"Iraq's 1988 campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living within its borders resulted in the death of at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children. This book from Human Rights Watch investigates the so-called Anfal campaign and concludes that this campaign constituted genocide against the Kurds." "The book is the result of research by a team of Human Rights Watch/Middle East investigators who analyzed eighteen tons of captured Iraqi government documents (ten of these documents are reproduced in an appendix) and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the Anfal campaign. It confirms that the campaign was characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass summary executions and disappearance of many tens of thousands of noncombatants; the widespread use of chemical weapons, among them mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands; the arbitrary jailing and warehousing of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation and without judicial order; the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers to barren resettlement camps after the demolition of their homes; and the wholesale destruction of some two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations. The book is a searing indictment of the Iraqi government's carefully planned and executed program to destroy a people, harrowing in its detailed and objective recounting of crimes against innocents."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The PUK's last stand.

Imposing sanctions on Iraq was one of the most heinous of crimes committed in the 20th century. Yet it has received little attention in the Anglo-American world. Despite the calamitous destruction resulting from the sanctions, no serious attempts by legal professionals, academics or philosophers have been undertaken to address the full scope of the immorality and illegality of such a criminal and unprecedented mass punishment. Genocide in Iraq offers a comprehensive coverage of Iraq’s politics, its building, its destruction through aggression and sanctions, and an analysis of the legality of these sanctions from the point of view of international laws and human rights laws. It presents a detailed policy analysis indicating how, under Ba’ath rule, Iraq had risen to become-be fore 12 years of total sanctions were globally enforced-the most progressive and developed Arab nation in the Middle East. It then contrasts that rising nation to the devastated remains left in the aftermath of sanctions, which nonetheless was yet to endure, in 2003, the full force of the American “shock and awe” invasion. The book explains why, in modern times, imperialist powers felt it was necessary to occupy Baghdad. It also puts forward the uniqueness of Iraq as at the heart of both Sunni and Shi’a theology, arguing it was this very centrality of Iraq, which far outweighs the significance of Arabia in socio-economic, religious and geostrategic dimensions, that at the same time makes Iraq a target. It details the building of Iraq by the Ba’ath regime, part of which was done with remarkable speed, putting to rest the argument that other countries in the area were developed at a similar pace. It also details the devastation of Iraq by 2003 after 12 years of sanctions-a devastation so dreadful that by the UN’s own accounting, some 500,000 child deaths were due to it; a devastation so pervasive and overwhelming that two of the UN’s own key administrators of the sanctions program, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest.

Genocide by Sanctions explores the criminal abuse of UN sanctions. Evidence of a planned and systematically created giant infanticide is uncovered. US bombing in 1991 destroyed Iraq’s water purification, sewages, and electricity plants to run them. The ensuing mass death of Iraqi babies and children was measured by experts who are among the authors.

Between February and September 1988, the Iraqi government destroyed over 2000 Kurdish villages, killing somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians and displacing many more. The operation was codenamed Anfal which literally means 'the spoils of war'. For the survivors of this campaign, Anfal did not end in September 1988: the aftermath of this catastrophe is as much a part of the Anfal story as the gas attacks, disappearances and life in the camps. This book examines Kurdish women's experience of violence, destruction, the disappearance of loved ones, and incarceration during the Anfal campaign. It explores the survival strategies of these women in the aftermath of genocide. By bringing together and highlighting women's own testimonies, Choman Hardi reconstructs the Anfal narrative in contrast to the current prevailng one which is highly politicised, simplified, and nationalistic. It also addresses women's silences about sexual abuse and rape in a patriarchal society which holds them responsible for having been a victim of sexual violence.