The Muslims need to answer these crimes of one of the largest gendercidal massacres of modern times. It was not Jews, Christians or anyone else; it was your own leaders mercilessly wasting their own people. "Final solution" to the Kurdish problem undertaken within months of al-Majid's arrival in his post. It would be known as "al-Anfal" ("The Spoils"), a reference to the eighth sura of the Qur'an, which details revelations that the Prophet Muhammad received after the first great victory of Islamic forces in A.D. 624. "I shall cast into the unbelievers' hearts terror," reads one of the verses; "so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them ... the chastisement of the Fire is for the unbelievers." Anfal, officially conducted between February 23 and September 6, 1988, Send these mails to Al Jazeera, let them run few programmes on htis too. Let them shame their own people in the people.
It was war against own populace. Those who talk of rights were quiet. Why? Why these Ulema were not standing up to protect their own brethren from ass annihilation form the hands of their own leaders?
Martin van Bruinessen writesAnswer these crimes agaisnt their own people...Genocide against women,the elderly, and children.
It was these displaced populations of Barzani tribespeople who, after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, would fall prey to one of the largest gendercidal massacres of modern times. Martin van Bruinessen writes:
In [July-]August 1983, Iraqi security troops rounded up the men of the Barzani tribe from four resettlement camps near Arbil. These people were not engaged in any antigovernment activities. ... Two of Barzani's sons at that time led the Kurdistan Democratic Party and were engaged in guerrilla activities against the Baghdad government, but only a part of the tribe was with them. ... All eight thousand men of this group, then, were taken from their families and transported to southern Iraq. Thereafter they disappeared. All efforts to find out what happened to them or where they had gone, including diplomatic inquiries by several European countries, failed. It is feared that they are dead. The KDP [Kurdish Democratic Party] has received consistent reports from sources within the military that at least part of this group has been used as guinea pigs to test the effects of various chemical agents. (van Bruinessen, "Genocide in Kurdistan?," in George J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions ([University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994], pp. 156-57, emphasis added.)
One Barzani woman described the roundup of the menfolk: "Before dawn, as people were getting dressed and ready to go to work, all the soldiers charged through the camp [Qushtapa]. 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 preacher 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 Qur'an [Koran] and begged the soldiers not to take their men away." In 1993, Saddam Hussein strongly hinted at the final fate of the Barzani men: "They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant, and we meted out a stern punishment to them, and they went to hell." As Human Rights Watch noted, "In many respects, the 1983 Barzani operation foreshadowed the techniques that would be used on a much larger scale during the Anfal campaign." (Human Rights Watch, Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 4, 26-27.) Khaled Salih notes that "No doubt, the absence of any international outcry encouraged Baghdad to believe that it could get away with an even larger operation without any hostile reaction. In this respect the Ba'ath Party seems to have been correct in its calculations and judgement of the international inaction." (Khaled, "Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq"; see also "Who was responsible?," below.)
Aftermath of Iraqi chemical attack on Halabji, March 1988.
Among the most horrific features of the Iraqi campaigns against the Kurds in the 1980s was the regime's resort to chemical weapons strikes against civilian populations. On April 16, 1987, a chemical raid on the Balisan valley killed dozens of civilians; in its wake, "some seventy men were taken away in buses and, like the Barzanis, never seen again. The surviving women and children were dumped on the plain outside Erbil and left to fend for themselves." (Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?, p. 230.) Less than a year later, on March 16, 1988, a far more concentrated chemical attack was launched on the town of Halabji, near the Iranian border, which had briefly been held by a combined force of Kurdish rebels and Iranian troops. Thousands of civilians died, and with the town still under Iranian occupation after the raid, journalists and photographers were able to reach the scene. "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 noncombatants." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 72.) Although it took place during the Anfal campaign, however, the attack on Halabji is not normally considered part of that campaign.
The gendercide
In March 1987, Saddam Hussein's cousin from his hometown of Tikrit, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was appointed secretary-general of the Ba'ath Party's Northern Region, which included Iraqi Kurdistan. Under al-Majid, who "even by the standards of the Ba'ath security apparatus ... had a particular reputation for brutality," control of policies against the Kurdish insurgents passed from the Iraqi army to the Ba'ath Party itself. This was the prelude to the intended "final solution" to the Kurdish problem undertaken within months of al-Majid's arrival in his post. It would be known as "al-Anfal" ("The Spoils"), a reference to the eighth sura of the Qur'an, which details revelations that the Prophet Muhammad received after the first great victory of Islamic forces in A.D. 624. "I shall cast into the unbelievers' hearts terror," reads one of the verses; "so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them ... the chastisement of the Fire is for the unbelievers." Anfal, officially conducted between February 23 and September 6, 1988, would have eight stages altogether, seven of them targeting areas controlled by the PUK. For these assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000 soldiers with air support -- matched against Kurdish guerrilla forces that numbered no more than a few thousand.
On June 20, 1987, a crucial directive for the Anfal campaign, SF/4008, was issued under al-Majid's signature. Of greatest significance is clause 5. Referring to those areas designated "prohibited zones," al-Majid ordered 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." However, it seems clear from the application of this policy that "those between the ages of 15 and 70" meant "those males" in the designated age range. HRW/ME, for example, takes this as given, writing that clause 5's "order [was] to kill all adult males," and later: "Under the terms of al-Majid's June 1987 directives, death was the automatic penalty for any male of an age to bear arms who was found in an Anfal area." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 11, 14.) A subsequent directive on September 6, 1987, supports this conclusion: it calls for "the deportation of ... families to the areas where there saboteur relatives are ..., except for the male [members], between the ages of 12 inclusive and 50 inclusive, who must be detained." (Cited in Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 298.)
Iqbal Latif
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