jawhar Nameq, speaker of the new
Kurdish Parliament, elected in May 1992. Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, June 18, 1992.
24 This man last
saw his two sons, aged eleven and thirteen, in
detention in Tikrit. He also lost fifteen other
members of his family in Anfal. Middle East Watch
interview, Suleimaniyeh, May 12, 1992.
25 Middle East
Watch interview with former resident of Ber Hoshter,
Zarayen complex, July 28, 1992.
26 Middle East
Watch interview, Jedideh Zab complex, May 2, 1992.
27 The decisions
of the Northern Bureau meeting are reported in an
Amn Erbil letter dated September 16, 1988. It
reads, "It is possible to house the families
returning to the national ranks in the new towns of
our governorate, up to a maximum of 12,714 families,
to be distributed among the following new towns:
Jezhnikan 4,241
Girdachal 2,794
Ber Hoshter 2,314
Shakholan 2,387"
28 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 2, 1992.
29 This at least
was the view expressed to Middle East Watch by a
number of Kurdish doctors in Erbil who had entered
Baharka and Jezhnikan clandestinely at the end of
1988, by which time epidemics were a serious threat.
30 A Middle East
Watch-Physicians for Human Rights forensic team
investigated the Baharka-Jezhnikan cemetery in June,
1992, and took measurements of eighty-five graves of
camp inmates. Of these, seventy-one were judged to
be of sub-adult age. For a full discussion of the
team's methodology, see The Destruction of Koreme,
pp.65-70, 92-95.
31 Several
survivors said that twenty children from Tilakru
died in the camps, as well as thirty from Warmilleh
and between thirty-three and forty from Warakhal. In
the first two cases, the effects of exposure to
chemical weapons may well have been a contributing
factor. The MEW-PHR forensic team exhumed the
remains of three infant girls in the
Baharka-Jezhnikan cemetery; each showed signs of
severe malnutrition and/or disease stress. See
The Destruction of Koreme, p.68.
32 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, July 7, 1992.
33 The Iraqi
Christians had their own peshmerga
organization, the Assyrian Democratic Movement--a
full member of the Kurdistan Front. According to one
PUK commander interviewed by Middle East Watch, the
ADM had some 100-150 men under arms. Christians also
had five seats reserved for them in the 105-seat
Kurdish parliament elected in 1992.
34 The Peacock
Angel is a divinity who may be associated with the
Christian Satan, although he shares none of Satan's
evil attributes. See Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurdish
Society, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Refugee
Problems," in Kreyenbroek and Sperl, op. cit.,
p.37, citing T. Menzel, "Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis
der Jeziden," in H. Grothe, ed., Meine
Vorderasienexpedition, 1906, 1907, Volume 1
(Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1911). See also the chapter on
religion in Izady's The Kurds, pp.131-166.
35 According to a
list prepared by Shorsh Resool and published as an
appendix to his 1990 report, Destruction of a
Nation.
36 Ali Hassan
al-Majid, taperecorded conversation with unnamed
Ba'ath officials, Kirkuk, August 1, 1988.
37 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 19, 1992.
38 This
separation procedure at the Ibrahim Khalil bridge
was described by a number of witnesses. Middle East
Watch interviews, Dohuk, September 3 and 5, 1992.
39 The lie was a
judicious one, for the separation of the Yezidis
suggests that the regime's intent was to disappear
only those who had been captured within the theater
of operations covered by Anfal, which ended at the
edge of Nineveh governorate. This same logic--which
reflects bureaucratic rigidity rather than
clemency--is evident in Iraqi government documents
dealing with the treatment of captured civilians.
For example, a secret letter from Amn
headquarters in the governorate of Erbil, no. Sh
2/12809, dated August 26, 1988, says that two named
individuals detained in the Anfal theater have been
"returned by the Northern Bureau Command, due to the
fact that they are not residents of areas that
were included in the Anfal operations."
(emphasis added)
40 Middle East
Watch interview, Dohuk, June 10, 1992. In the course
of a dozen interviews with Christians, Yezidis and
other survivors of Baharka-Jezhnikan, Middle East
Watch assembled a total of ninety-eight names of
people who had disappeared. This list consisted of
sixty-four Christians (twenty-five men, eighteen
women, twelve children under the age of sixteen, and
nine of unknown age and sex), and thirty-four
Yezidis (four men, nine women and twenty-one
children). Several of those who disappeared were
infants of less than one year; the oldest was a
woman of eighty-five.
12
Aftermath
"With God's help, we have managed to eliminate from
our beloved North the saboteur factions and
collaborators with the enemy. The situation in the
Northern Region now calls for certain measures
commensurate with this new phase."
-- Communique from Ali Hassan al-Majid's Northern
Bureau, November 1988.
As the experience of the Yezidis and Christians
suggested, the general amnesty of September 6 was
not the end of the Anfal story. As we shall see,
there were continued mass executions of prisoners
captured before the amnesty. The Ba'ath Party's
Returnee Reception Committee (Lajnet Istiqbal
al-A'idin) continued to function until at least
February 1989, relocating the families of
"saboteurs" to complexes on the Erbil plain.1
In addition to the sworn residence statements
mentioned earlier, "returnees to the national ranks"
were also to undertake: (a) to live in housing
assigned to them and not to change their address;
(b) not to take part in any "saboteur" activity; and
(c) to "stand for their country"--on pain of
punishment as stipulated by the law.2
The new mujamma'a of Ber Hoshter, to the
north of the city of Erbil, was opened for returnees
on November 27, 1988,3
and the resettlement of the families of suspected
peshmerga in nearby Girdachal went on for at
least another six or seven months after that.4
The regime appears to have set up a special Pursuit
(or "Follow-Up") Committee (Lajnet al-Mutaba'a)
to enforce the terms of the returnee program, and a
flurry of orders from Amn and other agencies
exhorted the security forces to greater vigilance of
the complexes. Amn also issued arrest
warrants for anyone who left the mujamma'at
without permission or otherwise infringed the terms
of their resettlement. In at least one case, the
Erbil governorate's Committee to Fight Hostile
Activity (Lajnet Mukafahat al-Nashat al-Mu'adi)
also appears to have revived a pattern more
characteristic of the 1970s, relocating individual
Kurdish families in the south of Iraq.5
By the end of the year, the note of urgency in
government documents had somewhat diminished, to be
replaced by a tone of wary confidence. "With God's
help," began an order from Ali Hassan
al-Majid'sNorthern Bureau, "we have managed to
eliminate from our beloved North the saboteur
factions and collaborators with the enemy."
The situation in the Northern Region now calls for
certain measures commensurate with this new phase,
taking precautions against any new method to which
the remaining saboteurs may turn--those who will try
to create pockets of sabotage from which to carry
out acts that will inspire their sympathizers, and
give the impression to their masters abroad that
they still possess footholds in our nation's soil
and are capable of undertaking acts of sabotage.
There is no doubt that, from now on, we will not
find a group of saboteurs that is large in size, or
that operates out of fixed bases, or that launches
large-scale operations. Instead what we may find are
small mobile groups of saboteur elements numbering
no more than ten or fifteen. These groups would then
wait to gauge the level of our response to their
acts. If the reaction is normal and routine, then
they will redouble their activities, broaden their
base and undertake larger operations in graduated
phases. They would also organize their internal
structures in such a way as to keep in touch with
some of their friendly elements who may have
benefited from the amnesty decree.6
Al-Majid clearly felt that he faced a delicate
dilemma. On the one hand, he could not afford to
appear lax, in case this emboldened the peshmerga.
To prevent this, he ordered draconian measures by
the security apparatus. "Force and just harshness"
must be used in the struggle. "There shall be a
prompt and decisive response to any incidents that
may occur, with the scale of the response being out
of proportion to the scale of the incident, no
matter how trivial the latter may be."
On the other hand, as far as the economic life of
Iraqi Kurdistan was concerned, "what is called for
is a departure from emergency measures, because the
continuation of the economic siege gives the
impression that we are still nervous about the
situation." The blockade of the north would be
relaxed slightly, the document concluded, although
there would still be restrictions on the sale of
gasoline, a blockade on the sale of certain
foodstuffs and a continued ban on any sale of food
outside the complexes. Any mujamma'a found to
be involved in smuggling food to "the seats of
sabotage" would immediately have its food rations
terminated.7
Now that the rural population had been removed,
there would also be a new census, or "sub-census,"
to determine and count the numbers of those who were
not registered in the 1987 census in the Autonomous
Region.8
By the following spring planting season, the regime
was even prepared to countenance the resumption of
some modest farming activities in the Kurdish
countryside. On April 9, 1989, the Northern Bureau
Command issued order no.3335, which modified the ban
on farming in the prohibited areas. At least in
principle, these lands could now be worked once more
by their owners (although not by amnestied
returnees), or leased for agricultural use if they
were the property of the state.
In practice, however, little changed. There would be
no rebuilding of what had been destroyed. "The
prohibited areas have been demarcated, and
agriculture may not be pursued there," Amn
reminded its branches. "Nor shall there be [any]
human presence in them, due to their effect in the
military and security sphere and their location in
the Third Phase [of village clearances]."9
Clause 5 of Northern BureauCommand directive
SF/4008, ordering the summary killing of anyone
found in the prohibited areas, remained in force.10
Having eradicated much of its Kurdistan bread
basket, Iraq would be more reliant then ever on food
imports and generous agricultural credit from
abroad, notably the U.S. and Australia.11
Farmers would only be allowed to work their lands if
they agreed to act as informers for Amn about
any suspicious activities in their area. Indeed, in
February 1990, Amn proposed to tighten these
restrictions even further. Agriculture should only
be permitted, the security agency suggested to the
Fifth Army Corps, if the farmer in question was
fully trusted by the authorities, and pledged in
addition not to build any fixed structure and to
refrain from working at night.
