History isn't always written by the winners. Sometimes, it's buried in the dirt of the Iraqi desert, waiting for a rainstorm to uncover a bone or a scrap of colorful fabric. When people talk about the Kurdish genocide in Iraq, they usually point to Halabja. They think of the gas. They think of the "silent city." But honestly, Halabja was just one horrific afternoon in a systematic, multi-year project of erasure.
If you want to understand what actually happened between 1987 and 1989, you have to look at the Anfal campaign. It wasn't just a war. It was a bureaucratic, state-sponsored attempt to wipe a specific group of people off the map. Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid—later nicknamed "Chemical Ali"—didn't just wake up and decide to be cruel. He ran a logistics operation. He used the Iraqi state's census data, its military transport, and its chemical weapon stockpiles to "cleanse" the north. It’s heavy stuff. It’s also largely misunderstood by the West, who often see it through the lens of the 2003 invasion rather than as its own distinct, tragic era of 20th-century history.
The Cold Logic of the Anfal Campaign
Most folks think genocide is just chaos. It's actually the opposite. It’s order. During the Kurdish genocide in Iraq, the Ba'athist regime divided the northern region into "prohibited zones." If you lived there, you were a target. Period. The military basically told the villagers: leave your ancestral homes and move to "victory cities"—which were really just concentration camps—or stay and die.
The campaign had eight distinct stages. It wasn't a single event. It was a rolling wave of destruction that moved through the valleys of Kurdistan. The Iraqi army would sweep in, shells would fall, and then the "Jash" (Kurdish collaborators) or the regular infantry would round up everyone left standing. They separated the men from the women. The men, mostly between the ages of 15 and 50, were loaded onto trucks. They weren't seen again. Decades later, mass graves in places like Samawa, hundreds of miles to the south, started giving up their secrets. We're talking about roughly 182,000 people disappeared. That number is so big it feels abstract, but try to imagine every single person in a mid-sized city just... vanishing.
Why the Gas Mattered
Chemical weapons were the "cost-effective" solution for the regime. It's a grim reality. In places like the Balisan Valley, the first chemical attacks weren't just about killing; they were about terror. When the mustard gas and Sarin hit, people didn't know what was happening. They thought it smelled like garlic or apples. They ran toward the water to wash their eyes, but the gas was heavier than air and clung to the riverbanks. It trapped them. This wasn't "collateral damage." It was a deliberate choice to use weapons that cause maximum suffering to clear out "rebellious" terrain.
The International Blind Eye
Here’s the part that’s hard to swallow: the world knew. Or at least, the people in charge did. During the late 1980s, the Kurdish genocide in Iraq was happening while the Iran-Iraq War was in its final, bloody stages. The West—including the United States—viewed Saddam Hussein as a necessary bulwark against the Islamic Revolution in Iran. We gave him credits. We gave him intelligence. We looked the other way when reports of chemical use surfaced.
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- The U.S. State Department initially tried to blame Iran for the Halabja gas attack to protect Saddam.
- European companies were the ones selling Iraq the precursors for the chemical agents.
- The UN was slow to act because of Cold War geopolitics.
It’s easy to look back now and say "never again," but the reality is that the Kurdish people were sacrificed for "stability" in the Middle East. Human Rights Watch, particularly through the tireless work of researchers like Joost Hiltermann and Kenneth Roth, eventually documented the sheer scale of the crimes, but by then, the villages were already bulldozed. Over 4,000 villages were leveled. Not just burned. Bulldozed. Wells were plugged with concrete. Orchards were cut down. The goal was to make sure no one could ever live there again.
Survival and the Ghost of the "Disappeared"
If you visit the Kurdistan Region of Iraq today, you'll see the scars. They aren't just in the museums. They’re in the way a grandmother looks at her son, or the way certain dates are marked with a quiet, heavy grief. The psychological impact of the Kurdish genocide in Iraq is multi-generational.
Imagine growing up without a father, an uncle, or a grandfather. That’s the reality for thousands of families. Because the bodies were taken to the southern deserts, there were no funerals for years. There was just waiting. The "Anfal widows" became a distinct social class—women who had to raise children in poverty while clinging to the hope that their husbands were just in a secret prison somewhere. When the mass graves were finally opened after 2003, that hope died, but it was replaced by a different kind of pain: the pain of a bone-deep confirmation.
The Problem with the "Civil War" Narrative
Some historians (or Ba'athist apologists) try to frame this as a counter-insurgency gone wrong. They say, "Well, the Kurdish Peshmerga were siding with Iran, so Iraq had to defend its borders."
That’s nonsense.
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You don't "defend a border" by gassing 5,000 civilians in a market town. You don't "counter an insurgency" by executing 12-year-old boys in pits in the desert. The scale of the violence was completely disconnected from any military necessity. It was racial. It was ethnic. It was an attempt to solve "the Kurdish question" once and for all through mass murder.
What We Can Learn from the Evidence
We actually have the documents. This is the "smoking gun" that most genocides lack. During the 1991 uprising, Kurds seized tons of Iraqi secret police files. These papers—millions of pages—were flown to the United States for analysis. They showed the bureaucracy of death. There were orders signed by al-Majid himself. There were lists of names. There were receipts for the gas.
It’s chilling to see genocide recorded in a ledger. It reminds us that these things don't happen because of "ancient hatreds." They happen because men in offices decide that a certain group of people is an administrative problem that needs to be deleted.
Moving Forward: Justice and Recognition
Recognition is slow. The Iraqi High Tribunal eventually ruled that the Anfal campaign was genocide. Some countries, like the UK, Sweden, and Norway, have followed suit. But for the survivors, "recognition" doesn't bring back the orchards or the missing brothers. It doesn't fix the fact that many of the chemical weapon suppliers were never held accountable in a meaningful way.
If you’re looking to actually do something or learn more, the path forward involves more than just reading a Wikipedia page.
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First, support the forensic work. Organizations like the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) have been working to identify remains in mass graves. This is crucial for giving families closure. Without a name and a grave, the mourning never really ends.
Second, look at the current state of the Yazidi community. History repeats itself. The genocide committed by ISIS against the Yazidis in 2014 used many of the same "playbooks" as the Anfal campaign—separation of men and women, mass executions, and the destruction of cultural heritage. Understanding the Kurdish genocide in Iraq helps us spot the warning signs today.
Third, demand transparency from corporations. The precursors for the gas used in Iraq didn't appear out of thin air. They were sold. Supporting legislation that holds companies accountable for how their products are used in conflict zones is a practical step toward "never again."
The Kurdish people have a saying: "No friends but the mountains." It’s a bitter proverb born from centuries of being let down by the international community. But by acknowledging the specific, planned nature of the Anfal campaign, we start to prove that proverb wrong. We start to show that the world is finally paying attention to the bodies in the sand.
To truly understand the depth of this history, your next steps should be grounded in the voices of those who were there. Read A People Betrayed by John Bulloch or look into the "Iraq Documents" held by the University of Colorado Boulder. These aren't just stories; they are the evidence of a crime that the world almost let disappear. Pay attention to the ongoing efforts of the Kurdistan Regional Government to seek international legal recognition for the genocide, as this affects everything from reparations to international protection. Keep an eye on the work of the Qandil and Barzan memorial sites. The history is still very much alive, and the quest for justice is far from over.