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Iraq has experienced a turbulent history during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, during which the country has witnessed invasions, military occupations, independence, violent regime changes, war, genocide, and gross human rights violations. Iraq's record on human rights abuses, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during this period has been among the most abysmal throughout the Arab world and the regions of southwest Asia. This was true especially after the seizure of power by the Ba'th Party in 1968, and the subsequent totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein from 1979 to 2003. The significance of this fact looms large not only for Middle Eastern history but for global history as well.

Ba'th Party Rule

Most of the gross violations of human rights and dignity committed in modern Iraq were perpetrated when the Arab Socialist Renaissance (Arabic: Ba'th) Party was in power. The Ba'th was a pan-Arab nationalist party founded in Syria in the mid-1940s, whose message soon spread to other Arab countries in the Fertile Crescent, including Iraq. Its slogans were "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" and "One Arab Motherland, with an Eternal Mission." Ba'thism was dedicated to effecting Arab unity, fighting imperialism and Zionism, and achieving domestic social justice. Its vision of a non-Marxist, "Arab" type of socialism, national unity, and ethnic destiny represented a type of Middle Eastern fascism, something certainly magnified by the leadership cults established in the two repressive regimes it eventually established: in Syria since 1963, and in Iraq briefly in 1963 and thereafter from 1968 to 2003. These two Ba'thist regimes—ironically, considering their advocacy of pan-Arab unity, bitter rivals—pursued a highly nationalistic pan-Arab ideology in countries that, although largely Arab, contained significant numbers of non-Arabs.

Iraq has long been the abode of a number of ethnic and religious groups. The southern half of the country has been home to Arabs who practice the Shi'ite branch of Islam. Although Shi'ites are a small minority in the wider Islamic world, they constituted 60 percent of the population of Iraq by the end of the twentieth century. Central Iraq hosts Arabs practicing the Sunni branch of Islam, approximately 20 percent of the population. Although fewer in number than the Shi'ite Arabs, regimes based in Baghdad that have held political sway in the region for centuries have always been led by Sunnis. Northern Iraq has long had a particularly heterogeneous population. In addition to Sunni Arabs, the mountainous northern regions feature a large number of Kurds. Between 15 and 20 percent of the population, Kurds are Sunni Muslims who are ethnically and linguistically distinct from Arabs. Other religious and ethnic groups in the north include small numbers of Kurdish Shi'ites and Yezidis, Assyrian Christians, and Turkoman. Iraq also counts among its residents small populations of Chaldean Christians (Assyrian Catholics), Sabeans, and Armenian Christians. Iraq was home to an ancient Jewish community for millennia as well, although the vast majority emigrated from 1950 to 1951.

Saddam Hussein (1937–) was the main figure behind the 1968 Ba'thist coup in Iraq, and formally added the presidency to his party leadership portfolio in July 1979. He immediately gave an indication of his brutal methods of maintaining his absolute rule by purging and executing a number of leading Ba'thists whom he considered rivals. For the next two decades Saddam reduced the Ba'th Party to an instrument of his personal rule and used the myriad intelligence forces he oversaw to intimidate and eliminate rivals and anyone else he deemed a threat, including entire categories of people. Thousands were arrested, executed, or simply disappeared from 1979 to 2003. Beyond this, Saddam's regime practiced ethnic genocide against the Kurds, tried to "Arabize" the northern region around Kirkuk, and directed whole-scale oppression against Shi'ite Arabs. Estimates as high as 300,000 have been proposed for the number of persons killed by Saddam's regime. Beyond that, Saddam exported his brutality when Iraqi forces committed war crimes and/or crimes against humanity during the Iran–Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, and the occupation of Kuwait of 1990 to 1991.

The Kurdish Genocide

No one specific group suffered more under Saddam's rule than the Kurds. The Iraqi state began armed action against Kurdish nationalists in 1961, before the Ba'th came to power. The bulk of the fighting against the insurrection, which lasted until 1975 and flared up again thereafter, however, came while the Ba'th was in power. In July 1983, the regime arrested 8,000 males from the Barzani family, which has produced the leading figures in the Kurdish national movement over the decades. They were deported to southern Iraq and presumably murdered. In the spring of 1987, as Iraqi fortunes were improving in the long Iran–Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, Iraqi forces launched a renewed offensive against the Kurds, who had been supported by Iran at various periods during the insurrection. The government created "forbidden areas" in the north to deny sanctuary to Kurdish peshmergas (fighters; literally, "those who face death"). Large-scale deportations removed thousands of villagers. At least 700 villages were demolished. Any human or animal remaining in the "forbidden areas" was subject to death. It was during this campaign that the first documented Iraqi uses of chemical weapons inside Iraq occurred. The first incident was an attack on a Kurdish political party headquarters in Zewa Shkan on April 15, 1987, followed the next day by chemical strikes in the villages of Balisan and Shaykh Wasan.

