Kurdistan and The Kurds A Divided Homeland and a Nation without ...

two occasions, the Kurdish liberation movement was in
a setback equivalent to more than fifty years instead of
moving forward. In the seventies all the Kurdish people
supported the Revolution while in the eighties the
revolution did not have more than two thousand fighters
affiliated to all the Kurdish factions and parties; in the
same time the Iraqi authorities were commanding and
controlling more than half a million armed Kurds. This
was the situation when I left Kurdistan and came to Europe
at the end of 1984. However, in 1988 there were signs
on the horizon that the Iraqi-Iran war might stop. So,
the Iraqi authorities started a widespread plan to burn
Kurdistan so that the victims from the Kurdish people
would be regarded as part of their war with Iran and not
as part of their racist war against the Kurdish people.
Thus on 16 March 1988 the Iraqi government attacked
the town of Halabja with chemical weapons and repeated
such attacks in other regions of Kurdistan such as Badinan
and the Balisan Valley. Also in the summer of 1988
Iraq carried out its operations unfamously known as the
“Anfal Operations”. The word Anfal is taken from one
of the verses of the holy Quran, in which the Exalted
Allah permits the Moslems to attack the infidels in their
areas allowing to rape their women, insult their honor,
take their property and kill their men… Indeed the criminal
Iraqi regime regarded itself as a Moslem regime and
regarded the Kurds as infidels!! As a result of these
operations the Iraqi regime amassed 182 thousand male
Kurds between the ages of 12 and 80 from various Kurdish
areas and villages, and carried them in trucks to the deserts
of the Southern Iraq, where bulldozers started digging
large pits and the kidnapped Kurds were put down, killed
and covered.
- 140 -