* * *
Continued Village Clearances
By now, only a few hundred villages remained intact
in the three governorates that make up the Kurdistan
Autonomous Region. According to a survey prepared by
the Ministry of Reconstruction and Development of
the new Kurdish government, 673 villages were still
standing in the three governorates of Erbil,
Suleimaniyeh and Dohuk;4049 had been destroyed. Of
those that remained, some two-thirds were
concentrated in the environs of Erbil city, Makhmour
and Aqra--areas that had been excluded altogether
from Anfal.12
Yet there was no guarantee of lasting security for
the minority of villages that had survived the Anfal
campaign. On April 15, 1989, order No.3448 of the
Northern Bureau authorized the "evacuation and
rounding up" of an unspecified number of villages
belonging to the Bradost and Dolamari tribes, in
order to make way for a new dam on the Greater Zab
river at Bakhma, an idea which had been in the works
since the 1950s. The Bradost and Dolamari had been
loyal to the government, but their location, in an
area where the territory once controlled by the PUK
abutted the traditional strongholds of the KDP, now
became a liability. The Bakhma impoundment, in
addition to its economic advantages, would drive a
permanent strategic wedge between these two
rebellious regions.13
Just a few miles to the south of the Bradost and
Dolamari settlements, another fourteen villages were
demolished in a joint army-Amn sweep in
December 1988 and their inhabitants deported to the
nearby complex of Basirma. This time the stated
pretext was not the Bakhma Dam project but
continuing counterinsurgency operationsagainst any
lingering pockets of peshmerga resistance.14
One of the villages affected was Serkand Khailani, a
relatively large place of close to a thousand
people. It had survived Anfal, but army troops now
stormed it with artillery, helicopters and ground
forces, as well as units of the Mafarez Khaseh.15
In the wake of the assault, Serkand Khailani was
razed to the ground and most of the villagers
arrested. Everyone was taken to Shaqlawa, where they
spent the night confined to IFAs at the army base,
and from there to Basirma--everyone, that is, except
for five people, who were taken off by Amn in
a separate jeep. They included the wife, brother and
teenage daughter of the village headman, or ra'is.
The headman himself was picked up by Amn in a
separate incident early in 1989. He was detained for
seven months at Amn's Erbil headquarters and
repeatedly tortured--beaten with a cable, suspended
from a hook on the ceiling, soaked in water and
given electric shocks to the earlobes. At frequent
intervals, cellmates were taken out to be executed.
Yet curiously, during the long sessions of
interrogation that the ra'is endured, the
five disappeared villagers of Serkand Khailani were
mentioned only in passing. They were saboteurs, he
was told, and he would never see them again. After
seven months, without a word of explanation, the
headman was released. At about the time he got back
to the Basirma complex, he received two documents
from the Census and Sanitary Department of the
Ministry of Health in Erbil. They were death
certificates for the two men who had disappeared.
The date they bore was February 20, 1989; the cause
of death was given as "execution by firing of
bullets." No word was ever received about the fate
of the threewomen, although documents describing
their execution were reportedly found by the
peshmerga during the 1991 uprising.16
* * *
Continued Mass Killings: Yunis's Story
Murder, in other words--including mass
execution--continued to be a fundamental tool of the
regime in its dealings with the Kurds, even though
Anfal was now over and most of the countryside was
uninhabited. Anyone found in a "prohibited area" was
likely to be killed, as was anyone suspected of
peshmerga activity in the few villages that had
been spared. Some of these killings were ordered by
the Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau, and Ali Hassan
al-Majid appears to have kept a close personal eye
on the elimination of prominent "saboteurs." (A
handwritten note from September 1988, by the
director of the Shaqlawa office of Amn,
passes on al-Majid's compliments to the agents
responsible for the liquidation of a Communist Party
cadre and the burning of his body: "Well done!" the
Northern Bureau chief writes. "May God bless them
for their faith and loyalty.")
Other executions were decreed by Saddam Hussein
himself; others by the Revolutionary Court (Mahkamat
al-Thawra); and others still by special military
tribunals.17
A large number of individual death certificates and
other official documents bear witness to these
executions. An August 1989 report from Amn
Suleimaniyeh, for example, enumerates eighty-seven
executions since January 1 of that year. Many were
people picked up in "prohibited" villages; one was a
literature teacher executed for teaching his
students the Kurdish language in Latin script.18
Most crucially, there continued to be mass
executions of people who had been captured during
the Anfal campaign but remained alive in custody
at the time of the September 6 amnesty. Some
were even killed after surrendering during the
five-week amnesty grace period, their crime recorded
in official documents as suspected membership in or
collaboration with an illegal organization, such as
the PUK, the KDP or the Islamic Party.19
Middle East Watch was also able to find two
survivors of these post-amnesty mass killings.
Yunis was a 19-year old peshmerga who had
fought with the PUK in the battle of Sergalou and
later in the Balisan Valley during the Sixth Anfal.
Cut off from his main peshmerga force near
Akoyan by Iraqi troops, he hid out for a while with
relatives in the town of Khalifan. But he was
persuaded by rumors of an amnesty to surrender to
Amn in the town of Sadiq around the middle of
August.20
The local Amn office speedily transferred him
to the agency's headquarters in Erbil, where he
shared a large cell with about a hundred other
prisoners--a mix ofpeshmerga, deserters and
Anfalakan from the Koysinjaq area. Yunis was
interrogated and tortured off and on for another
three weeks.
One day at the beginning of September, Amn
guards assembled the prisoners, stripped them of
their possessions and loaded them into a single
large civilian bus. It was so crowded that the men
had to sit on each other's laps. Their destination
was the Popular Army camp on the outskirts of Dibs,
which they reached at about 7:00 that evening. The
prisoners received two daily rations of stale bread
and water. Each day there were further rounds of
questioning by plainclothes agents--also Amn
men, Yunis guessed. Then, on September 6, guards
told them that there had been a general amnesty and
that they would be released.
But nothing changed. The daily interrogation
sessions continued, together with brutal forms of
torture. Beatings with a length of electrical cable
were an everyday routine. The interrogators also
devised two other standard torments. One was to fill
a plastic bag with water and ice cubes, suspend it
from the ceiling, pierce it with a pin, and allow
the freezing liquid to drip on to the forehead of
the prisoner, who was lashed to a bedframe beneath.
This went on for up to twenty minutes each time;
after ten, the pain was acute, and the prisoner
would thrash around on the bed in a vain attempt to
evade the icy drip. The ice-water treatment
alternated with the application of extreme heat. The
interrogators would slide a hot electric stove under
the prisoner's bed for four or five minutes at a
stretch, causing painful burns to the lower back.
These torments were the worst that Yunis personally
had to endure. But one day, just before the amnesty
was announced, he and the other prisoners from Erbil
watched through the windows of their cell as three
men accused of being "internal peshmerga"--that
is to say, active in the cities--were brought into
the courtyard below. The men were blindfolded, made
to stand on chairs and tied to posts in the yard,
arms raised above their heads. The chairs were then
kicked away, leaving the prisoners' feet dangling a
couple of feet from the ground. Next, guards
attached one end of a string to an empty Butagaz
container and the other to each prisoner's scrotum.
When the signal was given, the guard would drop the
gas cylinder, ripping out the man's testicles.
Within half an hour, all three were dead.
A few days later the guards entered Yunis's cell,
carried out a head count of the prisoners and told
them that they were to be transferred. By now their
numbers had swelled to about 180, including new
arrivals--as before, a motley assortment of
peshmerga, deserters andordinary civilians. Each
man was blindfolded and stripped of his IDs and had
his hands tied behind his back. The prisoners were
then loaded into six windowless vehicles, with
benches in the rear and a separate driver's
compartment--of the same sort, in other words, as
those described by survivors of the earlier mass
executions near Ramadi. They left Dibs at about 7:30
p.m. just before sunset. It was the evening of
September 14, according to Yunis, and the general
amnesty had been in force for eight days.
The buses turned left out of the camp gate, drove
along a paved surface for a few minutes and then
turned right on to a dirt road. As the bus bumped
along this track, Yunis managed to work his hands
free and loosen his blindfold. After an hour or so
the convoy came to a halt, and the guards began to
pull the prisoners out through the rear door. When
it came to Yunis's turn, they saw that his hands
were no longer tied. The guards pushed him to the
ground and kicked him viciously. Over the top of his
blindfold, Yunis could see a uniformed officer walk
over and raise his hand. There was a sharp blow to
the base of his skull with a heavy metal object, and
Yunis felt himself falling forward. The last thing
he knew before he lost consciousness was the touch
of his fingers on another human face.
When he came to, he found that his lower body was
covered with sand. He saw now that he was in a
narrow trench--twenty yards long, one yard across
and two deep--apparently dug by a backhoe. As he
took stock of his surroundings, he heard the sound
of a bulldozer approaching, and a fresh load of dirt
was dumped into the trench next to him, throwing up
a large cloud of dust. In the dust and darkness,
Yunis scrambled free, away from the buses, the
bulldozer and the voices of the guards. In the
distance, to the east, he could see fires, which he
guessed were the oilfields of
Kirkuk.
He ran in the direction of
Kirkuk
until he reached a paved road. Hearing the sound of
an engine, he jumped out to flag it down, but as the
sound grew nearer he realized that it was an army
IFA truck accompanied by a jeep, and he flung
himself down by the roadside before the drivers
could spot him in their headlights. Before long a
civilian car stopped. The driver, a fellow Kurd, was
wearing the uniform of the Popular Army, but Yunis
was too exhausted to care, and to his relief theman
drove him to Dibs without asking too many questions.
From there, Yunis eventually rejoined his fellow
peshmerga in Iran.21
* * *
Continued Mass Killings: Hussein's Story
"Hussein" presents a very different case. A year
younger than Yunis, he was sympathetic to the
peshmerga cause, as indeed most Kurds were, but
was not politically active himself. At the time of
Anfal, he and four companions had found work as
carpenters in a number of towns and complexes around
Erbil. On November 26, 1988, they were working on a
house in the village of Shiwarash, which had escaped
destruction during the 1987 campaign on the Erbil
plain, when four or five pick-ups and Landcruisers
pulled up, filled with members of "security and the
organization"--in other words, Amn and the
Ba'ath Party. The five young men were bundled into
the vehicles and driven first to Party headquarters
in Khabat. As they approached their next
destination, Hussein heard church bells ring. From
this he concluded that they were in Einkawa, a
Christian suburb of Erbil.22
Here they stayed for three days, handcuffed and
blindfolded with their cummerbunds (pishtend).
They were given no food or water and forbidden to
leave their cell, even to urinate. An electric light
burned day and night, while a team of interrogators,
headed by a man whom his colleagues referred to as
Amn Lieutenant Ghassan, tried to get the five
to admit to their connection to the PUK. The
Lieutenant played "good cop"; when his gentler
methods failed, he transferred the prisoners to
harsher colleagues. Each denial of PUK links brought
a fresh round of torture. Hussein endured the
falaka, in which the prisoner is beaten on the
soles of the feet while seated with his legs in the
air; he was hung from the ceiling by a rope tied to
his handcuffs; if he passed out, he was revived by
being burned with a lighted cigarette.
After three days of this, Hussein and his companions
were taken to Amn headquarters in Erbil,
where Yunis had been held three monthsearlier.
There, each man was placed in an isolation cell that
measured less than ten square feet.23
Hussein counted the passage of nine days, the first
seven filled with interrogation and torture. Again,
there was the falaka; again, suspension from
the ceiling. But there were new tortures as
well--the application of burning irons to his legs
and neck; electric shocks to the tongue and penis.
