Anfal campaign

Uncommon card · No. 114313

The Anfal campaign, was a counterinsurgency operation, described by many scholars and human rights groups as a genocide or ethnic cleansing, which was carried out by Ba'athist Iraq from February to September 1988 during the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict at the end of the Iran–Iraq War. The campaign targeted rural Kurds because its purpose was to eliminate Kurdish rebel groups and Arabize strategic parts of the Kirkuk Governorate. The Ba'athist regime committed atrocities on the local Kurdish population, mostly civilians. While the primary targets were Kurds, other minorities in the north such as Assyrians and Turkmen also fell victim to the Anfal campaign. The Iraqi forces were led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, on the orders of President Saddam Hussein. The campaign's name was taken from the title of the eighth chapter of the Qur'an (al-ʾanfāl). In 1993, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Anfal campaign based on documents captured by Kurdish rebels during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq; HRW described...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Rob984, CC BY-SA 4.0