Saddam to stand trial for campaign against Kurds
By Sameer Yacoub
28 June 2006
SADDAM HUSSEIN and six co-defendants will stand trial in August for his 1980s military campaign against Kurds.
An estimated 100,000 Kurds were killed in the operation in northern Iraq. Known as Anfal, Arabic for “spoils of war,” it was aimed at crushing independence-minded Kurdish militias and clearing out the Kurdish population along the sensitive Iranian border.
Saddam had accused Kurdish militias of ties to Iran. Thousands of Kurdish villages were razed and their inhabitants either killed or displaced.
Thee campaign included “savage military attacks on civilians,” including “the use of mustard gas and nerve agents … to kill and maim rural villagers and to drive them out of their homes,” the tribunal said in a memo issued in April.
Others accused in the case include Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, or “Chemical Ali”; former Defence Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad; former intelligence chief Saber Abdul Aziz al-Douri; former Republican Guard commander Hussein al-Tikriti; former Nineveh provincial governor Taher Tafwiq al-Ani; and former top military commander Farhan Mutlaq al-Jubouri.
Click photo to view and read Bloody Friday - Chemical massacre of the Kurds by the Iraqi regime - Halabja-March 1988
Saddam and seven other co-defendants have been on trial since October 19 for the deaths of Shi’ite Muslims following a 1982 assassination attempt against him in the town of Dujail.
That trial is in recess until next month when the defence is to present its closing arguments.
Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi said the Anfal and Dujail cases would proceed in tandem if the Dujail case judges have not reached a verdict by August 21.
Meanwhile, one of Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab groups has endorsed the prime minister’s national reconciliation plan, and the government announced new benefits to help freed detainees return to normal lives.
The political moves came a day after bombs killed at least 40 people at markets in two cities, and key lawmakers said seven Sunni Arab insurgent groups offered the government a conditional truce.
The seven groups who approached the government are mostly made up of former members or backers of Saddam’s government, military or security agencies, and were motivated in part by fear of undue Iranian influence in Iraq, lawmakers said.
If confirmed, their offer could stand as evidence of a growing divide between Iraq’s homegrown Sunni insurgency and the more brutal and ideological fighters of al-Qaida in Iraq, who are believed to be mainly non-Iraqi Islamic militants.
In the latest violence yesterday, a suicide car bomb struck a busy gas station in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing three people and wounding 17.
In the first tangible measure after the reconciliation plan was announced, the council of ministers said government employees who had been detained and recently released will be reinstated to their jobs.
The Justice Ministry, meanwhile, said 453 more detainees were released from US detention centres, part of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s plan to free 2,500 by the end of the month.