The interrogators told him that if he confessed to
his PUK ties, he would be released; if he denied
them, he would be executed. He told them that he
knew nothing.
On the seventh day, Hussein was forced to put his
thumbprint to a piece of paper. He was still
blindfolded, and the contents of the document were
not read out to him. With this, the questioning and
the torture ceased, and two days later a guard
opened the door of Hussein's cell to tell him that
Saddam Hussein had decreed another general amnesty.24
All the prisoners were to be freed. Hussein and his
four friends were again placed in a common cell,
handcuffed once more, and taken to a waiting
vehicle. As they drove--between an hour and two
hours on a paved road, then another half-hour on
dirt--they could hear the guards discussing their
fate. "Where are we taking them?" asked the first.
"To the south," answered another. And then a third
voice joined in: "They cannot live in the south." At
that, the five men knew what was going to happen to
them.
When they stopped, it was twilight and cold. "Sit
down and don't move," the guards told the prisoners.
"We are going to take your photographs." They sat
crosslegged in a line, and almost at once the guards
opened fire with automatic weapons. The first volley
of shots missed Hussein and he instinctively threw
his head into his lap for protection. As he did so,
a bullet from a second round of firing struck him in
the right shoulder, passing right through the flesh.
The impactknocked him forward into a deep ditch, and
he could hear the bodies of the other four men
tumbling in beside him. There was another burst of
gunfire. When it was over, the executioners
shovelled earth roughly on top of their five victims
and went on their way.
Hussein, semi-conscious, pushed aside the dirt,
which had not fully covered him. He lay where he was
for two hours as darkness fell. The grave, he saw
now, was an abandoned and derelict well, its walls
eroded by rainfall. He touched his friends to see if
they were alive, but there was no response. Clawing
his way upward over their bodies, he managed to pull
himself out of the pit, leaving only his Adidas
track shoes behind. It was cold and raining, and in
the distance he could see two separate clusters of
city lights. Closer at hand, perhaps two miles away,
he saw the glow of a fire and struck out in that
direction. Shoeless, and with his feet bruised and
swollen from the falaka torture, it took
Hussein all night to reach the house.
He guessed--wrongly, as it turned out--that he was
somewhere near Kirkuk, and called out in Arabic,
"Family of the house!" (ahl al-beit). A man's
voice answered, "Come on in!" (tfaddal). He
knocked, and a woman opened the door. Seeing a young
man barefoot and covered in blood, she started back
in fear and beat her breast in pity. But the couple
brought him a meal of water and tea and sheep's fat
(samneh), and he told them the outlines of
his story. As he talked, the woman fetched Arab
clothing and a heavy Popular Army greatcoat to
conceal the bloodstains from the wound in Hussein's
shoulder. And at daybreak the man took him to the
door to show him where he was. The nearby highway,
where Hussein could see electricity pylons and
passing trucks, led in one direction to
Mosul
and in the other to Al-Qayyara. The man explained
that the lights that Hussein had seen in the night
belonged to the Arab towns of Tharthar and
al-Hadhar.25
Eventually, like Yunis, Hussein escaped to Iran.
Some time later, Amn presented his mother
with the young man's death certificate.26
* * *
The End of the "Exceptional Situation"
When did Anfal reach its conclusion? The question
can be answered in a number of different ways. In a
strict military sense, it ended with the victory
over the KDP in Badinan and the announcement of the
September 6 amnesty. From the point of view of the
Iraqi public, it may be said to have ended on
October 1, when ritual celebrations of the victory
were organized by the ruling Ba'athist Party.27
As far as the logic of Anfal as a campaign of
extermination is concerned, it certainly went on for
several more months, at least until well into 1988.
Some might even argue that Anfal lasted until June
1989, for it was then that Iraqi troops destroyed
Qala Dizeh, a large town of some 70,000 people to
the east of Dukan Lake. Qala Dizeh is an ancient
settlement and a celebrated name in Kurdish history,
for it was the target of a notorious bombing raid by
the Iraqi Air Force on April 24, 1974, which left
hundreds dead.28
As a city, Qala Dizeh itself was exempt from the
narrow logic of Anfal, but certainly not from
reprisals or punitive action. Although parts of the
city center had been demolishedin 1987, Ba'ath Party
officials repeatedly assured the residents that they
had nothing further to fear. The area around Qala
Dizeh, which included the nearby town of Sengaser
and the complexes of Pemalek, Tuwasuran and
Jarawa--built for evacuees from the border
clearances of the late 1970s--was also spared by
Anfal. Although some villages were destroyed here in
mid-1988, their population had not been "Anfalized."
Sandwiched between the depopulated Iranian border
area and Dukan Lake, and in relatively flat terrain,
the Qala Dizeh area had not harbored any significant
peshmerga threat during Anfal, and the regime
had been content to leave it alone. But by the
spring of 1989, it had become a glaring anomaly, the
only sizeable population center that remained so
close to the Iranian border. Worse, the mountains to
the east had become the principal regrouping point
for the PUK as it struggled to reassert a presence
inside Iraq, and on March 22, 1989, the RCC's
Northern Affairs Committee ordered "maximum
measures" against the area east of Dukan lake.29
In late May, troops surrounded Qala Dizeh with tanks
and heavy artillery and gave the townspeople a month
to leave. They were to be moved "in the public
interest," to "modern villages."30
A number of choices were offered: trucks would take
them either to Bazian, on the road to Suleimaniyeh,
or to three new complexes on the Erbil
plain--Khabat, Kawar Gosek and Daratou. It took the
army engineers three weeks, beginning June 1, to
demolish Qala Dizeh, and they left nothing standing,
not even the new electrical power substation and the
water-pumping station that the regime itself had
built in 1987. On June 24, 1989, Qala Dizeh was
officially declared a "prohibited area."
Yet Qala Dizeh may best be seen, perhaps, as a
postscript to Anfal--a return to the same logic of
anti-Kurdish activities that had gone on for years.
The best answer to our question may be that the
logic ofAnfal ended when the behavior of the Iraqi
bureaucracy shifted into a perceptibly different
gear. This is not the same as saying "when the
killing stopped," or "when the deportations ended,"
or "when the last village had been burned and
bulldozed." For killings and deportations and
scorched earth policies have been a feature of life
under the Ba'ath Party for many years, and they
continue to this day. But, by the spring of 1989, it
is safe to say that the Iraqi regime felt that all
the goals of Anfal had been met, and on April 23,
the Revolutionary Command Council issued its decree
No.271, in which the special powers conferred upon
Ali Hassan al-Majid were revoked.31
The sense that the Kurdish problem was now fully
under control is further reinforced by Saddam
Hussein's December 1989 decision to abolish even the
Northern Affairs Committee of the RCC, which had
been in existence for more than ten years.32
With his task in Kurdistan complete, other duties
now awaited Ali Hassan al-Majid's singular
talents--notably, after the August 1990 invasion, as
Governor of occupied Kuwait.
"I would like to admit," he told Ba'ath officials
gathered to welcome Hassan Ali al-Amiri, his
successor as General Secretary of the Northern
Bureau, "that I am not the right person for the
current stable situation.... I hope that the
comrades in the North will not ask Comrade Hassan
Ali to do things that he cannot do. Because that
stage is over. It will no longer be allowed for a
member of the Party to have power over the army,
because the exceptional situation has come to an
end. These powers are not being withdrawn from
Comrade Hassan Ali because he is not capable of the
task, but because that stage has finished."33
Al-Majid was evidently well-pleased with his
efforts--not, he added, that the humanity of his
motives should be doubted. "I cry when I see a
tragic show or movie," he told his audience that
day. "One day I cried when I saw a woman in a movie
who was lost and without a family. But I would like
to tell you that I did what I did and what I was
supposed to do. I don't think you could do more than
what I could do."
During another meeting with Party officials,
al-Majid is heard to remark that, "What we have
managed to do is something which the Party and the
leadership never achieved until 1987. Some of it was
just the result of help and mercy from God. Nothing
else." An unnamed party member chimes in to offer
praise. "Only God can do more than you did.
Otherwise you can do anything. This Ba'ath Party can
do anything."34
______
1 The minutes of
the Ba'ath Party's Returnee Reception Committee
meeting on February 1, 1989 refers to the relocation
of a saboteur's family in the Ber Hoshter complex.
The minutes of another meeting of the committee,
dated September 13, 1988--a week after the
declaration of the general amnesty--resolve that
"people who used to live in areas controlled by the
saboteurs are to be treated as saboteurs," and notes
that returnees are to be transferred to the
complexes by the Iraqi Police and the [Erbil
governorate's] Committee to Fight Hostile Activity.
2 A number of
sworn statements to this effect, bearing various
dates in late 1988, were found among files recovered
from Ba'ath Party offices in Erbil.
3 According to an
undated Ba'ath Party letter found in Iraqi
government files in Erbil.
4 This was
reported to us by a family from the village of
Gelnaski, one of the principal KDP headquarters in
Badinan, whose son was reportedly executed after
surrendering under the amnesty. Middle East Watch
was shown a grave at Dohuk that supposedly contained
the young man's body. It lay in an unmarked area
outside the Dohuk municipal cemetery that appeared
to contain approximately forty-five other graves.
Middle East Watch interview, Dohuk, June 4, 1992.
5 A series of
instructions from the local Committee to Fight
Hostile Activity in Shaqlawa indicates that five
families from the Harir area, totalling thirty-seven
people, were deported to the marshy southern
governorate of Thiqar (formerly Nasiriya) on January
2, 1989, in vehicles supplied by the Traffic
Directorate (Mudiriyat al-Murour) of the
Erbil governorate. These people were accompanied by
a regular Iraqi Police officer, indicating that
there was nothing secretive about the transfer.
An Amn Shaqlawa memorandum, dated May 16,
1989, also notes that the former residents of the
destroyed village of Khirkhawa, who now live in
complexes, will be deported to the south if the
"saboteurs" attempt to make contact with them.
6 These are
extracts from the decisions taken at a meeting held
on November 8, 1988, and relayed to Amn
chiefs in the Autonomous Region by a set of
instructions from the region's Security Director,
no.14951, dated November 21, 1988 and classified
"Secret and Confidential."
7 ibid.
8 Plans for the
sub-census are outlined in a communique from the
Office of the Presidency, no. K/2/1/45508, dated
December 2, 1988. These in turn are conveyed to the
Ministry of Planning in letter no. 548 from the
Northern Affairs Committee of the RCC, dated January
25, 1989.
9 The "Third
Phase," in other words, clearly refers to the period
since June 22, 1987 and continuing after the Anfal
operation. This order is conveyed in letter no.6271
from Amn Erbil to Amn Shaqlawa, dated
April 26, 1989 and apparently classified.
