The Anfal
Campaign
(Genocide)
Lesson 3
Historical Context
• Anfal--"the Spoils"--is the name of the eighth surah 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.
Administrative Context
• 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
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.
Terminology of the Baath regime
• 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.
Barzan
Qushtapa
Rawanduz
Soran
• 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.
Anfal in Iraqi Newspapers
• 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
• 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 is nothing 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,
• The majority of the women, children and elderly people
were released from the camps after the September 6
amnesty. But none of the Anfal 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.
• By the most conservative estimates, 50,000 rural Kurds
died during Anfal. While males from approximately
fourteen to fifty were routinely killed en masse, a number
of questions surround the selection criteria that were used
to order the murder of younger children and entire
families.
Nughra salman
The End Of Anfal
• 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."
