3 August 2012
Mass Grave Map
The anti-Kurdish "Anfal" campaign, mounted between
February and September 1988 by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, was both
genocidal and gendercidal in nature. "Battle-age" men were the
primary targets of Anfal, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East (hereafter,
HRW/ME). The organization writes in its book Iraq 's Crime of Genocide: "Throughout
Iraqi Kurdistan, although women and children vanished in certain clearly
defined areas, adult males who were captured disappeared en masse. ... It is
apparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate all adult males
of military service age captured in rural Iraqi Kurdistan" (pp. 96, 170). Only
a handful survived the execution squads.
survivor
An Interview with the Anfal survivor, Taimour
Preamble: Kanan Makiya's Account of His Meeting With Taimour.
As far as anyone knows, Taimour 'Abdallah, from the village of Qulatcho, is the only human being to have experienced firsthand the innermost workings of the Anfal campaign and to have lived to tell of it. This much I already knew in London, although I did not really know what the Anfal campaign was about, or if the boy's account could be believed; it had been such a wooden and stilted interview. The Anfal was at that point just a name for me, one that kept on cropping up in the copies of the secret police documents which I had been given and which maybe had something to do with large numbers of Kurds disappearing in 1988. Many survivors had witnessed the attacks on their villages or other rounding up operations inside northern Iraq. But only one person 'disappeared' and by a miracle 'reappeared' to tell us what had happened to him.
Our meeting took place in an abandoned army barracks a half-hours' drive into the mountains that surround Sulaimaniyya. Bombed out buildings with blackened windows perched on a mountain with unobstructed visibility in every direction. The setting was as remarkable as the base was awful--surrounded by walls, barbed wire and security checkpoints. Taimour's life since the March uprising had been organized around the fact that he was and still is a prime target for assassination by Saddam's agents. It became obvious the boy had been turned into a symbol, the servant of a cause, a living monument to the suffering of the Kurdish people.
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