Anfal campaign

Overview

The Anfal campaign was a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime against Kurdish communities in Kurdistan, within northern Iraq. Kurdish civilians were its principal targets. Across the wider campaign of 1987 and 1988, Iraqi forces killed large numbers of people, emptied and destroyed villages, forcibly relocated survivors and used chemical weapons. The best-known chemical attack struck Halabja on 16 March 1988. The Halabja massacre was part of Anfal’s wider pattern of mass killing, rather than a separate explanation for the devastation of rural Kurdistan.

Anfal combined military offensives against Kurdish armed groups with state action against civilian settlements. Iraqi forces treated residence in areas designated outside government control as grounds for attack, removal or detention. They destroyed homes and the means by which rural communities sustained themselves. One account of the wider ten-month campaign reports that Saddam Hussein’s forces razed 4,000 of northern Iraq’s 4,655 villages and killed as many as 180,000 Iraqi citizens. These figures convey the scale of the destruction; the killing of civilians and the destruction of their communities define the campaign more clearly than its official military name.

The assault reached beyond ethnic Kurds. Iraqi forces destroyed Assyrian churches, and Assyrians were executed and tortured during Anfal. Saddam Hussein’s government also compelled Yazidis into detachments assigned to pursue Muslim Kurds, while repressing Yazidi identity. These actions belonged to a system directed by the Iraqi state. Compelled service by members of a minority community did not transfer command of the campaign, or responsibility for its policies, away from the regime.

Background

Anfal grew out of Saddam Hussein’s sustained effort to bring Kurdish areas under direct control and weaken the communities that lived there. Before the principal 1988 offensives, the regime had already pursued Arabization, expulsion and village destruction in northern Iraq. In government-controlled areas, Arabization sought to harass and remove non-Arabs and alter the population of strategically important places. Kirkuk was a central focus: the regime targeted ethnic Kurds and Assyrians for expulsion as it sought to Arabize the city. The policy extended the struggle from armed resistance to questions of residence, identity and control of land.

The Iran–Iraq War formed the immediate wartime setting. Iraq had used chemical weapons during that war and used them again against its own people during Anfal. Kurdish armed groups resisted Baghdad, and the regime cast areas beyond its control as security threats. Its response went far beyond fighting those groups. Village residents, including families who remained on their land, faced bombardment, arrest, forced relocation and killing. The regime’s treatment of whole rural communities made Anfal a campaign against a population, even as Iraqi forces also fought Kurdish combatants.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin and head of the Ba’ath Party’s Northern Bureau, directed the organized campaign in northern Iraq. His office coordinated the state’s military and security apparatus as successive areas came under assault. Iraqi army formations carried out offensives while security agencies handled arrests and removals. The government’s ability to move forces between districts, designate areas for destruction and confine displaced people gave Anfal its systematic character. Al-Majid’s command role linked the successive phases to central policy under Saddam Hussein, rather than to isolated decisions by units in the field.

The regime’s approach also placed northern Iraq’s minorities under pressure. Most Assyrians lived in northern governorates, and Saddam Hussein’s government suspected them of collaborating with Iraqi Kurds. It sought to undermine Assyrian and Yazidi identities while using coercion to divide communities. The campaign therefore took place within a broader program of repression directed at non-Arabs and religious minorities, although Kurdish civilians remained its principal victims.

Course of the war

The wider violence lasted ten months across 1987 and 1988. Its principal Anfal offensives unfolded in organized phases during 1988. Beginning in the southeastern part of Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi forces moved through successive rural districts before turning to areas farther north. Each phase brought a new concentration of military force against villages and surrounding countryside. The sequence allowed the regime to pursue Kurdish armed groups while repeatedly sweeping civilian settlements into its operations. Pauses between offensives did not end the threat to villagers who had been detained, displaced or left without homes.

The first major 1988 offensive struck the area around Kurdish resistance positions at Sergalou and Bergalou. Subsequent phases reached Qara Dagh, Germian and other districts before the final operations in the north. Iraqi forces combined conventional attacks with chemical strikes, arrests and the demolition of villages. Their campaign made rural life itself a target. When residents fled an advancing force, they could lose their homes and farmland; when they remained, they risked attack or detention. The regime then moved survivors away from the communities it had destroyed.

Halabja showed the lethal purpose and reach of Iraqi chemical warfare. On 16 March 1988, Iraqi forces dropped chemical weapons on the town, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians, including women and children. The attack occurred during the same campaign that was destroying villages elsewhere in the north. Halabja was one of multiple places where Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against civilians. Its prominence in accounts of Anfal reflects the scale and visibility of the massacre, not an exception to the regime’s conduct.

