[Firefox]

What about the Kurds

Code:

http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html

Saddam gassed his own people.

Aftermath of Iraqi chemical attack on Halabji, March 1988.











How many died?

According to HRW/ME, "at least fifty thousand rural Kurds ... died in Anfal alone, and very possibly the real figure was twice that number ... 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." "On the basis of extensive interviews in Kurdistan and perusal of extant Iraqi documents, Shoresh Resoul, a meticulous Kurdish researcher ... conservatively estimated that 'between 60,000 and 110,000' died during [al-]Majid's Kurdish mandate," i.e., beginning shortly before Anfal and ending shortly afterwards. (Randal, After Such Knowledge ..., p. 214.) Other Kurdish estimates are even higher. "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." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 14, 230.)

It is impossible to state with certainty what proportion of the victims of Anfal were adult men and adolescent boys. The most detailed investigation, conducted by HRW/ME, tabulated the number of "disappeared" from the various stages of Anfal, based on field interviews with some 350 survivors. The organization gathered the names of 1,255 men, 184 women, and 359 children -- "only a fraction of the numbers lost during Anfal." This would suggest that some 87 percent of the adults "disappeared," all of whom were apparently executed, were male; and that about 70 percent of all those who "disappeared" were "battle-age" males. (See Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 266-68.) These calculations do not, however, include the large number of Kurdish civilians killed indiscriminately in chemical attacks and other generalized assaults.

Most recently, Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, has referred to "100,000 Kurdish men and boys machine-gunned to death during the 1988 Anfal genocide." (Roth, "Show Trials Are Not the Solution to Saddam's Heinous Reign", The Globe and Mail, 18 July 2003.)