10 This was true
until at least July 1989, several months after the
derogation of al-Majid's exceptional powers. Erbil
Committee to Fight Hostile Activity, "confidential"
letter no. 3489 to Fifth Army Corps, dated July 5,
1989. The only exceptions to the rule were Amn
informers and members of the Mafarez Khaseh,
whose presence in the prohibited areas had to be
coordinated in advance with the military. The
exceptions are spelled out in an Erbil governorate
Amn letter to the internal security section
of Fifth Army Corps Command, no. Sh 3/1524, dated
February 13, 1990.
11 Between 1983
and 1988, Iraq acquired more than $2.8 billion in
U.S. agricultural products under the Commodity
Credit Corporation's (CCC) credit-guarantee program.
In 1989, the Bush administration doubled the CCC
program for Iraq, raising credits to a level
exceeding one billion dollars in 1989. In addition
to credit guarantees, the CCC program included
interest-free loans and direct sales at prices
subsidized by the U.S. government. See Middle East
Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, New York, 1990,
p.152.
12 Resool's
figures (op. cit.) closely parallel those of
the Ministry. He cites a cumulative total of 3,839
villages destroyed since 1975. The villages that
were spared include a hundred or so belonging to the
loyalist Surchi tribe in the qadha of Aqra.
On January 28, 1988, on the eve of Anfal, the
Shaqlawa Security Committee "pointed out that it
will not object to the lifting of the security
prohibition regarding these villages, due to the
fact that their population belongs to the Surchi
tribe and that most of them are volunteer members of
the National Defense Battalions. Furthermore, these
villages have been beyond the reach of the
saboteurs, their inhabitants have not collaborated
with them, and no confrontations have occurred in
the region." Amn Erbil to Amn
Shaqlawa, letter no. S T/17922 of November 21, 1988.
13 The Bakhma dam
project was conceived originally as a small-scale
irrigation and electricity-generating project.
However, after the Ba'ath came to power in 1968 it
grew more ambitious. Scheduled for completion in
1994, the dam remained only partially built by the
time of the Kurdish uprising in March 1991, when its
machinery was extensively looted and damaged. Middle
East Watch interview with a former administrator in
the Erbil headquarters of the Jahafel al-Difa'
al-Watani (or jahsh), Erbil, July 7,
1992.
14 These fourteen
villages lay between the town of Khalifan and the
Greater Zab river. Their names are listed in an
Amn Erbil report, dated December 11, 1988, as
Faqian, Kulken Kolo, Madgerdan, Mingerdan, Daljar,
Qalata Sin, Pir Marwa, Deremer, Serkand, Suka,
Serkoz, Kuska, and upper and lower Jimkei. Resool,
op. cit., pp.65-67, lists nineteen villages
in the nahyas of Salah al-Din and Harir
destroyed during December 1988. Serkand Khailani is
the only name that appears on both lists, and its
story follows.
15 On the
Mafarez Khaseh and other special jahsh
units, see above p. 22-24.
16 Middle East
Watch interview, Basirma complex, September 11,
1992. An internal Istikhbarat report on
Serkand Khailani village, dated November 1, 1988,
noted that a number of Kalashnikov rifles had been
found in this man's home, concealed in a child's
crib. Again, the match-up of documentary and
testimonial evidence is striking.
17 Letter
No.25163 from the Security Director of the
Suleimaniyeh governorate, dated October 29, 1988,
mentions executions ordered by the Ba'ath Party's
Northern Bureau and by the Revolutionary Court. One
former prisoner was brought before Military Court
No.23 in Erbil, a body with the power to impose the
death sentence. In this particular case, the court's
powers were superseded by "a special [execution]
order from Baghdad." The man eventually escaped, and
was interviewed by Middle East Watch in Khaneq
complex on August 27, 1992.
18 Secret and
confidential letter no. 19727 from the director of
Amn Suleimaniyeh to the director of Amn
Autonomous Region headquarters, August 24, 1989.
19 Handwritten
documents found in an Amn Erbil file.
20 Many Kurds in
the Khalifan area surrendered prematurely as a
result of these rumors. Another was a PUK
peshmerga named Haydar Awla Ali Muhammad-Amin,
whose arrest on September 15, 1988 is referred to in
an Amn document of September 7, 1990. Haydar
was persuaded to surrender to Amn by one
Najma Grou, a leader of the Amn-controlled
Kurdish Mafarez Khaseh. After this he
disappeared. In response to his wife's persistent
requests for news, Najma Grou told her, "Go home:
your husband is no more." Middle East Watch
interview, Galala complex, March 23, 1993.
In an earlier interview in Sadiq, July 18, 1992,
Yunis told MEW that the only person he recognized in
the group to be executed was a relative from Galala
named "Haydar Abdullah." Since Awla is a shortened
Kurdish form of the name Abdullah, this was almost
certainly the same man.
21 ibid.
22 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, July 14, 1992.
23 Middle East
Watch accompanied Hussein to the former Amn
building in Erbil on July 14, 1992, where he
identified the room in which he had been detained.
24 The
Revolutionary Command Council did in fact issue an
amnesty decree on December 14. Yet Hussein was
convinced--and his chronology bears this out--that
the date of his attempted execution was December 8.
Amnesties, as noted elsewhere, are a regular feature
of life under the Ba'athist regime, and yet another
was decreed on February 29, 1989, this one for all
those who had fled to Iran, with the exception of
PUK leader Jalal Talabani.
25 And thus of
particular interest, since the archaeological site
of Al-Hadhar, south of Mosul, was mentioned several
times as a mass execution site during Anfal. See
above p.253. Hussein's story is based on a Middle
East Watch interview, Erbil, July 14, 1992.
26 A third
reported example of post-amnesty killings involves
Omar and Rahman, the two brothers from the Sheikh
Bzeini area whose flight during the Fourth Anfal is
recounted above at pp.185-188, and who were captured
by the army in mid-June, 1988. Another prisoner who
was released under the September 6 amnesty saw them
in jail at that time, still alive, but that is the
last that was ever seen of them. Middle East Watch
interview, Daratou complex, July 15, 1992.
27 Yusef Rahim
Rashid, a lawyer with the Kurdish Human Rights
Organization (KHRO) told Middle East Watch that he
attended one such ceremony in Erbil.
28 The motive for
the 1974 bombing was apparently the KDP's decision
to reopen the University of Suleimaniyeh in Qala
Dizeh. The university had been closed down by the
regime that March.
29 RCC Northern
Affairs Committee directive no. 1925 of March 22,
1989, signed by Abd-al-Rahman Aziz Hassan. These
measures were to include the temporary deportation
to the south of families who had contact with the
"saboteurs." The directive also insists that the
"clear instructions" of Northern Bureau Command
directive no. SF/4008 of June 20, 1987 should
continue to be observed.
30 Middle East
Watch interviews with former residents, Qala Dizeh,
May 23, 1992.
31 The RCC decree
is conveyed in a circular from Amn Erbil to
all Section Security Directors, no. Sh 3/7604,
classified "secret and confidential" and dated May
17, 1989. The circular reads, "By virtue of the
Revolutionary Command Council's decree no. 271 of
April 23, 1989, it has been decided to abrogate RCC
decree no. 160 of March 24, 1987 granting special
authority to the Comrade Secretary General of the
Northern Bureau."
32 RCC decree no.
771 of December 3, 1989, signed by Saddam Hussein,
revoking RCC decree no. 997 of August 2, 1979.
33 Audiotape of a
meeting between Ali Hassan al-Majid and unnamed
officials, Kirkuk, April 15, 1989.
34 Audiotape of
meeting between Ali Hassan al-Majid and unnamed
officials, Kirkuk, May 26, 1988.
13
The Vanishing Trail
"These measures will have a deterrent effect because
(a) the prisoners will vanish without leaving a
trace;
(b) no information may be given as to their
whereabouts or their fate."
-- Nacht und Nebel Erlass (Nazi Germany's
Night and Fog Decree), modified version, February
1942.
"They have sunk into deep water. They were lost.
We have no information about them."
-- elderly female survivor from Goktapa.
Forced disappearance is the distinctive act of
terror of the modern state. It immobilizes the
survivor with doubt and fear, with unconsummated
grief and mourning that is permitted none of the
rituals of closure. The washing and clothing of the
dead, the placing of the body with its face turned
toward Mecca that is required of the devout
Muslim--these acts were not possible for the
disappeared of Anfal. In the case of those who were
executed in captivity under the routine terror of
the Ba'ath regime, a punctilious bureaucracy at
least furnished the family with the legal proof of
death. But for most of the Kurds who disappeared
during Anfal, there was not even this.
Once the campaign was over, most of the survivors
inhabited a netherworld of uncertainty. Women had
lost their breadwinners, and Islamic law forbade
them to remarry until seven years had passed since
their husbands went missing. Although the stories of
the firing squads were known and repeated, the
Kurds' squalid resettlement complexes were still
swept by rumors of Anfalakan kept alive in
secret jails in the desert, held as bargaining chips
in some future round of negotiations between the
regime and the peshmerga, taken off to other
countries--Sudan, Yemen or Jordan--to be used as
slave labor.
Before the uprising of March 1991, while the Ba'ath
Party still controlled Iraqi Kurdistan, few had the
temerity to inquire after their lost ones, fearing
that the same fate might await them or their
surviving relatives. Even leaving aside questions of
security, few would have knownhow or where to start
an inquiry into the labyrinth of the state
bureaucracy: with the district head, the qaym
maqam? the governor's office? the local police
station? the mustashar? the Ba'ath Party? the
Army base? the dreaded Amn? But some did take
the risk, and their searches--when pieced together
with Iraqi government documents and the testimony of
those who survived the camps--shed important light
on how Anfal worked. It appears to have been a
highly compartmentalized operation, with each of the
agencies involved knowing only what it needed to
know. Only a tiny circle at the heart of the Ba'ath
Party machine was ever privy to the whole story
about what happened to those who were "Anfalized."
* * *
Some survivors came to learn the truth, but only in
the most bald and unadorned terms. Rashid, a young
shepherd from Chircha Qala, at the foot of Zerda
Mountain, had managed to live through Anfal by
walking past the troops on the main road with his
farm animals. But he lost his mother, ten-year old
sister, six-year old brother and two aunts. Later he
was drafted into the same army that had captured his
family. A sympathetic Christian officer took a
liking to Rashid and told him candidly to stop
thinking about his relatives: "All the people from
Anfal have been buried with bulldozers."1
Most, however, did not even discover this much.
