The author argues that a part of the history of nation building in Iraq through addressing its political characters, different communities, agreements and pan Arab ideology, including the Baath ideology and its attempts to seize power through nondemocratic methods. It is an attempt to approach the essence of the exclusion mentality of the ruling elite in order to understand the process of genocide against the Kurdish people, including all existing religious minorities. This essence of the process has been approached in the framework of the civilizing and de-civilizing process as a main theory of the German sociologist, Norbert Elias. Thus, this book may be considered as one of the comprehensive books to present a study of state-building in Iraq, along with identifying some of the political figures that had an essential impact on the construction. On the other hand, it is a comprehensive study of the genocide, in the sense of searching for the causes and roots of the genocide. The Anfal campaigns took place in 1988, but the process started as far back as the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies of the last century.

The PUK's last stand.

The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.

Saddam Hussein's execution for his crimes against Iraq's Shia not only brought an end to his reign of oppression, but also to the justice that was to be served to the Iraqi Kurds. The unspeakable atrocities visited by Saddam upon the Kurds of Iraq are explored here, together with the trials of Saddam by the Iraqi High Tribunal. However, this work is more than a litigation history. It is also an exploration of the motivations behind and the depths of organized evil in the context of a single, brutal despot at the helm of an artificially created multi-ethno/religious state lying atop massive oil wealth. Saddam's background and the context of his rule explain much about his actions, but not all. He remained an unpredictable tyrant to the end of his reign. The Kurds have continually been subject to adversity since the end of World War I, when they were denied their own homeland, splitting them among three countries: Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. During Saddam's 24-year reign, the Kurds of Iraq were frequently under the knife of injustice. Between 1987 and 1989, Saddam unleashed genocide, razing over 2,000 villages and murdering at least 50,000 Kurds. As his dictatorship came to an end, the Kurds long-awaited opportunity to hold Saddam responsible for the atrocities against them seemed to have come, only to be sidetracked by the Iraqi High Tribunal, the Iraqi government, and the U.S. government. While the Shia rejoiced in their victory, the Kurds continued to be left behind. Saddam's death freed him of the charges against him by the Kurds. The world had turned its back on the Kurds in their age of genocide, and now appeared to turn a blind eye to the justice that was denied. The unspeakable atrocities visited by Saddam upon the Kurds of Iraq are explored here together with the trials of Saddam by the Iraqi High Tribunal—both the completed prosecution for the Dujail massacre against the Shites and the incomplete one for the Anfal Campaigns against the Kurds. However, this work is more than a litigation history. It is also an exploration of the motivations behind and the depths of organized evil in the context of a single, brutal despot at the helm of an artificially created multi-ethno/religious state lying atop massive oil wealth, but situated in the most dangerous part of the world. Saddam's background and the context of his rule explain much about his actions, but not all. He remained an unpredictable tyrant to the end of his reign.

"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 Armenian genocide of 1915 has been well documented. Much less known is the Turkish genocide of the Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac peoples, which occurred simultaneously in their ancient homelands in and around ancient Mesopotamia - now Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The advent of the First World War gave the Young Turks and the Ottoman government the opportunity to exterminate the Assyrians in a series of massacres and atrocities inflicted on a people whose culture dates back millennia and whose language, Aramaic, was spoken by Jesus. Systematic killings, looting, rape, kidnapping and deportations destroyed countless communities and created a vast refugee diaspora. As many as 300,000 Assyro-Chaldean- Syriac people were murdered and a larger number forced into exile. The "Year of the Sword" (Seyfo) in 1915 was preceded over millennia by other attacks on the Assyrians and has been mirrored by recent events, not least the abuses committed by Islamic State. Joseph Yacoub, whose family was murdered and dispersed, has gathered together a compelling range of eye-witness accounts and reports which cast light on this 'hidden genocide.' Passionate and yet authoritative in its research, his book reveals a little-known human and cultural tragedy. A century after the Assyrian genocide, the fate of this Christian minority hangs in the balance.

An analysis of the Turkish position regarding the Armenian claims of genocide during World War I and the continuing debate over this issue, the author offers an equal examination of each side's historical position. The book asks "what is genocide?" and illustrates that although this is a useful concept to describe such evil events as the Jewish Holocaust in World War II and Rwanda in the 1990s, the term has also been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by many different groups seeking to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic approbation for them. The author includes the Armenians in this category because, although as many as 600,000 of them died during World War I, it was neither a premeditated policy perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government nor an event unilaterally implemented without cause. Of course, in no way does this excuse the horrible excesses committed by the Turks.