The curse of the state, or rather the nation-state, affected the Kurdish people on two levels. On the first level, it deprived them of having a state of their own. On the second level, the Kurdish homeland was annexed to the states of others. Thus, a policy of denial – aimed to tame and assimilate the Kurds within the framework of different forms of chauvinist policies – was adopted. It was, at best, a bitter struggle for survival and basic rights.
The state of Iraq was established, as it turns out, as a nationalist Sunni Arab project. The policy of Arabization began with the arrival of the king's man and Sati' al-Husari, both of whom were non-Iraqis. One of the first signs was the exclusion of the Kurds from the first Iraqi constitution in 1925. This was also reflected in the violation of the Mandate Termination Agreement in 1931, which had granted a special status to the Kurdish region. With marginalization initiated, the denial of rights and the continuation of the policy of Arabization continued, from the Arabization of the land to the Arabization of the people.
The Baath Party appeared in 1951, and their ideas grew in the womb of the Arab nationalism that King Faisal was purveying as an identity to be imposed on everyone. It was the Iraqi Uruba, an Uruba culture taking hold in Iraq, which was thereafter considered part of the Arab world. With Israel declaring its statehood on May 14, 1948, Iraq joined the resistance countries – everything was for the liberation of Palestine. Enveloped into this ‘everything’ was revenge against the Kurdish people, who were considered a client enclave of Israel and thus part of Israeli plans for imperialism and colonialism. Thus, the Iraqis and the nationalist Arabs deluded themselves into believing that a second Israel was coming from northern Iraq and that the Arabs had to unite their ranks to quell the Kurdish sedition. From that point, genocide was initiated.
With the formation of the Baath government in 1968, the genocide was driven by a policy of divide, rule, and destroy. The decision to exterminate the Faili Kurds and uproot them from their lands was launched under the pretext that the Faili had not obtained Iraqi citizenship and constituted a fifth column. The Faili Kurds are an essential part of the Kurdish people, and their areas of influence were mostly Arabized.
The first Iraqi decision was to exterminate the Faili Kurds in 1969, and the campaign continued until 1980, which succeeded in eradicating twenty thousand people while the rest were expelled to Iran where they face very difficult living conditions.
The next step came after the 1975 Algiers Agreement between Iraq and Iran and was aimed to crush the Kurdish liberation movement. The campaign involved evacuating and destroying thousands of Kurdish villages that lay within 15-25 km of the borders with Iran, Syria, and Turkey. More than half a million people were gathered in forced compounds and besieged by Iraqi security forces in inhumane conditions, with large groups deported to southern Iraq. The campaign destroyed approximately 4,500 villages, including 31 Christian villages, along with livestock and agriculture.
After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, hundreds of thousands of young Kurds were forcibly recruited to the battlefront to fight and die in a fierce war that they had nothing to do with. During the war, Baghdad issued its second decision to annihilate the Barzanis. As described above, Kurdish villages had already been destroyed, including the Barzani villages, and village families were deported into five compounds. In 1983, however, these compounds were raided and besieged by the Iraqi army and special forces, and 5,000-8,000 Barzani males were kidnapped. In response to the fate of the Barzanis, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said, "We sent them to hell."
Thus, the Baathists' aggression against the Kurdish people continued, and Baghdad issued a third genocidal decision, one that involved careful planning and implementation beginning in February 1987 with the appointment by the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council of Ali Hassan al-Majid as the general military commander with absolute powers for the northern regions. When Al-Majeed moved to Kurdistan, he cavalierly announced: "Either I wear Kurdish pants, or they wear Arab headbands (al-Iqal)." This statement was patent: the Baathists were planning for the final solution of genocide.
The campaign began with several actions. First, the Revolutionary Command Council issued an action plan for genocide. Second, according to this plan, large areas outside the borders of the large cities of Kurdistan were designated as ‘forbidden areas’. Third, the general census of the Iraqi population was conducted, and those from the forbidden areas were not counted, denying them participation in the state and rendering them foreigners.
The ‘forbidden areas’ were attacked eight times during the so-called Anfal (genocide) campaigns. The first campaign began on February 21, 1988, and the last ended on September 6, 1988. These campaigns included the use of chemical weapons on many towns and cities and ended in the city of Halabja, which claimed the lives of five thousand civilians within a few hours on March 16, 1988.
Meanwhile, Iraqi forces and militias attacked the ‘forbidden areas’, and tens of thousands of civilians were arrested, mostly women, children, and the elderly. At the end of each campaign, families were transferred to concentration camps, and men, women, and children were separated. Then, everyone was transported in trucks to pre-prepared mass graves. Within eight months of the campaign, more than 180,000 innocent Kurdish men, women, and children were executed.
Hence, Baghdad made three genocidal decisions against various components of the Kurdish people, yet these decisions still did not manage to exterminate the Kurdish people, who continued to insist on claiming their human rights and demanding freedom and dignity.
It was the uprising of March 1991 and the liberation of the Kurdish cities, including Kirkuk, that halted the genocide. After one million Kurds migrated at the end of March 1991, the UN Security Council issued Resolution No. 688 on April 5, 1991, to protect the Kurdish people. Kurds began to return to their areas, and preparations for regional elections and the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) were outside the will and control of the Iraqi government for the first time.
Finally, in 2006, the Iraqi Supreme Court recognized the genocide against the Kurdish people in the three aforementioned cases, although this confession did not result in full justice. This was only achieved with the apologies of successive Iraqi governments after 2003 for the genocide campaigns and the declarations that the survivors of the genocide must be fully compensated (yet to be materialized by the central government), which included the proclamation of a law criminalizing the denial of the genocide of the Kurdish people.
Ibrahim Sadiq Malazada is a researcher and sociology professor at Soran University.