Nuri, an elderly man from the devastated village of
Jelamort, in the Lesser Zab valley, went to the
office of the qaym maqam of Chamchamal to
inquire after his missing son, daughter-in-law and
two-year old granddaughter. The authorities
registered their names and told him to come back
after three days. When he returned, they said that
the governorate could do nothing to help in this
case. In fact, the official told Nuri, "I can do
even less than you. You asked, but I am afraid to
ask."2
Salim, a younger man from the Sheikh Bzeini tribal
area, had been away from his village when the army
came. But the troops had captured his wife and eight
children--the eldest a boy of fifteen, the youngest
a year-old girl. Some sympathetic jahsh from
Salim's own tribehad tried bribing the soldiers,
offering them 1,000 dinars ($3,000) for the freedom
of each child. It was too late for this, the
soldiers answered; the children had already been
loaded into the trucks. After Anfal, Salim went on
the track of every rumor; he went to Kirkuk, to
Topzawa, and even to Nugra Salman. Amn
arrested him three times for his persistence. On the
last occasion they blindfolded him and warned him
never to ask about his family again.3
Mahmoud Tawfiq Muhammad, the elderly head of the
Jaff-Roghzayi tribe in one of the worst hit areas of
southern Germian, refused to take no for an answer.
Twenty members of his immediate family had vanished,
most of them small children; Mahmoud had been with
them in the fort at Qoratu, but had lost track of
them when the sexes were separated at Topzawa. After
his own release from Nugra Salman, Mahmoud traveled
to the home of Haji Ahmad Fatah, the Kurdish village
elder (mukhtar) who had been in charge of the
Dibs camp. "I kissed his shoes and begged him. But I
was told not to ask. 'You have nothing to do with
it,' they told me. 'Go to Nugra Salman.'" All that
the mukhtar would tell the old man was that
the Dibs prisoners had been transferred--but he did
not know, or would not say, where.
From Dibs, Mahmoud went up to Erbil, where his
personal connections enabled him to arrange a
meeting with the head of Amn in that city.
The security boss told him that the missing had been
sent to a place called Ar'ar, an important border
crossing point to Saudi Arabia and a resting place
for pilgrims on their way to Mecca.4
It was forbidden for anyone to visit or communicate
with them. Mahmoud pleaded with the Amn
chief, offering him 1,000 dinars for each person
freed, but the man said this was impossible: "Only
Saddam Hussein or Ali Hassan al-Majid could free
them."
The civilian governor of Erbil said that he, too,
was powerless. Despite Mahmoud's deferential gift of
a number of sheep, the Kurdish governor of
Suleimaniyeh, Sheikh Ja'far Barzinji,5
told much the samestory: many prisoners, both men
and women, were being held in Ar'ar in a facility
that was serviced by Egyptian truck drivers in the
interests of secrecy. Personally, he could do no
more than Mahmoud. The affair rested in the hands of
the president and his cousin. But in Kirkuk, the
information department of the Ba'ath Party's
Northern Bureau told Mahmoud that Majid "had no time
to meet me." In despair, he went back to
Suleimaniyeh, where he approached a certain powerful
Kurd who was known to be close to al-Majid and
frequently entertained him in his home. The man
agreed to intercede personally. "But Majid swore by
the Holy Koran that only Saddam Hussein and God
could save the disappeared." Exhausted and
dispirited, Mahmoud abandoned his search.6
* * *
The Ba'ath Party:
Alpha and Omega of the Anfal Campaign
A number of captured Iraqi documents corroborate
this kind of anecdotal evidence about the extreme
degree to which power was concentrated during the
Anfal campaign. Perhaps the most revealing case is
that of four brothers, Chaldean Catholics, who
disappeared from a Christian village near Gara
Mountain in the nahya of Sarseng, in the wake
of the Final Anfal.7
Their father "Isho," an influential local figure,
was interviewed by Middle East Watch in
Erbil
in July 1992. (see also above p.317) He explained
that the family had fled their village before Anfal
reached them. His sons--three of them deserters and
one a draft-dodger--had surrendered to the army
during the five-week grace period that followed the
September 6 amnesty; they had last been seen by
relatives who were able to visit them in the
Nizarkeh fort outside Dohuk. After this sighting,
Isho himself tried to visit the fort, but when he
arriveda guard told him that all the Christians and
Yezidis had been removed the previous day in sealed
buses. In Baharka, Isho made inquiries with both
Amn and Istikhbarat, demanding to know
why his sons had not been brought to the complex
with the rest of their family. As non-Kurds, he was
told, they were not covered by the September 6
amnesty. They had no information about the young
men's present whereabouts. Finally, the family wrote
to Saddam Hussein himself, but they never received
an answer.8
Six months after this interview, Middle East Watch
researchers happened upon the family's file in a box
of documents from the Erbil regional office of
Istikhbarat. The disappearance of Isho's four
sons is the subject of a sequence of a dozen
separate "secret and urgent" documents, beginning
with a petition from Isho's sister-in-law to Saddam
Hussein, dated January 7, 1989. She writes:
"Mr. President, Commander-in-Chief (May God Protect
and Guide Him): My heartiest greetings and great
admiration for the builder of Iraq's glory and the
realizer of victories over its despicable enemies:
I am the citizen M. ... The four sons of my
husband's brother are soldiers enlisted in the
Southern Division. Upon your announcement of a
general amnesty, they turned themselves in at Dohuk.
Since that time, we have heard nothing of their
fate.
Victorious and respected sir, please grace me with
some knowledge of their fate.
Just as one knocks on the door of your justice, it
opens on to the sweet smell of your compassion."
The petition is signed with the woman's fingerprint.
Since the case involved army deserters and draft
dodgers, the presidential office referred it to
military intelligence. It appears that
Istikhbarat conducted a serious internal
investigation into the affair, and that it was
genuinely unaware of what had happened to the four
men. Although Istikhbarat's Northern Region
headquarters complains angrily about the sloppiness
of its Mosul and Dohuk offices, and the
contradictory quality of their reports, the initial
facts of the case are quickly established. The four
brothers are known to have surrendered to military
units in Atrush on September 10, 1988, four days
into the amnesty period, and
Mosul
Isitikhbarat can find no evidence that they
"bore arms with the saboteurs." From there the
prisoners were transferred to the Party-run Returnee
Reception Committee of Dohuk and detained--as their
father already knew--in the Nizarkeh fort. Mosul
reports that the Dohuk detainees were subsequently
split up into two groups. One was sent to a fort in
the Daraman area, on the highway between Altun Kupri
and Kirkuk. The other was transferred to
Topzawa--the only reference so far found to indicate
that this Popular Army camp being used for prisoners
from the Final Anfal in Badinan.
After this, the trail goes cold. Northern Region
Istikhbarat dispatches agents to the
Baharka-Jezhnikan complex to interview the family,
as well as to each of the army forts along the
Kirkuk-Erbil road. But these inquiries yield no
fresh information. The Dohuk office might be more
helpful, an Istikhbarat captain comments
pointedly in his report to the Northern Region
director, if it were prodded by the ruling Party.
Three days later, however, on March 14, 1989, the
director makes his final report to Istikhbarat
headquarters. The four men, he writes, "were handed
over to the [Returnee] Reception Committee of Dohuk
governorate, which in turn handed them over to the
Northern Bureau Command in Ta'mim [Kirkuk]
governorate. We have no further information on their
fate."9
* * *
While Istikhbarat was clearly kept in the
dark, it seems that even Amn, which wielded
such enormous power over the lives of all Iraqis,
was unaware of the final destination of those who
disappeared during Anfal or surrendered to the
authorities under the various amnesty decrees of
1988 and 1989. The archives of Amn
headquarters in the governorate of Erbil, for
example, are full of requests to local branches for
information about hundreds of men, women and
children whose relatives have come inquiring about
their whereabouts.10
Eventually, as the survivors continued to knock on
the door of the powerful security agency seeking
"the sweet smell of compassion," Amn ordered
a change in how its standard response to them would
be worded. A handwritten Amn letter notes:
On September 25, 1990, the honorable director issued
the following directive: The phrase 'We do not have
any information about their fate' will replace the
phrase 'They were arrested during the victorious
Anfal operation and remain in detention.' The
purpose of this is to be accurate in dealing with
such an eventuality."11
Both Amn and Istikhbarat had to defer
to the final authority of the Ba'ath Party's
Northern Bureau on the matter of those who vanished.
Evidence for this can be found, for example, in a
communication from Amn Erbil that appears
insignificant at first glance. Dated August 26,
1988, this is a brief note informing the agency's
municipal office that two women "have been returned
[to Amn] by the Northern Bureau Command, due
to the fact that they are not residents of areas
that were included in the Anfal operations." While
both women are former residents of villages in the
nahya of Taqtaq, which was decimated by
Anfal, one had previously been relocated with her
family to the city of Erbil and the other to the
Qushtapa complex--and were thus not liable to be
"Anfalized." Conversely, it is clear, it would have
been up to the Northern BureauCommand to dispose
finally of anyone who was a resident of an
area affected by Anfal.12
* * *
Decree no. 160 of March 29, 1987 had made it quite
clear that Ali Hassan al-Majid was to enjoy the full
authority of the Revolutionary Command Council to
orchestrate the efforts of the whole pyramid of
other state and party agencies--military, civilian
and security--which played a role in Anfal. (see
Appendix B, pp. 355-357) And as the captured Iraqi
documents and survivor testimonies indicate, it was
the Ba'ath Party apparatus in the north, headed by
al-Majid, which weighed in its hands the fate of
each individual captured in the course of the
campaign.
There remain many unsolved mysteries about the Anfal
campaign, some of which may be answered by future
study of the captured Iraqi documents.13
The identity of the uniformed men who made up the
Anfal firing squads may remain forever a secret.
Were they Amn agents? Members of the
Republican Guard? Or were they, as seems more
likely, "comrades" of the Ba'ath Party itself?14
Why were the women and children only killed in
certain areas? Did their execution reflect patterns
of combat and resistance, or was some other
criterion used? Where are the graves of all those
who died, and how many bodies do they hold? The
answer cannot conceivably be less than 50,000, and
it may well be twice that number. When Kurdish
leaders met with Iraqi government officials in the
wake of the spring 1991 uprising, they raised the
question of the Anfal dead and mentioned a figure of
182,000--a rough extrapolation based on the number
of destroyed villages. Ali Hassan al-Majid
reportedly 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 than 100,000"--as if this
somehow mitigated the catastrophe that he and his
subordinates had visited on the Iraqi Kurds.15
The identity of the executioners, and the precise
number of their victims, may never be known--or at
least not until the files in Baghdad can be opened.
But whatever the answers to these lingering
questions, there can be no doubt that the Northern
Bureau of the ruling Ba'ath Party, and its parallel
Command, headed by RCC member Taher Tawfiq,
functioned as both the Alpha and the Omega of the
Anfal operation. And it was Ali Hassan
al-Majid--"Ali Anfal," "Ali Chemical," Iraqi's
present Minister of Defense--who gave the killers
their orders.
