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The Intersections of Geography and Language

The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iranian Academic Research

Aspirations and Capabilities: Drivers of Kurdish Youth Migration to Europe in the 2020s

Dam Policies and the Colonial Condition of Kurdistan

Origins and Historical ContextAnfal – above all else – seems to evoke a historical reference related to Kurds in northern Iraq. Etymologically, from its root, the term is derived from the Arabic origin word which signifies the meaning of profits, spoils of war, or earnings. In addition to that, the name was utilized by the Iraqis for a series of military operations that took place in different periods during the late 1980s. Analyzing the Anfal campaign requires an understanding of the concluding phases of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War; that is to say, this genocide was not only a byproduct of that conflict but rather, the conclusion of the fight on Iraq's terms provided Baghdad with the opportunity to bring to a close its long-running efforts to bring the Kurds to heel. The Iraqi regime's anti-Kurdish campaign predated the commencement of hostilities between Iran and Iraq by at least fifteen years. Anfal was also the most visible manifestation of the "special powers" handed to Ali Hassan Al-Majid – Saddam Hussein's cousin and the secretary general of Iraq's Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party's Northern Bureau. From March 29, 1987, through April 23, 1989, Al-Majid was given power similar to that of the president himself in northern Iraq, with authority over all governmental agencies. Al-Majid, known to Kurds as “Chemical Ali," was the mastermind of the Kurdish genocide. The major actors in the mass murder were the regular Iraqi Army's First and Fifth Corps, the General Security Directorate, and Military Intelligence under his direction.&nbsp; In addition to that, the Kurdish pro-government militia known as The National Defense Battalions, or ‘Jahsh’ provided critical auxiliary support. However, the combined forces of the Iraqi state's military, security, and civilian apparatus were mobilized, in Al-Majid's words: "to solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs”. Saddam Hussein claimed Anfal was a direct retaliation for the Kurds' support for Iran during the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war. It was also opportunism: Baghdad had long desired to squash Kurdish self-rule dreams and establish full Arab control over Kurdistan's oil.The campaigns of 1987-1989 were marked by the following plans and operations: mass summary executions and mass disappearances of tens of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages; widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, against the town of Halabja and dozens of Kurdish villages. Army engineers systematically destroyed civilian objects, including several electricity substations, as well as schools, mosques, and other non-residential structures in the targeted villages; large-scale plunder of civilian property and farm animals was demolished by army personnel and pro-government militia; arbitrary detention of all peasants apprehended in "prohibited areas". Even though they were far away from their own homes and farms; illegal incarceration and warehousing continued for months in deplorable conditions in which tens of thousands of women, children, and the elderly for no reason other than their supposed sympathies for the Kurdish opposition. Hundreds of them were left to die from starvation and sickness. Years after the Anfal campaign, the skeletal remains (Figure 1) were found in different locations in Iraq – mostly in the southern parts – besides the skeletons; clothes, children’s toys, watches, shoes, and women’s accessories were also discovered. Eventually, experts began to work on the remains to identify to whom those skeletons and items belong. Yet, a huge number of the captured civilians are still missing and the only legacy that is left behind is the massive graves.&nbsp; In a stochastic fashion, individuals from the civilian population were apprehended without discernible patterns and predetermined criteria. Eventually, they had been taken to different prison camps in southern Iraq – far from their homes. For instance, Nugra Salman Prison (Figure 2) was located in the desert of the Muthanna Governorate, and Topzawa prison camp where the Iraqi army's recent attempt to reopen a former Baathist-era Iraqi military base in Kirkuk. The prison was established in Topzawa village in southern Kirkuk province, wherein thousands of Kurds, especially women, and children were uprooted. The dictatorship then transported them to the Topzawa base – a building – where males and females were separated before being sent to desert detention camps. In an interview with Kurdistan 24, Saman Ahmed – an Anfal survivor – stated: “before we arrived, more than 50 buses were here [at the base]. When we arrived, it