For over two years, from March 29, 1987, to April 23, 1989, a genocide and gendercide campaign was orchestrated by Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali,” under the special powers granted him by his cousin, Saddam Hussein. Although reported numbers differ, it is widely believed that up to 180,000 Kurdish men, women, and children were exterminated and 5,000 of their villages were destroyed. According to an extensive report written by Human Rights Watch, tactics of the miniature holocaust that consisted of eight separate attacks included the widespread use of chemical weapons in addition to “mass summary executions and mass disappearance of many tens of thousands of non combatants, including large numbers of women and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages” and their infrastructure “including all schools, mosques, wells, and other non residential structures in the targeted villages, and a number of electricity substations.” Hundreds of thousands that were not disappeared underwent forced displacement—“trucked into areas of Kurdistan far from their homes and dumped there by the army with only minimal governmental compensation or none at all for their destroyed property, or any provision for relief, housing, clothing, or food, and forbidden to return to their villages of origin on pain of death.”
During this campaign, as decreed by al-Majid, all males found in the “prohibited areas” (despite the fact that these were their own homes and lands) were to be “detained and interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of 15 and 70 shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them.” As captured Kurdish populations arrived at detention centers, in Nazi-like fashion men were separated from women and small children, registered, warehoused under conditions of horrible overcrowding and deprivation, beaten, and after a few days taken out and trucked to sites where they were executed. In many cases women, children, and the elderly were also executed.” Those not exterminated were shipped to overstuffed relocation camps, where they were allowed to die of extreme malnutrition and disease.
Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front, and dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; still others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it—a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses. Some of the gravesites contained dozens of separate pits and obviously contained the bodies of thousands of victims.
A handful of the survivors, mostly women, have made their way to Sulamania’s Trauma Recovery and Training Center. “For most of these women, the man will not return back because he has been killed by the previous regime,” says Dr. Hassan. “Today, we have many widows, maybe 15,000 women, who, ’til now, don’t know where their husband is. Just the females returned back. Most of these women are not present in Sulaimania, but are present in areas south of Kurdistan—Kalar, Kifree, Khanaqan in the Diyala province, and Kirkuk.”
One patient, a 40-year-old woman, along with her five children, was purposely separated from her husband and forced to relocate as part of the Anfal campaign. Due to lack of food, lack of proper hygienic facilities—“lack of everything,” Dr. Hassan says—“two of her children died before her very eyes.” In this woman’s case, there was no place to bury her dead children. With nowhere to go, she was forced to watch as animals devoured their bodies. According to Dr. Hassan, this story is not unique. “We have many many tragic stories just like this here in Sulaimania. I’ve had between 10 and 20 cases that mention this sort of tragedy.”