Al-Majid appears almost defensive in talking about
the Anfal operation with unnamed Northern Bureau
officials in January 1989. "How were we supposed to
convince them to solve the Kurdish problem and
slaughter the saboteurs?" he asks them, alluding to
the misgivings of senior military officers about the
Anfal operation. In addition, he adds, what was to
be done with so many captured civilians? "Am I
supposed to keep them in good shape?" al-Majid asks.
"What am I supposed to do with them, these
goats?....[T]ake good care of them? No, I will bury
them with bulldozers." And that is what he did.
______
1 Middle East
Watch interview, Naser complex, March 26, 1993.
2 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, April 23, 1992.
3 Middle East
Watch interview, Daratou complex, April 20, 1992.
4 On Ar'ar as a
possible mass execution site, see above p.253,
footnote 10.
5 Sheikh Ja'far,
it should be recalled, was the brother of the
notorious Qader Karam mustashar, Sheikh
Mu'tassem Barzinji. Sheikh Ja'far was also
reportedly the main point of liaison between Ali
Hassan al-Majid and the mustashars duringthe
Anfal campaign.
6 Middle East
Watch interview, Sumoud complex, May 20, 1992.
7 All names and
locations in this account have been altered or
omitted to protect the witnesses.
8 Middle East
Watch interview, Erbil, July 7, 1992. Further
information on this case was provided by additional
interviews with former residents of the village.
9 Classified
correspondence between Istikhbarat national
headquarters, Northern Regional headquarters, and
Dohuk and Mosul offices, February 12 to March 14,
1989.
It should be
recalled that the September 6 amnesty decree
stipulated that anyone surrendering after October
9--not the case here--was to be taken into
military custody and then handed over to the
Northern Bureau Command.
10 The Amn
requests examined by Middle East Watch were issued
between June and August 1989. They refer, however,
to detentions and surrenders as far back as the
Second Anfal in April 1988.
11 Handwritten
internal memo from the "Person in Charge of
Political Affairs," Amn Erbil, October 18,
1990.
12 Amn
Erbil to Amn municipal command, letter no.
Sh2/12809, classified "secret" and dated August 26,
1988. This document is also an excellent
illustration of both the meticulous bureaucratic
procedures and the rigid logic of Anfal. Individual
detainees were evidently evaluated on a case-by-case
basis before a decision was made about their fate.
Although it is noted that one of these two women is
"politically independent" and the other a
"housewife," it is not this which saves them, but
their place of residence. This appears to be the key
to the logic of the whole Anfal operation.
13 By the time of
the publication of this report, Middle East Watch
had scrutinized only a small proportion of the Iraqi
documents captured by the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan. The results of MEW's continuing research
into these unique materials will be detailed in
future reports.
14 This tentative
conclusion is supported by two factors. One is the
known subordination of Amn, Istikhbarat
and other agencies to the Ba'ath Party in all
aspects of the Anfal campaign. The other is the
frequent reference, in Revolutionary Command Council
decrees and other documents, to the Party as the
agency responsible for executing draft dodgers and
deserters--terms whichbecame virtually synonymous,
as we have seen, with anyone living in the
"prohibited areas" of the Kurdish countryside.
15 This remark
was reported to Middle East Watch by Kurdish
officials present at the meeting, and has appeared
in a number of press reports. See, inter alia,
Makiya, "The Anfal," Harper's Magazine, May,
1992, pp.58-59.
Appendix
Appendix A
The Ali Hassan Al-Majid Tapes
The following are selected remarks by Ali Hassan
al-Majid, Secretary General of the Ba'ath Party's
Northern Bureau, from a number of meetings with
senior Ba'ath officials in 1988 and 1989. Audiotapes
of more than a dozen of these meetings were
recovered from Iraqi government offices and from
al-Majid's home in Kirkuk during the failed Kurdish
uprising in March 1991.
1. Meeting with members of the Northern Bureau
and governors of the Autonomous Region of Iraqi
Kurdistan, April 15, 1988.
By next summer there will be no more villages
remaining spread out here and there, but only
complexes. It'll be just like the hen when she puts
the chicks under her wing. We'll put the people in
the complexes and keep an eye on them. We'll no
longer let them live in the villages where the
saboteurs can go and visit them. Emigration from the
villages to the city is necessary in the north of
Iraq.
From now on I won't give the villagers flour, sugar,
kerosene, water or electricity as long as they
continue living there. Let them come closer to me to
hear me, so that I can tell them the things I
believe and want in ideology, education and common
sense. Why should I let them live there like donkeys
who don't know anything? For the wheat? I don't want
their wheat. We've been importing wheat for the last
twenty years. Let's increase it for another five
years.
I will prohibit large areas; I will prohibit any
presence in them. What if we prohibit the whole
basin from Qara Dagh to Kifri to Diyala to
Darbandikhan to Suleimaniyeh? What good is this
basin? What did we ever get from them? Imagine how
much we paid out and lost on those areas. How many
good citizens are there among those people, and how
many bad ones?
What went wrong? What happened? Thirty, twenty,
twenty-five years of saboteur activity. Imagine how
many martyrs we have!.... Now you can't go from
Kirkuk to Erbil any more without an armored vehicle.
All of this basin, from Koysinjaq to here
[Kirkuk]...I'm going to evacuateit. I will evacuate
it as far as Gweir and Mosul. No human beings except
on the main roads. For five years I won't allow any
human existence there. I don't want their
agriculture. I don't want tomatoes; I don't want
okra and cucumbers. If we don't act in this way the
saboteurs' activities will never end, not for a
million years. These are all just notes, but with
the help of God we will apply them very soon, not
more than a month from now. In the summer nothing
will be left.
2. Meeting with Northern Bureau members and
directors of the Ba'ath Party headquarters in
the northern governorates: tape is dated
May 26, 1988, but from context appears to be 1987.
(Response to a question about the success of the
deportation campaign):
As a matter of fact what we have achieved is
something that the party and the leadership never
managed to do until 1987. Some of it was just the
help and mercy of God. Nothing else. Otherwise if
you just go and conduct military exercises for the
troops who were used in the campaign you will have
more casualties than we had. Imagine in such an
exercise how many martyrs and casualties there will
be!....
What happened? Are these the saboteurs? Are these
the people you were afraid of? This is the reality
of the saboteurs, and you have all these facilities
and this capacity. They could not confront you. In
the past they were confronting a division with just
a few machine guns. This time they were just
shelling us from far away with light artillery.
Some of you who were working here at the time when I
arrived, so motivated with this duty, perhaps you
said in your hearts, "OK, wait a minute! Wait a
minute! The people who were here before you said the
same things and then didn't do anything!" You will
be forced to take action. All those years and the
saboteurs still existed. At a time when we had this
huge military! I swear to God it was not done in
that way. All the Iraqi troops couldn't have done
what we did. But this [deportation] hurt them. It
kills them.
(voice identified as Abu Muhammad: Only God can do
more than you. Otherwise you can do anything. This
Ba'ath Party can do anything.)
The saboteurs watch the orders and directives. The
orders are not that strong. The previous ones were a
hundred times stronger. But they were not combined
with a belief on the part of those executing them.
Now that exists. We said that at that date we will
start to implement the deportation campaign. And we
did it everywhere, with the help of God. The same
day [in 1987] they captured Qara Dagh in
retaliation.
Jalal Talabani asked me to open a special channel of
communication with him. That evening I went to
Suleimaniyeh and hit them with the special
ammunition.1
That was my answer. We continued the deportations. I
told the mustashars that they might say that
they like their villages and that they won't leave.
I said I cannot let your village stay because I will
attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your
family will die. You must leave right now. Because I
cannot tell you the same day that I am going to
attack with chemical weapons. I will kill them all
with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything?
The international community? Fuck them! The
international community and those who listen to
them.
Even if the war with
Iran
stops and the Iranians withdraw from all occupied
lands, I will not negotiate with him [Talabani] and
I will not stop the deportations.
This is my intention, and I want you to take serious
note of it. As soon as we complete the deportations,
we will start attacking them everywhere according to
a systematic military plan. Even their strongholds.
In our attacks we will take back one third or one
half of what is under their control. If we can try
to take two-thirds, then we will surround them in a
small pocket and attack them with chemical weapons.
I will not attack them with chemicals just one day,
but I will continue to attack them with chemicals
for fifteen days. Then I will announce that anyone
who wishes to surrender with his gun will be allowed
to do so. I will publish one million copies of this
leaflet and distribute it in the North, in Kurdish,
Sorani, Badinani and Arabic. I will not say it is
from the Iraqi government. I will not let the
government get involved. I will say it is from here
[the Northern Bureau]. Anyone willing to come back
is welcome, and those who do not return will be
attacked again with new, destructive chemicals. I
will not mention the name of the chemicalbecause
that is classified information. But I will say with
new destructive weapons that will destroy you. So I
will threaten them and motivate them to surrender.
Then you will see that all the vehicles of God
Himself will not be enough to carry them all. I
think and expect that they will be defeated. I swear
that I am sure we will defeat them.
I told the expert comrades that I need guerrilla
groups in Europe to kill whoever they see from them
[the saboteurs]. I will do it, with the help of God.
I will defeat them and follow them to Iran. Then I
will ask the mujaheddin to attack them there.2
3. Meeting with unnamed officials,
August 1, 1988.
...Any Arab who changes his ethnicity to Kurdish is
doing so to avoid serving in the army. This is a big
problem. What shall we do about it?.... Why did
Mosul [governorate] register them as Kurds? We asked
them to deport every Kurd who lives there and send
them to the mountains to live like goats. Fuck them!
Why do you feel embarrassed by them?
We deported them from Mosul without any
compensation. We razed their houses. We said come
on, go, go! But those who are already fighters, we
tell them from the beginning that they must go and
settle in the complexes. After that we will tell
them to go to the Autonomous Region. We will not get
into any arguments with them. I read the pledge for
them and they must sign it. Then wherever I find
[passage unclear], I will smash their heads. These
kind of dogs, we will crush their heads. We will
read the pledge for them: I the undersigned admit
that I must live and settle in the Autonomous
Region. Otherwise I am ready to accept any kind of
punishment including the death penalty. Then I will
put the pledge in my pocket and tell the Amn
director to let him go wherever he wants. After a
period of time, I will ask where is he? They will
tell me, here he is. The Ba'ath Party director must
write to me saying that the following people are
living in that place. Immediately I will say blow
him away, cut him open like a cucumber.
