The Kurdish genocide in Iraq: the Security-Anfal and the Identity-Anfal

ABSTRACT

From February to September 1988, Iraqi Kurds were subjected to a genocidal operation by the Iraqi government, known as the Anfal operation. The operation lasted just over seven months but it had a devastating impact on most parts of rural Kurdistan in Iraq, resulting in the killing of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Most scholars have overlooked the multiple strategies, dimensions of and motivations for the operations and have mostly focused on and/or examined the military and genocidal dimensions of the operation. This article examines some of data and documents as well as secondary sources related to the Anfal operation directly or indirectly. It scrutinizes the pattern of casualties and disappearances of the Kurdish civilians during operations in order to identify and explain the motives of the Iraqi state. It argues that although the Iraqi government’s objectives and intentions were multidimensional, two dimensions were the primary ones; the first one security and the second identity. In the Security-Anfal the intention was to overcome the Kurdish rebel groups; however, in the Identity-Anfal the key motive was the de-Kurdification of the Kirkuk province in order to Arabize the areas of Iraqi Kurdistan that were strategically significant economically and politically.

KEYWORDS:

• Iraq
• Kurdish genocide
• Anfal
• identity
• ethnic cleansing

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions that greatly enriched our article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Sherko Kirmanj earned his PhD in International Studies at the University of South Australia. He is the author of Identity and Nation in Iraq (the book is translated into Arabic by Al-Saqi Press and Aras Press); Politicisation of Islam (in Kurdish); and Iraqi Identity: Ethnic and Sectarian Conflicts (in Kurdish). Kirmanj has published eleven articles and five book chapters in international refereed journals and academic volumes in English. At the same time, Kirmanj has published numerous newspaper and website articles in Kurdish. He lectured at the College of Law and Politics at Salahaddin Univeristy, Iraq. Kirmanj was Postdoctoral Fellow at University of South Australia and a Senior Lecturer at the University Utara Malaysia. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, University of Sharjah in UAE, concurrently is Adjunct professor at Koya University, Iraq.

Aram Rafaat received his PhD from the University of Adelaide, and taught at the University Utara Malaysia. He has published widely on Kurdish issue both in English and Kurdish. He is the author of three books, one book section and a number of journal articles, published in international refereed journals. His latest book Kurdistan in Iraq: the Evolution of a Quasi-state is published by Routledge. In addition to a weekly column he published a dozen of policy papers and tens of articles in Kurdish newspapers and magazines. He has also participated in numerous international conferences, presenting his empirical research on the Kurdish issues and the ethno-sectarian conflicts in the Middle East and wider Middle Eastern politics and history.

Notes

1 Human Rights Watch’s seminal works, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: the Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, and Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words, the two main sources of this article, are based on eighteen tons of official Iraqi state documents captured by Kurdish political parties in the 1991 uprising that provide evidence that the Anfal campaign by the government of Iraq against its population of rural Kurds in 1988 amounted to genocide.

2 Al-Waqai‘ al-Iraqiya is the Official Gazette of Iraq and has been published since August 1922.