Yet it was the Ba'thist regime's 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds that rose to the level of genocide according to international observers. Taking its name from a chapter entitled "Anfal" (Arabic: "spoils") in the Koran, Anfal was a massive counterinsurgency campaign following up on the similar efforts of 1987. It once again sought to deny large portions of Kurdistan to the peshmergas by deporting and/or killing the areas' inhabitants and destroying their villages. Anfal consisted of eight military offensives launched between February 23 and September 6, 1988 as the Iran–Iraq war was concluding. Although it was dependent on state institutions for its execution, the campaign was a Ba'th Party operation. The person responsible for supervising the genocide, below Saddam Hussein himself, was his cousin and party stalwart, Ali Hasan al-Majid (1941–). Decree No. 160 of March 29, 1987 placed all state and party apparatuses in the north under al-Majid, secretary of the Ba'th Party's Northern Bureau Command, for the purpose of carrying out the Anfal campaign. This included the military, military intelligence, general intelligence, Popular Army, and pro-regime Kurdish jahsh militia. Most of the Anfal campaigns were undertaken by army units subsumed under al-Majid's command: the Iraqi army's First Corps, based at Kirkuk, commanded by Lieutenant General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Ta'i (1944?–), and the Fifth Corps based at Irbil, commanded by Brigadier General Yunis Muhammad al-Zarib. When the fifth Anfal that began in May stalled, the Office of the President ordered operations renewed—indicating Saddam's personal involvement in the execution of the campaign. According to Human Rights Watch, a total of 115 Iraqis may have had criminal responsibility for the genocide.

The ethnic dimensions of the Anfal campaign were clear. It was preceded by a national census held on October 17, 1987. All persons in Iraq were required to register themselves according to ethnicity, either "Arab" or "Kurd." Those refusing to "return to the national ranks" and be counted, which in effect meant those Kurds living in areas under peshmerga control who did not participate, were classified as "deserters." Thereafter, entire areas deemed outside the "national ranks" and containing "deserters" were designated "forbidden areas" and subject to "collective measures." These measures included military sweeps through the areas, followed by mass deportations and the demolition of villages. Any person or animal thereafter found in a "forbidden area" was to be killed. Many Kurdish males rounded up in the operations were later taken away, shot, and buried in mass graves by uniformed execution squads. It is surmised that these squads were made up of party members, among others.

By September 6, 1988, when the government declared an amnesty, an estimated 2,000 Kurdish villages had been depopulated and destroyed, although some figures are higher. Conservative estimates place the death toll at 50,000, but most put the count higher, in the range of 100,000 to 182,000. Ali Hasan al-Majid himself later suggested that "no more" than 100,000 Kurds were killed. Mines were sown in many destroyed localities to prevent reinhabitation. Middle East Watch also has determined that Iraqi forces attacked at least sixty villages with chemical weapons during Anfal. The worst and most famous massacre occurred in a town, not a village: the March 16, 1988 chemical attack on Halabja. Somewhere between 3,200 and 5,000 Kurds were killed there with mustard gas (a blistering agent) and Sarin (a nerve agent).

The memory of Anfal prompted the flight of hundreds of thousands of Kurds into the mountains after the failed Kurdish uprising of March 1991, and drew calls for global action. UN Security Council Resolution 688 condemned the "repression" of the Kurds and other Iraqis on April 5, 1991. On April 10 the United States created a "no fly zone" north of the 36th parallel, forbidding Iraqi military aircraft from operating there. The "safe haven" for the Kurds announced by the United States seven days later eventually turned into what was called the Kurdish Autonomous Zone, protected by United States and other troops, in which a Kurdish Regional Government began functioning in July 1992.

