Wednesday was the 17th anniversary of the Halabja massacre. On March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein doused the small Kurdish city with deadly chemical weapons, killing 5,000 civilians. At the time, Iraq was in the midst of a long war with Iran. Europe and the United States backed Saddam, but Kurdish civilians – tired of Saddam’s oppressive rule – sided with Iran. Saddam retaliated in a number of ways. He used chemical weapons a number of times, but his Anfal campaign was severe.
In 1988, thousands of Kurdish villages were burned to the ground. After they lost their homes, many tens of thousands were taken to death camps and shot. During the Anfal campaign, Kurdish villagers were taken to a place called Topzawa south of Kirkuk.
According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners at Topzawa were frequently lined up and dragged into pre-dug mass graves. Other Kurds were shoved into trenches and shot where they stood; still others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed.
"It was very difficult land to work in," recalled Abdul-Hassen Muhan Murad. A former bulldozer driver for Saddam’s secret police, he spoke in 2004 to Kurdish journalist Aref Korbani. "There were lots of holes, and as I remember we dug five big holes in those places and the length of the holes was around 25 meters and the depth of it – it was approximately two and a half meters."
Abdul-Hassen told Korbani how the Kurdish men were brought to the trenches and killed. "They brought men, all of them in Kurdish clothes, the baggy sharwal pants, their eyes were blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs. They brought three or four cars at a time," he said.
"In each hole, they put 70 to 75 people. The implementation was by officers, and there were around 11 of them."
The method was different for women and children, he said. They "were without blindfold, and the gun that was used was the Kalashnikov. They brought them in groups and used automatic weapons. The women were screaming, and the children, and there was a 65-year-old woman included. She had a hunched back, and she couldn’t move or walk so they pushed her into the trench."
After the Kurds were killed or forcibly displaced, Saddam filled their homes with Arabs loyal to him. Driver Abdul-Hassen was one of them. He was given a house in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
"I got a built house that was for a Turkmen man who had been displaced," he said. "It was a complete house. And the neighborhood, all of it, they distributed it for those who moved their residency. They just gave you the number and indicated the house which you were going to live in. We didn’t know the owners of these houses. It just depended on your fate."
Now, almost 20 years later, more than 100,000 Kurds forced out of Kirkuk during Saddam’s regime are trying to return. No one is proposing any housing be built for them. Instead, Kurdish political parties are demanding that all the Arabs who came to Kirkuk since 1975 return back to their "original place."
"All of the time, we feel the problem of the Kurdish policy here," explained Ali Falah last month. The 24-year-old is a recent graduate of the medical college in nearby Mosul. He was born in Kirkuk, but his parents were born in the south of Iraq and moved here during Saddam’s regime.
Kurdish leaders are offering Arabs compensation to leave the city, but Dr. Ali Falah says he has no plans to take it. He says he’s already noticed the change in Kirkuk from Saddam’s time – when most of the police were Arabs – to the post-Saddam period – when nearly all of Kirkuk’s police are Kurds.
"The police here are about 95 percent Kurdish," he says, "so just when they stop you for checking weapons or something, if you talk with them in Arabic language, it’s like you burn them. I don’t know why. If they are Kurdish people, they will deal with them kindly, respectfully. But if they find that you talk to them in Arabic, the emotion in their faces changes."
Like other Arabs in northern Iraq, Dr. Ali Falah doubts the Kurds’ intense interest in Kirkuk is a reaction to the mass displacement of Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Instead, he traces it to the oil under the ground here, more than 8.5 billion barrels (more than $450 billion at today’s prices).
"You know, Kirkuk city is like a lake in oil," the doctor said. "So the most rich city in the world is Kirkuk, and they want to gain it – to control the situation. But I don’t think they will [reach] this goal in their lives."