was very crowded, so we were transferred to Tikrit”.Narrative Review:The issue of such critical race has been read by various critics through different lenses: for instance, &nbsp;Bozarslan et al. (2021) claim that during the mid-1980s, the Iraqi state intensified its campaign to seize Kurdish-held areas, adopted an Arabization policy, and launched the Anfal campaign, which included chemical attacks on Kurdish civilians, destruction of the traditional rural economy and infrastructure, forced displacement of rural Kurdish communities, summary executions, and forced disappearances. According to Kurdish accounts, 4,000 villages were devastated and 182,000 people were slain. According to Human Rights Watch, up to 100,000 people died, many of them women and children, with the chemical strike on the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, alone killing 5,000 Kurdish residents. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the Iranians aided Kurdish guerilla forces in their fight for independence in northern Iraq, as well as opening a new front to divide Iraqi military operations. The Iraqi military suppressed the Kurdish insurgency. However, Kurdish rebels collaborated with Iranian soldiers in attacking Iraqi military targets. In return, the Iraqi military retaliated with ground operations by army forces, aerial bombing, village devastation, concentration camps, mass executions, and chemical warfare against the Kurdish population. Iranian forces and Kurdish insurgents gained control of the Iraqi military station in Halabja in March 1988. The Iraqi Air Force launched rockets and napalm into Halabja's residential districts two days later, followed by a poison gas strike – 3,000-5,000 civilian Kurds were murdered, while 10,000 or more were severely injured. It was the most massive chemical assault since poison gas was banned during W.W.I. in 1918 (p.8).Joost (2008) states that the Anfal campaign was the conclusion of the Ba'ath regime's long-standing efforts to put an end to Kurdish ambitions for greater autonomy and independence. It occurred near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, a deadly eight-year conflict (1980-1988) that allowed Kurdish rebels to exploit a security vacuum in the north. Anfal was the regime's retaliation for what it saw as an unforgivable betrayal, along with its way of permanently resolving the Kurdish national conflict within the borders of the Iraqi state. Whitely (1994) asserts that the village of Koreme, located in the Badinan highlands of the Dohuk governorate, was one of the hundreds of Kurdish settlements that felt the scourge of the Anfal. Near the end of the campaign, 27 male peasants were brutally killed on a hill outside Koreme after returning from a futile attempt to flee into Turkey. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights exhumed their bodies and conducted a forensic examination to identify the cause and circumstances of their deaths in late spring 1992.&nbsp;From a Totalitarian Regime to Anfal&nbsp;The term totalitarianism – primarily – is a political system in which a single ruling party or leader consolidates control and authority. Individual liberties are often suppressed, political pluralism is absent, and large state machinery is used to maintain govern over society. In other words, it is a government that theoretically allows no individual freedom and strives to submit all aspects of individual life to state control. In the early 1920s, the Italian dictator – Benito Mussolini – coined the term totalitario to describe the emerging fascist state of Italy, which he further defined as "all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state”. Totalitarianism had become synonymous with absolute and brutal single-party rule by the outbreak of W.W. II. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, and North Korea under the Kim family are all modern examples of totalitarian nations. &nbsp;This political concept has been one of the major issues which thinkers have highlighted in their works, for instance, the modern political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, investigated this subject in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), on the ideological foundation of totalitarianism, she begins with an introduction to the origins of the anti-Semitism historically and the Nazis’ manufactured political doctrine.