Discussions

Like many people, I knew Saddam was a horrific dictator. Until this week though when I looked up the details of the Al-Anfal campaign I was (sadly)ignorant of the worst of the atrocities he committed. In hopes of bringing more attention to it I am including here a short summary from "Iraq's Crime of Genocide" by Human Rights Watch. Be warned that if you found Schindler's list difficult you will find this more of the same.  
 
Saddam started off by rounding up all the Kurdish people he was able to. Basically any ground the Kurdish Peshmerga where pushed back from or could not defend. The people so caught where sorted as follows:  
 
"With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together. Roughly speaking, this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, but there was no rigorous check of identity documents, and strict chronological age seems to have been less of a criterion than size and appearance. A strapping twelve-year-old might fail to make the cut: an undersized sixteen-year-old might be told to remain with his female relatives. ... It was then time to process the younger males. They were split into smaller groups. ... Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustled into large rooms, or halls, each filled with the residents of a single area. ... Although the conditions at Topzawa were appalling for everyone, the most grossly overcrowded quarter seem to have been those where the male detainees were held. ... For the men, beatings were routine." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 143-45. ISBN 0-300-06427-6)  
 
Within a few days and with no known exceptions, the "processed" men where trucked off to be killed:  
 
"Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front, and dragged into predug 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 grave sites contained dozens of separate pits and obviously contained the bodies of millions of victims." (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 12.)  
 
A more detailed accounting from witnesses and other sources that human rights watch has put together can be found here:  
 
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFAL8.htm