Kurds, a strong and large nation, deserve a state of their own (like Jews, they want it without Arabs). Most Kurds, however, live in tough-mannered Turkey which won’t easily give them one fifth of its territory. Iran, a home for six million Kurds, is similarly ill mannered and isn’t worth asking for sovereignty. Kurds, therefore, historically chose a relatively soft spot for their sovereignty demands - Iraq. In doing so, they have full support of Iran which assures its own territorial integrity and troubles Iraq. Later, Israel started sponsoring the Kurdish insurgents to distract Iraq and perhaps even acquire in autonomous Kurdistan a base for the operations against Iran and Iraq. Before calling Iran and Israel irresponsible instigators, consider the peripheral wars staged by America to weaken the Soviets. In Afghanistan alone, one and a half million people were killed, most of them with the American money and weapons.
Saddam wasn’t the first to massively kill the Kurds. British used air power and artillery against the Kurdish civilians in 1930. Protracted struggle followed with intermittent uprisings every few years. Sometimes, the Iraqi government granted the Kurds a degree of independence to be revoked when the balance of power shifted. When Saddam came to power, Kurds were not a defenseless minority but thoroughly armed population with considerable army which, for example, defeated regular Iraqi army in 1966. Among other violent acts, several decades earlier Kurds repeatedly massacred Christian Assyrians. In 1980s, Kurdish army was at least 60,000 strong, being armed by Iran and Israel for decades.
Late 1970s saw intense fighting between Kurdish militia and the Iraqi army. At that time, Baghdad employed the standard anti-insurrection measure, resettlement. Since, however, Kurds wanted a state, not merely personal survival, the resettlement crashed their hopes and was bitterly opposed.
International Criminal Court (ICC) defines genocide as an action intended to destroy a national group. That was not Saddam’s intention: only a tiny percentage of the Kurdish population was annihilated. Saddam rather perpetrated ethnic cleansing, forced removal of indelible group from a territory. Theoretically, ethnic cleansing is also a crime against humanity, but of much lower order than genocide.
Despite its agreement with Iraq, Iran continued supporting Kurdish insurgents. Ten percent of the population, autonomously residing in a large territory, aligned with the enemy at war, is dangerous. Saddam chose a brutal, but commonsense solution: to clean the border areas with Iran of hostile Kurds. The operation was extended to oil-rich areas because Iraq, exhausted by the war with Iran, had to secure the oil revenues. Most of the Kurds repressed during the Anfal campaign refused government orders regarding evacuation and resettlement. With few unavoidable exceptions, women and children were resettled and interned, not killed. Military-age males were summarily executed on the assumption that those found on the prohibited territories are likely to be or support the guerrillas.
Most commentators cite the number of killed about 50,000. That constitutes 0.8% of the Iraqi Kurds and falls short of genocide. The number fades in comparison to more than a million people killed in the ongoing war with Iran. The number is probably much lower. During the extensive investigation, Human Rights Watch collected only 17,000 names of the deceased relatives. That includes many missing people. Since women were almost never killed and most people survived in Kurdish extended families, a significant omission is unlikely: someone always remained to testify. Examination of gravesites produced similar figures. Relative prosperity of the Kurdish region also shows that the killing was limited in scope. To be sure, brutal death of even 17,000 people is a tragedy - but not genocide, and arguably a military measure.
Saddam is also condemned for the gas attack on Halabja. The reports by CIA and the US Army intelligence agency put the blame on Iran simply because Iraq did not have the poison gases used in that city. When the US relations with Iraq soured, America shifted the blame on Iraq - many years after the event, based on no new evidence whatsoever. Even if Iraq had indeed perpetrated the attack, it seemingly targeted the Iranian troops and ubiquitous Kurdish insurgents. Credible accounts place the number of dead at several hundred - again, not genocide.