&nbsp;Arendt claims that antisemitism is more than just hatred, rather, it is an ideology that authoritarian movements use as a weapon. To further rouse the populace against Jews, European nobility linked itself with conservative religious objectives and propagated antisemitic rhetorically. In exchange, nations required Jews to assimilate while also wishing for them to remain distinct. According to Arendt, all of this has driven authoritarian movements to actively use antisemitic discourse to further their aims. She goes further, explaining that Antisemitism is defined and its significance in authoritarianism is discussed. Arendt refutes various theories concerning the relationship between antisemitism and totalitarianism, claiming that antisemitism arose along with totalitarianism. She explains the history of the Jewish people in Europe, including the restrictions and benefits that come with their unique status. According to Arendt, the loss of Jewish political power while maintaining riches caused others to detest the Jewish people (1962, p. 5-9). Because of their ancestry, Jews were both sought and rejected. &nbsp;In Arendt’s context, it is fair to state that this ethnic problem related to the Anfal Campaign seems to be related to the political doctrine which led to the tragic and violent reactions from the former regime towards Kurds. The term antisemitism has a long history in which readers immediately absorb the signification within it. Strikingly, a similar conception is found in a different context – Kurdish/ Arabic identity– that is to say, the emergence of this phenomenon seemed to be invisible. Here we want to focus on this political system –– the animosity of the Nazis towards Jews assumed a different form in northern Iraq. The political prejudice against Kurds took various shapes from propaganda to using weapons, progressively, this became one of the major issues between two different nations in the same area; one is viewed as superior and the other inferior in terms of power.Similarly, Michel Foucault explains the concept of ‘biopower’ that originated historically with the transition of power forms in Western civilizations beginning in the seventeenth century, but the most dramatic transformation occurred during the nineteenth century. In other words, the sovereign's right to take or let live, symbolized by the sword, gradually gave way to society's capacity to govern life, both by caring for people's lives and by limiting it, even to the point of terminating life. This change included many power strategies and methods of managing life. According to Foucault, this new power over life, known as biopower, arose in two forms: anatomy-politics of the human body and biopolitics of the population. They were different in the eighteenth century but were later connected by a bridge in the latter centuries – a plethora of relations converged to form a coherent, new power technology. Foucault coined this term in the 1970s, to illustrate the complexities of authority and the abstractions of manufactured power, he defines biopolitics:&nbsp;The way one has tried since the eighteenth century to rationalize the problems that were posed to governmental practice by the totality of living beings constituted as a population; health, hygiene, lifespan, races, and birthrate. (p 136)In other words, biopolitics encompasses all disciplinary procedures and regulatory approaches that optimize the population while also establishing it as a new reality. And what exactly is biopower? Foucault defined biopower as a technology that, on the one hand, refers to body discipline while, on the other hand, refers to the control over this new totality of the population through certain regulatory and knowledge systems. In this framework, Foucault outlines a power technology aimed at "bodily capabilities" and "life processes" (Deuber-Mankowsky, 2008, p. 136-137). &nbsp;From this perspective, the life of Kurds was under the power of the Ba’ath regime in terms of who would live or die. The details of the Anfal operation and the steps of transporting the prisoners from one place to another and the random firing squad – the penal system – without having a legal trial, all show the means of power and discipline that were set by the government led the civilians in certain patterns. Their physical, emotional, and psychological freedoms were forsaken and buried beneath the desert sands where they were interred alive.Like Arendt and Foucault, Karl Popper examines political ideology and fascism through his well-known “The Paradox of Tolerance,” the notion illustrates the boundaries of tolerance in a democratic society. It emphasizes the dichotomy between defending individual freedom and safeguarding the democratic norms that enable that liberty. Popper contended that a tolerant society must not accept bigotry to prosper. In other words, there are some ideas or persons who want to undermine or destroy the concepts of tolerance and democracy. Allowing unfettered tolerance of intolerant ideas risks allowing those ideologies to take over or hurt society, potentially leading to the erosion of individual freedoms and the collapse of the open society. The paradox emerges from the inherent conflict between tolerant principles and the necessity to maintain such standards. If tolerance is extended to all viewpoints, including intolerant ones, a paradoxical scenario arises in which the tolerant society risks being used or destroyed by those who wish to abuse its openness and stifle opposing viewpoints (Shereikis, 2017). Popper’s theory appears its reflection on the Kurdish genocide through the tolerance