Persecution of the Shi'ites and Marsh Arabs

Although ostensibly a secular party, the Ba'th Party in Iraq long drew its support from, and based its rule on, the country's Sunni Arab population, just as had previous regimes in the country. The Shi'ite community was subject to persecution. In July 1974, the regime arrested dozens of Shi'ite clerics and executed five of them. The oppression worsened during Iraq's long war with Shi'ite Iran. The government expelled between 350,000 and 500,000 Shi'ites to Iran in the 1980s because of their alleged Iranian origin; approximately 50,000 other men were arrested, many of whom simply disappeared. The Shi'ite uprising of March 1991 was brutally suppressed and led to even more extreme measures. Mosques and seminaries were closed. Leading Shi'ite clerics like Ayatullah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (1933–1999), Ayatullah Murtada al-Burujerdi (1931–1998), and Ayatullah Mirza Ali al-Gharawi (1930–1998) were later assassinated as well, almost certainly by Ba'thist agents. Security Council Resolution 688 of 1991 condemned the attacks on the Shi'ites as well as those against the Kurds. The United States, Britain, and France later began enforcing another "no fly zone" over Iraq south of the 32nd parallel (later expanded to the area south of the 33rd parallel.

In addition, the government moved against the Shi'ite Marsh Arabs and the unique ecosystem where they lived in south-central Iraq. These Arabs, called the Ma'dan, numbered some 250,000 in 1991. They lived in the marshlands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Middle East's largest wetlands area. In addition to forced imprisonment, killings, and disappearances, the Ma'dan faced forced deportations from the marshlands into government-built settlements. Only 40,000 remained in their ancestral lands by the late 1990s.

The government also initiated a massive program to drain the marshes. A document later captured entitled "Plan of Action for the Marshes," dated January 30, 1989, refers to an earlier 1987 plan approved by Saddam himself—another indication of the dictator's personal involvement in these crimes. While claiming it was implementing earlier plans to reclaim land that dated to 1953, the government undoubtedly was trying to deny shelter to antiregime Shi'ite guerrillas and army deserters that the marshes had provided. The UN Environmental Program has estimated that 90 percent of the marshes had been destroyed by the late 1990s, constituting a major international ecological disaster.

War Crimes in the Iran–Iraq War and in Kuwait

Saddam ordered the Iraqi army to attack Iran in September 1980, precipitating the twentieth century's longest conventional war. Iraq used chemical weapons against the numerically stronger Iranian forces throughout the war, in violation of the 1899 Hague Declaration IV, 1907 Hague Convention IV, and 1925 Geneva Protocol. (Iran responded with its own chemical attacks, but on a smaller scale than Iraq.) The United Nations launched an investigation, and the Security Council condemned the use of chemical weapons in the fighting, without specifying by whom, in March 1984, and again in September 1988.

Iraqi forces carried out a number of war crimes against Kuwaitis during their occupation of Kuwait from August 1990 to March 1991, including torture, rape, killings, looting, theft of cultural property, executions, and disappearances. An estimated 1,000 Kuwaitis were killed during the occupation, and an additional 600 remain unaccounted for after having been taken away by retreating Iraqi forces. A 1992 U.S. Defense Department study found Iraq guilty of sixteen violations of the laws of war during the occupation of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. The Kuwaiti government also compiled extensive documentation on Iraqi war crimes.

Prosecution

United States and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and Saddam's rule in Baghdad quickly collapsed. United States forces began rounding up high-ranking Iraqis suspected of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. They captured Ali Hasan al-Majid on August 19, 2003. Saddam himself evaded arrest until December 14, 2003. Saddam and eleven others, including al-Majid, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz (1936–), and former Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan al-Jazrawi (1938–), were arraigned before an investigative judge of the Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity on July 1, 2004. Lieutenant General and former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Ta'i, commander of the army's First Corps during Anfal, were also captured by coalition forces and could stand trial in the future.

Conclusion

Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the Ba'th represented the most brutal and totalitarian regime anywhere in the Middle East during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as one of the worst such regimes anywhere on earth. The scope and scale of the human rights abuses, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the Ba'thist regime were rivaled only by the fastidious bureaucratic measures and records used to execute and document them, as well as by the megalomaniacal ego of Saddam Hussein himself. His downfall not only opened a new chapter in Iraq's history but paved the way for what likely will be the most sensational human rights trial of the early twenty-first century.

SEE ALSO Gas; Kurds; Saddam Hussein; Safe Zones

Michael R. Fischbach