The War Crimes of Iraq s Saddam Hussein
Political Oppression:
Hussein openly idolized the former Soviet premier
Joseph Stalin, a man notable as much for his paranoia-induced execution sprees as anything else. In July 1978, Hussein had his government issue a memorandum decreeing that anyone whose ideas came into conflict with those of the Baath Party leadership would be subject to summary execution. Most, but certainly not all, of Hussein's targets were
ethnic Kurds and
Shiite Muslims.
The Dujail Massacre of 1982:
In July of 1982, several Shiite militants attempted to assassinate
Saddam Hussein while he was riding through the city. Hussein responded by ordering the slaughter of some 148 residents, including dozens of children. This is the war crime with which Saddam Hussein was formally charged, and for which he was executed.
The Barzani Clan Abductions of 1983:
Masoud Barzani led the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), an ethnic Kurdish revolutionary group fighting Baathist oppression. After Barzani cast his lot with the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein had some 8,000 members of Barzani's clan, including hundreds of women and children, abducted. It is assumed that most were slaughtered; thousands have been discovered in
mass graves in southern Iraq.
The al-Anfal Campaign:
The worst human rights abuses of Hussein's tenure took place during the genocidal al-Anfal Campaign (1986-1989), in which Hussein's administration called for the extermination of every living thing--human or animal--in certain regions of the Kurdish north. All told, some 182,000 people--men, women, and children--were slaughtered, many through use of
chemical weapons. The Halabja poison gas massacre of 1988 alone killed over 5,000 people. Hussein later blamed the attacks on the Iranians, and the Reagan administration, which supported Iraq in the
Iran-Iraq War, helped promote this cover story.
The Campaign Against the Marsh Arabs:
Hussein did not limit his genocide to identifiably Kurdish groups; he also targeted the predominantly Shiite Marsh Arabs of southeastern Iraq, the direct descendants of the ancient Mesopotamians. By destroying more than 95% of the region's marshes, he effectively depleted its food supply and destroyed the entire millennia-old culture, reducing the number of Marsh Arabs from 250,000 to approximately 30,000. It is unknown how much of this population drop can be attributed to direct starvation and how much to migration, but the human cost was unquestionably high.
The Post-Uprising Massacres of 1991:
In the aftermath of
Operation Desert Storm, the United States encouraged Kurds and Shiites to rebel against Hussein's regime--then withdrew and refused to support them, leaving an unknown number to be slaughtered. At one point, Hussein's regime killed as many as 2,000 suspected Kurdish rebels every day. Some two million Kurds hazarded the dangerous trek through the mountains to Iran and Turkey, hundreds of thousands dying in the process.