of Iraqi civilians led to the tragic ending. It is essential to mention that one of the major Ba’ath’s justifications for killing Kurds was treason – they obviously demanded more tolerance for their intolerant actions against the Kurdish identity, heritage, and history. &nbsp;The Iraqi government's hostility towards the Kurdish community drove the genocidal campaigns. Once we consider the Kurds’ point of view, the contradiction of tolerance becomes clear. Due to the Iraqi regime's intolerance, Kurds demanding autonomy and acknowledgment of their cultural rights were subjected to deadly violence. The paradox stems from the question of whether a tolerant society should allow the activities of an intolerant dictatorship seeking to eradicate a certain population within its borders. From a larger standpoint, one may say that the Kurdish Anfal exemplifies the risks of unrestricted tolerance. While tolerance is a vital and necessary principle in a democratic society, it should not be given to individuals who want to undermine fundamental tolerance ideals or commit grave human rights violations.&nbsp; ConclusionThe Kurdish genocide in the 1980s has been narrated in terms of historical events that were committed against Kurds by the Ba’ath regime. In this article, we attempted to present the context of the Anfal Campaign and then illustrate the political aspect behind it through several studies by critics. In the discussion, we investigated this case in terms of race and power – these concepts seem to be major issues that have been manipulated by fascists throughout history. For this reason, we endeavored to focus on the philosophical investigation of mass murder and study its complexities through the works of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Karl Popper, in terms of totalitarianism. As a result, political ideology appears to play the key role in constructing such manufactured ideologies – the racial divisions – the decisions on civilian life, and forge identities.&nbsp; ReferencesBozarslan, H., Gunes, C., &amp; Yadirgi, V. (Eds.). (2021). The Cambridge History of the Kurds. New York: Cambridge University Press.Arendt, H. (1962). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York: The New World Publishing Company.Arnason, G. (2012). Biopower (Foucault). Retrieved from Science Direct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/biopower#:~:text='Biopower'%20is%20the%20term%20he,political%20sphere%20of%20sovereign%20powerBa'athis and Kurds. (n.d.). Retrieved from Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFAL1.htmDeuber-Mankowsky, A. (2008). Nothing is political, everything can be politicized: On the concept of the political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt. Telos, 135-161.In Pictures | Families of Anfal Victims Visit Nugra Salman Prison. (2023, May 16). Retrieved May 25, 2023, from Basnews: https://www.basnews.com/en/babat/807385Joost, H. (2008, February 3). THE 1988 ANFAL CAMPAIGN IN IRAQI KURDISTAN. Retrieved May 22, 2023, from https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/1988-anfal-campaign-iraqi-kurdistan.htmlKurdish Genocide. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2023, from The Kurdish Project: https://thekurdishproject.org/history-and-culture/kurdish-history/kurdistan-genocide/Shereikis, N. (2021, November 17). Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance and What It Teaches Us About Political Polarization. Retrieved from Political Empathy Project: https://www.politicalempathyproject.org/blog-posts/karl-poppers-paradox-of-tolerance-and-what-it-teaches-us-about-political-polarization. Accessed 23- 05-2023.&nbsp;Sherwani, H. (2021, October 25). Iraqi army stops plan to put Baathist-era military base used in Anfal back in operation. Retrieved May 25, 2023, from https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/26034-Iraqi-army-stops-plan-to-put-Baathist-era-military-base-used-in-Anfal-back-in-operationStory of Anfal. (n.d.). Retrieved from Kurdistan Memory Propgramme: https://kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com/story-of-anfal/ Accessed 25- 050 2023.&nbsp;totalitarianism. (2023, May 18). Retrieved from Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/totalitarianism. Accessed 25- 05-2023.&nbsp;Whitley, A. (1994, July- August). The Remains of Anfal. Retrieved from Merip.org: https://merip.org/1994/07/the-remains-of-anfal/

From Totalitarianism to Genocide: The Anfal Campaign as a Dark Chapter in Kurdish History

The Importance and Challenges of Establishing the Federation Council in Iraq

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Research Articles

The Intersections of Geography and Language

The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iranian Academic Res...

Aspirations and Capabilities: Drivers of Kurdish Youth Mi...

Dam Policies and the Colonial Condition of Kurdistan

From Totalitarianism to Genocide: The Anfal Campaign as a...

The Importance and Challenges of Establishing the Federat...