Contact Admin. Introduction This report is a narrative account of a campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. It is the product of over a year and a half of research, during which a team of Middle East Watch researchers has analyzed several tons of captured Iraqi government documents and carried out field interviews with more than witnesses, most of them survivors of the campaign known as Anfal.
It concludes that in that year the Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide. Anfal--"the Spoils"--is the name of the eighth sura 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, While it is impossible to understand the Anfal campaign without reference to the final phase of the 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.
From March 29, until April 23, , 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. The pro-government Kurdish militia known as the National Defense Battalions, or jahsh , assisted in important auxiliary tasks.
