The Kurdish genocide in Iraq: the Security-Anfal and the Identity-Anfal

From February to September 1988, Iraqi Kurds were subjected to a genocidal operation by the Iraqi government, known as the Anfal operation. The operation lasted just over seven months but it had a devastating impact on most parts of rural Kurdistan in Iraq, resulting in the killing of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Most scholars have overlooked the multiple strategies, dimensions of and motivations for the operations and have mostly focused on and/or examined the military and genocidal dimensions of the operation. This article examines some of data and documents as well as secondary sources related to the Anfal operation directly or indirectly. It scrutinizes the pattern of casualties and disappearances of the Kurdish civilians during operations in order to identify and explain the motives of the Iraqi state. It argues that although the Iraqi government’s objectives and intentions were multidimensional, two dimensions were the primary ones; the first one security and the second identity. In the Security-Anfal the intention was to overcome the Kurdish rebel groups; however, in the Identity-Anfal the key motive was the de-Kurdification of the Kirkuk province in order to Arabize the areas of Iraqi Kurdistan that were strategically significant economically and politically.