Do you want to increase the Arab population with
these bloody people?.... We must Arabize your area
[Mosul]--and only real Arabs, notYezidis who say one
day that they are Kurds and the next that they are
Arabs. We turned a blind eye to the Yezidi people
joining the jahsh in the beginning, in order
to stop the saboteurs from increasing. But apart
from that, what use are the Yezidis? No use.
4. Northern Bureau meeting to review the
campaigns of 1987 and 1988; the tape is undated, but
is in a batch dated January 21 and 22, 1989.
The most dangerous stage of the threat to Iraq was
between August 1987 and April 1988. It was a
dangerous situation. We started to do serious work
on the military front from February 18 to September
4, 1988.
All the successive commanders of the First Corps and
the Fifth Corps: Lt. Gen. Nazar [al-Khazraji] and
Sultan Hashem of the First Corps and Tali'a
al-Durri, the martyr al-Hadithi, Muhammad and Ne'ama
Fares and Ayad of the Fifth Corps... All these men
that I mentioned are commanders who have been
serving in the north of Iraq since they were
lieutenants. The first one among them to join the
Ba'ath Party was Tali'a al-Durri.
When we made the decision to destroy and
collectivize the villages and draw a dividing line
[i.e. the so-called "red line"] between us and the
saboteurs, the first one to express his doubts to me
and before the President was Tali'a al-Durri. The
first one who alarmed me was Tali'a al-Durri. To
this day the impact of Tali'a is evident. He didn't
destroy all the villages that I asked him to at that
time. And this is the longest-standing member of the
Ba'ath Party. What about the other people then? How
were we to convince them to solve the Kurdish
problem and slaughter the saboteurs?
So we started to show these senior commanders on TV
that [the saboteurs] had surrendered. Am I supposed
to keep them in good shape? What am I supposed to do
with them, these goats? Then a message reaches me
from that great man, the father [i.e. Saddam
Hussein], saying take good care of the families of
the saboteurs and this and that. The general command
brings it to me. I put his message to my head.3
But take good care of them? No, I will bury them
with bulldozers. Then they ask me for the names of
all the prisoners in order to publish them. I said,
"Weren't you satisfied by what you saw on television
and read in the newspaper?" Where am I supposed to
put all this enormous number of people? I started to
distribute them among the governorates. I had to
send bulldozers hither and thither...4
5. Meeting to welcome Hassan Ali al-Amiri, his
successor as Secretary General of the Northern
Bureau,
April 15, 1989.
I would like to admit that I am not and will not be
the right person for the current stable situation in
the North....For this current peaceful and stable
situation, Comrade Hassan Ali is the right person. I
am ready to come back and do whatever you think is
necessary, though I would like to remain a member of
the Northern Bureau.
I hope that the comrades in the North will not ask
Comrade Hassan Ali to take administrative measures
and do other things that he cannot do. Because that
stage is finished. It will no longer be allowed for
a member of the leadership to have power over the
army, because the exceptional situation is over.
These powers are not being withdrawn from Comrade
Hassan Ali because he is not up to the task, but
because that stage has now finished.
In my first meeting in April 1987 with the army
corps commanders, Amn and police directors,
governors and Ba'ath Party directors, we decided to
deport all the villagers in order to isolate the
saboteurs. We made it in two stages. The first stage
started on April 21 and ran until May 21. The second
stage ran from May 21 to June 21. From June 22
anyone who was arrested in those areas was to be
killed immediately without any hesitation, according
to the directives which are still in force.
In one of the meetings with the army chiefs of staff
I was asked to postpone the campaign for a month by
one of our best commanders. I said no, not even for
one day. From now on our slogan will be to wipe out
saboteur activity. That is our objective. That is
the objective of this stage. Anyone who thinks he is
not capable of implementing this must tell me now,
One of the best commanders, the commander of the
FifthCorps, was reluctant, despite me providing him
with more facilities than the First Corps. The
result now is that the saboteurs are finished, and
they had frozen 40 percent of Iraqi power.
When the [September 1988] amnesty was announced, I
was about to get mad. But as a responsible party
member I said OK. I said probably we will find some
good ones among them [the Kurds], since they are our
people too. But we didn't find any, never. If you
ask me about the senior officials of the Kurds,
which ones are good and loyal, I will say only the
governors of Erbil and Suleimaniyeh. Apart from
those two there are no loyal or good ones.
I cry when I see a tragic show or movie. One day I
cried when I saw a woman who was lost and without a
family in a movie. But I would like to tell you that
I did what I did and what I was supposed to do. I
don't think you could do more than what I could do.
I would like to speak about two points: one,
arabization; and two, the shared zones between the
Arab lands and the Autonomous Region. The point that
we are talking about is Kirkuk. When I came, the
Arabs and Turkomans were not more than fifty-one
percent of the total population of Kirkuk.5
Despite everything, I spent sixty million dinars
until we reached the present situation. Now it is
clear. For your information, the Arabs who were
brought to Kirkuk didn't raise the percentage to
sixty percent. Then we issued directives. I
prohibited the Kurds from working in
Kirkuk,
the neighborhoods and the villages around it,
outside the Autonomous Region....
Kirkuk is a mixture of nations, religions and
doctrines. The people we deported from May 21 to
June 21, not one of them was from the prohibited
areas. But they were under the control of the
saboteurs, whether they were for them or against
them.
1 This presumably
refers to the April 1987 chemical attack on the PUK
headquarters in the Jafati Valley.
2 Following their
expulsion from France in 1986, the People's
Mujaheddin of Iran relocated to Iraq and came under
the patronage of the Ba'ath Party.
3 The sense
conveyed in the Arabic phrase is that Saddam
Hussein's wish is always al-Majid's command--but
not, he goes on to say defensively, in this
instance.
4 The tape is cut
off in mid-sentence at this point.
5 It is unclear
here whether al-Majid is referring to the city or
the governorate of Kirkuk.
Appendix B
The Perpetrators of Anfal:
A Road-Map to the Principal Agencies and
Individuals
· The Revolutionary Command Council:
The highest formal authority in Iraq is the ruling
Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), headed by
President SADDAM HUSSEIN. While Saddam involved
himself personally in operational aspects of Anfal
through the Office of the Presidency of the
Republic, supreme powers for handling Kurdish
affairs between 1987-1989 were vested in his cousin,
ALI HASSAN AL-MAJID.
·
The Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party:
Anfal was a Ba'ath Party operation, commanded by the
party's Northern Bureau, buttressed administratively
by the Northern Bureau Command and the Northern
Affairs Committee of the RCC. Under RCC decree
no.160 of March 29, 1987, the Northern Bureau's
Secretary General, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was given
extraordinary powers over all other state, party,
military and security agencies. Al-Majid's
co-signatory on Northern Bureau Command orders was
TAHER TAWFIQ AL-ANI, secretary of the RCC's Northern
Affairs Committee. Deputy Secretary of the Northern
Bureau Command was RADHI HASSAN SALMAN.
Under al-Majid's command, the following were the
other main agencies involved in Anfal.
· The Iraqi Army and Air Force
(including commandos, special forces, chemical
weapons units, engineering corps): all field
combat operations; village burnings and destruction;
mass transportation of detainees. The Iraqi Defense
Minister at the time of Anfal was Gen. ADNAN
KHAIRALLAH (later deceased). The Army Chief of Staff
was Brig. Gen. NIZAR ABD-AL-KARIM AL-KHAZRAJI. Most
Anfal operations were handled by the Kirkuk-based
First Corps (commander Lt. Gen. SULTAN HASHEM) and
the Erbil-based Fifth Corps (commander Brig. Gen.
YUNIS MOHAMMED AL-ZAREB).
Lt. Gen. Hashem was also the field commander of the
First Anfal operation; Brig. Gen. AYAD KHALIL ZAKI
and Brig. Gen. BAREQ ABDULLAH AL-HAJ HUNTA commanded
the Second and Third Anfals respectively. The field
commanders of other Anfals are not known.
· Republican Guard:
elite combat operations during the First and Second
Anfals.
· General Military Intelligence Directorate (MUDIRIYAT
AL-ISTIKHBARAT AL-ASKARIYEH AL-AMEH):
supervision of initial holding facilities such as
the Qoratu and Nizarkeh forts; some interrogation;
matters affecting draft dodgers and deserters; field
command of the jahsh. Two of Istikhbarat's
four regional commands played key roles in Anfal.
The commander of Eastern Sector Istikhbarat
was KHALED MUHAMMAD ABBAS; the commander of Northern
Sector Istikhbarat was FARHAN MUTLAQ SALEH.
· General Security Directorate (MUDIRIYAT AL-AMN
AL-AMEH)
(including the special units of Kurdish agents known
as Mafarez Khaseh): case-by-case
intelligence-gathering and surveillance of the
population; interrogation of prisoners at Topzawa
and other detention camps; supervision of informers;
tracking down escapees and those sheltering them;
monitoring of complexes. The director of Amn
for the Kurdistan Autonomous Region was
ABD-AL-RAHMAN AZIZ HUSSEIN.
· Emergency Forces (QUWAT AL-TAWARE'): Units under Ba'ath Party command, including
members of the jahsh and Amn and
police agents, in charge of urban intelligence and
counter-terrorism and supervision of initial
detention facilities in the city of Suleimaniyeh,
and perhaps other locations.
· National Defense Battalions (JAHAFEL AL-DIFA'
AL-WATANI, or jahsh):
auxiliary role in combat operations; roundups and
surrender of prisoners; guard duty at collection
points.
· Popular Army (JAYSH AL-SHA'ABI):
guard duties at principal transit facilities
(Topzawa, Dibs etc.)
· Inter-Agency Committees:
a number of inter-agency groups were in charge of
discrete aspects of the Anfal operation and
associated anti-Kurdish campaigns during the
1987-1989 period. Normally chaired by a Ba'ath Party
official, most included representatives of Amn,
the Army's First and Fifth Corps and/or
Istikhbarat, the Iraqi Police, and civilian
authorities. The most notable were the following:
· Returnee Reception Committees (LAJNET
ISTIQBAL AL-A'IDIN): responsible for those
"returning to the national ranks" under the General
Amnesty between September 6 and October 9, 1988 and
other later amnesties;
· Security Committees (LAJNET AL-AMNIYEH)
and Committees to Fight Hostile Activity (LAJNET
MUKAFAHAT AL-NASHAT AL-MU'ADI): organized to
combat the peshmerga at the governorate and
local level respectively; and a number of ad
hoc committees which monitored the economic blockade
of the "prohibited areas," controlled food rationing
and attempted to prevent smuggling;
· Follow-up Committees (LAJNET AL-MUTABA'A):
charged with ensuring compliance with laws governing
returnees, tracking down escapees and otherwise
tying up the loose ends of the campaign.
