The Kurds in Iraq

Iraqi Kurdistan or Kurdistan Region (Kurdish: Herêmî Kurdistan; Arabic: إقليم كردستان Iqlīm Kurdistān) is an autonomous region of Iraq.[5] It borders Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Syria to the west and the rest of Iraq to the south. The regional capital is Arbil, known in Kurdish as Hewlêr. The region is officially governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

The establishment of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq dates back to the March 1970 autonomy agreement between the Kurdish opposition and the Iraqi government after years of heavy fighting. The Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s and the Anfal genocide campaign of the Iraqi army devastated the population and nature of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Click on Anfal Genocide.

The al-Anfal Campaign (Arabic: حملة الأنفال‎), also known as Operation Anfal or simply Anfal, was a genocidal[5] campaign against the Kurdish people (and many other ethnic groups) in Northern Iraq, led by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid in the final stages of Iran-Iraq War.

The campaign takes its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Qur’an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Baathist regime for a series of systematic attacks against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, conducted between 1986 and 1989 and culminating in 1988. The campaign also targeted other minority communities in Iraq including Shabaks, Yazidis, Jews, Mandeans, and many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were also destroyed.

The Anfal campaign began in 1986 and lasted until 1989, and was headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid (a cousin of then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit). The Anfal campaign included the use of ground offensives, aerial bombing, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation, firing squads, and chemical warfare, which earned al-Majid the nickname of “Chemical Ali”.

Thousands of civilians were killed during the anti-insurgent campaigns stretching from the spring of 1987 through the fall of 1988. The attacks were part of a long-standing campaign that destroyed approximately 4,500 Kurdish village[s] in areas of northern Iraq and displaced at least a million of the country’s estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population. Independent sources estimate 1,100,000 to more than 2,150,000 deaths and as many as 860,000 widows and an even greater number of orphans.[7] Amnesty International collected the names of more than 17,000 people who had “disappeared” during 1988.[8] The campaign has been characterized as genocidal in nature. It is also characterized as gend[o]cidal, because “battle-age” men were the primary targets, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East.[9] According to the Iraqi prosecutors, as many as 182,000 people were killed.[10]

Anfal, officially conducted between February 23 and September 6, 1988, would have eight stages altogether, seven of them targeting areas controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The Kurdish Democratic Party-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. 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

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Are these guerilla forces the PKK?

The Iraqi treatment of those not killed involved concentration camps.

That’s all my stomach can take for today. All of this was gathered from Wikipedia.