Conventional methods caused destruction alongside chemical attacks. Iraqi forces entered rural districts, emptied villages and razed homes and other buildings. Forced relocation severed families from land, livelihoods and local institutions. Arrests removed people from their communities, often without any later accounting of their fate. Saddam Hussein’s officials arrested more than 150,000 Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians and other non-Arabs who were never seen again. Anfal’s toll thus included deaths during attacks, disappearances after detention and the lasting loss of settlements across Kurdistan.

Assyrian communities also suffered during the 1988 campaign. Iraqi military forces destroyed numerous Assyrian churches, damaging places of worship as well as the communities around them. Many Assyrians were executed or tortured. Their treatment reflected the regime’s suspicion of Assyrians in the north and its wider repression of minority identities. Assyrian losses must be understood within the campaign’s full reach, while retaining the distinction that the regime’s principal genocidal target was the Kurdish population.

Iraqi government documents also record the formation of all-Yazidi military detachments during the 1988–89 Anfal period. The government assigned these detachments to pursue and attack Muslim Kurds. Evidence of compelled Yazidi participation matters because the regime was simultaneously imposing repressive measures on Yazidis themselves. It used state power to draw members of one vulnerable community into operations against another. The Iraqi government formed the detachments, set their mission and commanded the campaign; the ethnic composition of a unit did not change who directed it.

By the final phase, Iraqi forces had carried their offensives into the northern districts of Kurdistan. The end of the Iran–Iraq War freed forces for operations there. The regime’s successive attacks had already emptied broad stretches of countryside, and the final operations extended that destruction. Anfal was therefore an organized series of assaults whose effects continued after particular battles ended. Displaced families faced confinement or the loss of any village to which they could return.

Outcome

Anfal left rural Kurdistan devastated. Thousands of villages were destroyed, their populations killed, detained or uprooted. Chemical weapons inflicted mass casualties at Halabja and elsewhere; conventional force and forced displacement dismantled communities across a much wider area. The reported toll of as many as 180,000 deaths in the wider campaign captures only one dimension of the harm. The disappearance of relatives, destruction of churches and homes, and loss of farmland reshaped life for survivors and for communities beyond the principal Kurdish targets.

The campaign achieved the regime’s immediate objective of destroying much of the rural environment in which Kurdish communities had lived and armed groups had operated. That outcome did not make Anfal a conventional military operation. Its methods included the deliberate destruction of civilian settlements, the removal of their inhabitants and chemical attacks on people whom the Iraqi state governed. The combination of mass killing and an organized drive to erase communities is why Anfal is described as genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The assault also exposed the connection between Saddam Hussein’s wartime conduct and his domestic rule. Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iran–Iraq War and then against its own people. In northern Iraq, the regime joined that capacity to longstanding Arabization and expulsion policies. Kirkuk’s targeted non-Arab communities, the destroyed Assyrian churches and the coerced Yazidi detachments show how the campaign drew on broader structures of state repression. Its central tragedy remained the killing and displacement of Kurdish civilians throughout rural Kurdistan.

Aftermath and legacy

The 1991 Gulf War changed the political setting three years after Anfal devastated rural Kurdistan. It preceded the birth of the Kurdistan Regional Government, under which Kurdish self-government gained substantial autonomy. For survivors, that political change followed the destruction of homes and communities under Saddam Hussein, rather than undoing it. Anfal remained a defining event in Kurdish public life and in efforts to account for those killed or disappeared.

Kurdistan served as the northern front of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its role elevated the Kurdistan Regional Government’s status. The invasion ended Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, the government responsible for Anfal, and enabled Kurdish political and economic power to grow. The end of that regime strengthened Kurdish rights, but rebuilding required more than a change in Baghdad. Communities that had lost villages, relatives and institutions faced a long recovery.

During the economic boom from 2004 to 2014, the Kurdistan Regional Government undertook reconstruction across areas destroyed during Anfal. It reported rebuilding 65 percent of rural Kurdistan damaged in the campaign. New construction and expanding economic activity marked a substantial change from the devastation of 1988. The rebuilding figure describes the government’s account of physical recovery; it cannot encompass every death, disappearance or broken connection to a former home.

Anfal’s legacy also concerns the people beyond the principal Kurdish target. Assyrian losses included lives and churches, while the regime’s treatment of Yazidis demonstrated both coercion and repression. The broader Arabization drive against non-Arabs, including in Kirkuk, placed the campaign in a longer history of attempts to reshape northern Iraq by force. Remembering Anfal in full requires recognition of those connected policies and of the Iraqi state’s responsibility for directing them.

Halabja remains the campaign’s most recognizable atrocity, but Anfal cannot be reduced to a single chemical attack. Its organized phases, repeated assaults on villages, mass arrests, killings and forced movements devastated communities across Kurdistan. The fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the growth of Kurdish autonomy changed the political order that had carried out the campaign. They also left a continuing task: preserving an accurate account of the civilians targeted, the minority communities harmed and the state apparatus that made the destruction possible.