In addition, a number of civilian ministries played
supportive roles in Anfal: For example, the
Agriculture Ministry harvested and disposed of the
abandoned 1988 crop; the Finance Ministry
administered the confiscated property of "saboteurs"
and oversaw house demolitions; while the Real Estate
Bank arranged loans for new housing in the
complexes.
Appendix C
Known Chemical Attacks
in Iraqi
Kurdistan, 1987-1988
This table includes only those attacks that Middle
East Watch has been able to document through
eyewitness testimony. The true figure may be
considerably higher, since we have received many
other unconfirmed reports and allegations of
chemical weapons attacks during 1987-1988. Based on
our field interviews, at least sixty villages, as
well as the town of Halabja, were attacked with
mustard gas, nerve gas, or a combination of the two;
The Iraqi regime appears to have used chemical
weapons for at least four complementary purposes:
(a) To attack base camps and main-force
concentrations of Kurdish peshmerga. This
logic accounts for many of the attacks on the Jafati
valley (First Anfal), the Qara Dagh area (Second
Anfal), the Balisan and Smaquli valleys (Fifth,
Sixth and Seventh Anfals) and Zewa Shkan (Final
Anfal);
(b) To harass and kill retreating peshmerga
as Anfal progressed. Attacks of this sort include
those on Shanakhseh (#14 in the accompanying table),
Zerda mountain (#19), Tazashar (#20) and the
Shaqlawa-Rawanduz area (#26 and 27);
(c) To inflict exemplary collective punishment on
civilians for their support for the peshmerga.
The most dramatic case is the bombing of Halabja
after the seizure of the town by peshmerga
and Iranian revolutionary guards. Others include the
1987 attacks on Sheikh Wasan and Balisan (#4), and
the Anfal attacks on Sayw Senan (#15) and Goktapa
(#22);
(d) To spread terror amongst the civilian population
as a whole, flushing villagers out of their homes to
facilitate their capture, relocation and killing.
The opening of almost every phase of the Anfal
campaign was marked by attacks of this sort, but
they are most apparent in the Final Anfal (Khatimat
al-Anfal) in the Badinan region, where more than
thirtyvillages were bombed simultaneously along an
east-west strip on the morning of August 25, 1988.
While a distinction between these different kinds of
targets is helpful in understanding the tactical
thinking behind the Iraqi campaign, it is without
meaning in legal terms. Chemical weapons are by
their nature indiscriminate, and their use is
outlawed under any circumstances.
DATE (M/D/Y) LOCATION MEANS DEATHS
1. 4/15/87 Sergalou-Bergalou air not known
2. 4/15/87 Gojar mountain, Mawat rajima* not
known
3. 4/15/87 Zewa Shkan air not known
4. 4/16/87 Sheikh Wasan, Balisan air 225-400**
5. 5/?/87 Ja'faran (Qara Dagh) rajima --
6. 5/?/87 Serko (Qara Dagh) air --
7. 5/27/87 Bileh, Malakan (village and air 1+
valley)
8. 5-7/87 Bergalou, Haladin, air + 7+
Yakhsamar, Sekaniyan and rajima
surrounding areas
(repeated attacks)
9. 2/?/88 Sheikh Bzeini area air --
10. 2/?/88 Takiyeh, Balagjar air --
11. 3/16/88 Halabja air 3,200-5,000
FIRST ANFAL (JAFATI VALLEY)
12. 2/23/88 Yakhsamar rajima 5
13. 2/23-3/18/88 Sergalou, Bergalou, Haladin air +
and neighboring villages and rajima not known
mountains (constant attacks)
14. 3/22/88 Shanakhseh air up to 28
SECOND ANFAL (QARA DAGH)
15. 3/22/88 Sayw Senan rajima 78-87
16. 3/23/88 Dukan rajima not known
17. 3/24/88 Ja'faran rajima --
18. 3/24/88 Masoyi helicopter --
19. c.3/30/88
Zerda
Mountain (Qara Dagh) rajima --
THIRD ANFAL (GERMIAN)
20. 4/10/88 Tazashar air 15-25
FOURTH ANFAL (LESSER ZAB VALLEY)
21. 5/3/88 Askar air 9
22.
5/3/88 Goktapa air 154-300
FIFTH, SIXTH AND SEVENTH ANFAL (SHAQLAWA-RAWANDUZ)
23. 5/15/88 Wara air 37
24. 5/23/88 Seran; Balisan, Hiran and air 2+
Smaquli valleys
25. 5/26/88 Akoyan, Faqian, Rashki rajima --
Baneshan mountain
26. 7/31/88 Malakan, Seran, Garawan; air 13+
Balisan, Hiran, Smaquli and
Benmerd valleys
27. 8/8-8/26/88 Balisan valley and adjacent air not
known
areas (constant attacks)
FINAL ANFAL (BADINAN)***
28. 8/24/88 Zewa Shkan air + not known
rajima
29. 8/25/88 Birjinni air 4
30. 8/25/88 Tilakru air not known
31. 8/25/88 Gelnaski air --
32. 8/25/88 Tuka, Barkavreh air 14-15
33. 8/25/88 Warmilleh, Bilejaneh air --
34. 8/25/88 Ikmala, Heseh, Khrabeh air 3-6
35. 8/25/88 Ruseh, Nazdureh air 1+
36. 8/25/88 Berrabareh air --
37. 8/25/88 Swareh, Spindar, Avok, Sidara air 2+
(south side of
Gara
Mountain)
38. 8/25/88 Mergeti, Bawarkeh Kavri and air not
known
other villages (north side of
Gara
Mountain)
39. 8/25/88 Gizeh, Rodinya, Shirana and air 9+
other villages (center of
Gara
Mountain)
40. 8/25/88 Baluka air not known
* truck-mounted multiple barrel artillery.
** the dead include two busloads of adult men and
teenage boys subsequently disappeared from Amn
captivity.
*** Final Anfal fatality statistics refer only to
on-site deaths; they exclude later deaths from the
effects of chemicals.
Appendix D
Sample Mass Disappearances
During Anfal, by Region
This table attempts to show the pattern, not the
scale, of civilian disappearances and presumed mass
killings during each successive phase of the Anfal
campaign. Representing only a very small fraction of
the total numbers lost during Anfal, it includes
only those who were reported by name, or by precise
numerical count, during more than 350 Middle East
Watch field interviews with survivors.
First Anfal
No meaningful figures exist and there is no evidence
to suggest mass disappearance of civilians. Recorded
fatalities from four villages--Haladin, Sergalou,
Qara Chatan (nahya Surdash) and Maluma (nahya
Kareza)--seem to refer to deaths from bombing,
shelling, chemical attacks, exposure and cold.
Second Anfal
nahya villages total men women children unspecified
disappeared
Qara Dagh/
Serchinar (a)9 56 32 -- -- 24
Qara Dagh/
Serchinar (b) 5 103 23 27 17 36
TOTAL: 14 159 55 27 17 60
(a) = villages whose inhabitants fled to
Suleimaniyeh
(b) = villages whose inhabitants fled to Germian
Third Anfal
nahya villages total men women children unspecified
disappeared
Qader Karam (a)13 148 129 -- -- 19
Qader Karam (b) 8 208 110 6 27 65
Qara Hanjir 1 3 3 -- -- --
Qara Hassan 1 -- -- -- -- --
Altun Kupri 1 8 8 -- -- --
Sengaw1
9 196 60 11 21 104
Tilako 7 200 17 27 69 87
Kalar2
1 200 6 2 3 189
Serqala 2 82 6 3 10 63
Peibaz 5 273 24 22 54 173
TOTAL: 48 1318 363 71 184 700
(a) = areas where no combat is reported in army
documents
(b) = areas of combat (Gulbagh
Valley, Tazashar southward)
Fourth Anfal
nahya villages total men women children unspecified
disappeared
Aghjalar 10 155 47 29 79 --
Shwan 7 68 43 9 16 --
Taqtaq 5 162 22 11 16 113
TOTAL: 22 385 112 49 111 113
Fifth, Sixth, Seventh Anfals
(nahyas Khalifan, Rawanduz, Harir)
nahya villages total men women children unspecified
disappeared
TOTAL: 5 123 59 7 6 51
Final Anfal
(a) Kurdish villages
(b) Christian/Yezidi villages
nahya villages total men women children unspecified
disappeared
Sarseng (a) 17 189 189 -- -- --
al-Doski (a) 7 175 175 -- -- --
Zawita (a) 1 1 1 -- -- --
al-Guli (a) 2 30 30 -- -- --
al-Sindi (a) 3 42 42 -- -- --
Berwari Bala (a)2 40 40 -- -- --
Amadiya (a) 1 9 9 -- -- 9
Nerwa Reikan (a)3 155 155 -- -- --
Sarseng (b) 3 86 11 13 26 36
al-Doski (b) 1 34 11 11 3 9
Berwari Bala (b)1 6 4 2 -- --
Deralouk (b) 1 17 6 2 9 --
Nerwa Reikan (b)1 7 2 2 3 --
ALL (a) 36 632 6323
-- -- --
ALL (b) 7 150 34 30 41 45
TOTAL: 43 782 666 30 41 45
OVERALL
TOTAL: 132 2767 1255 184 359 969
AS PERCENTAGE 100.0 45.4 6.6 13.0 35.0
1 The heaviest
pattern of mass disappearances from Sengaw appears
to reflect paths of flight--either into southern
Germian or toward Chamchamal through the Gulbagh
Valley.
2 The figure is
an approximation, but the witness reported that
almost all those who disappeared were women and
children.
3 Includes five
boys aged 12 or 13.
Appendix E
Glossary of Arabic and Kurdish Terms
Amn: Security (as in Mudiriyat al-Amn al-Ameh,
General Security Directorate)
Chatta: Bandit or brigand; derogatory term for
jahsh in Badinan region
Intifada: Uprising
Istikhbarat: Military Intelligence
Jahsh: Donkey foal; derogatory term for Kurdish
National Defense Battalions
Lak: Peshmerga Branch Command (KDP)
Mafarez Khaseh: Special Unit (Kurdish section of
Amn)
Maghawir: Commandos
Malband: Peshmerga Regional Command (PUK)
Mujamma'a: Complex or collective village used for
Kurdish resettlement
Mukhabarat: Foreign Intelligence Agency
Mustashar: Adviser or consultant; Kurdish tribal
commander of a jahsh unit
Nahya: Administrative unit; district center, and
the villages within its jurisdiction
Peshmerga: "Those who face death"; Kurdish
guerrilla fighters
Qadha: The largest administrative unit within a
governorate
Rajima: Truck-mounted multiple-barrel artillery,
sometimes used to deliver chemical weapons
Sura: Chapter of the Koran
Teep: Division; basic PUK military unit within
the malband
