The many consequences of the Anfal campaign: the campaign of Saddam Hussein’s army to exterminate the northern Iraqi Kurds, have been an anchor point of our work in northern Iraq since the founding of WADI.
In 1988, in the last year of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein decided to solve the ‘problem’ of the insurgent Kurds once and for all with a tremendous act of violence; in 8 consecutive offensives during the so called Anfal-Campaign large parts of Iraqi Kurdistan were attacked; first poison gas was used against numerous villages, the survivors were then partly deported to southern Iraq and killed, partly housed in newly built settlements along the main roads. Staying in the cleared parts of the country was forbidden, and anyone who stayed there could be killed. The numbers of affected by the campaign vary greatly, officially it is assumed that 180,000 people were murdered in Kurdistan; around 4000 villages and settlements were systematically destroyed house by house. After the liberation from Saddam Hussein in 1991, most parts of northern Iraq were practically completely destroyed and had to be resettled. It is also important to remember that Iraq’s poison gas production came about with the help of German companies.
For thirty years now, WADI has been specifically active in the regions of Iraqi Kurdistan that were affected by the Anfal campaign and the poison gas attacks that accompanied it. These include the Germian areas southwest of Suleimania and Halabja on the Iranian border. WADI has in recent years promoted local political self-expression and networking in villages affected by poison gas attacks, including a number of small projects such as the establishment of local libraries and playgrounds. In this context, WADI has also supported projects and initiatives that are dedicated to remembering, documenting and dealing with the history of the Anfal campaign and the continuing effects of its consequences today.
In Germian, around the village of Göptepe and neighboring communities, which were particularly hard hit by the Anfal campaign, a comprehensive search for traces and documentation of victims by the teacher Hirmen Goptapi resulted. He estimates that he can document over 90% of the names and photographs of the victims at the time. Around 500 residents of Göptepe were victims of the campaign, a little more than 100 of them died from poison gas, the others were deported and killed in the southern Iraqi desert. Today the place has around 1000 inhabitants.
For thirty years now, WADI has been specifically active in the regions of Iraqi Kurdistan that were affected by the Anfal campaign and the poison gas attacks that accompanied it. These include the Germian areas southwest of Suleimania and Halabja on the Iranian border. WADI has in recent years promoted local political self-expression and networking in villages affected by poison gas attacks, including a number of small projects such as the establishment of local libraries and playgrounds. In this context, WADI has also supported projects and initiatives that are dedicated to remembering, documenting and dealing with the history of the Anfal campaign and the continuing effects of its consequences today.
In Germian, around the village of Göptepe and neighboring communities, which were particularly hard hit by the Anfal campaign, a comprehensive search for traces and documentation of victims by the teacher Hirmen Goptapi resulted. He estimates that he can document over 90% of the names and photographs of the victims at the time. Around 500 residents of Göptepe were victims of the campaign, a little more than 100 of them died from poison gas, the others were deported and killed in the southern Iraqi desert. Today the place has around 1000 inhabitants.
Hirmen’s latest project is documenting one of the desert forts on the Saudi border to which Kurds were deported. There you just have to scrape the ground with your foot to uncover bones and remains of clothing. Hirmen wants to document this place photographically in its state of preservation and collect memorabilia. He will go there with one of the survivors, who was a 12-year-old boy at the time and survived because he served the soldiers, and reconstruct the locations and processes of the time. With four young photographers from Germian, he wants to photograph this place systematically.
In order to appreciate the importance of this form of independent remembrance work, one must also take a look at the official commemoration, which has found its form with large “Anfal monuments” for which a separate “martyrs’ ministry” is responsible. As a rule, the survivors and their descendants feel neither addressed nor represented by this type of official memorial, which is purely aimed at political representation.
In Halabja, a place that became synonymous with the brutal attack on the Kurdish civilian population after a poison gas attack that killed 5,000 people in 1988, WADI has been working with a local partner organization, NWE, since 2004, and we have supported its establishment and ongoing development.
Since Wadi began working in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1993, we have also supported countless projects in Halabja and continue to do so to this day. The projects Wadi has supported have always demanded that every German federal government that has been in office since the gas attacks to formally apologise, because without German help Saddam Hussein’s regime would never have been able to produce this deadly gas.
Then came the war in Syria and more poison gas attacks. Again thousands died and nothing happened… except for a few speeches about red lines and a deal with the Syrian dictator that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
One year after the mass murder of civilians in the Syrian Ghoutas, together with our Syrian partner organisation Al Seeraj, we published an extensive dossier on poison gas in the Middle East, which we would like to remind you again, because the texts and eyewitness reports that we read back then, in 2014, have unfortunately are still highly topical.
Past, present and future intertwine in these places; Giving space to the past and remembering also means looking to the future. Sustainability and self-ownership are often popular buzzwords in NGO circles but they actually mean something here. Everything is actually connected with everything else: Hero Wakel, the head of WADI’s local partner organisation NWE in Halabja, answers the question about the meaning of the slogan of Green City Halabja, the environmental program with jute bags and plastic recycling, first with the reference to the poison gas attack, that made the city a symbol.
“Before, we were a green city with lots of trees and gardens. And we want to make Halabja green again.”
The past can quickly come back to Halabja; The murderous acts of the ‘Islamic State’ have also shown how virulent the genocidal potential in the region still is. And so a commemoration project for Halabja, which is to be implemented with the help of the Hans Böckler Foundation, is not based on an abstract ‘commemoration’ – rather the past is to be connected with the future. A ‘memory trail’ – six panels are planned in the first stage – is intended to inform visitors of the city about what happened on that day in March 1988 when the Iraqi jet fighters dropped these bombs. But also the development of the city since then, the reconstruction and the massive changes of the last 30 years.
All of these projects are aimed at a programmatic connection between the past, present and future, which represent what is special and ultimately also successful about the work in the “poison gas villages”; the projects are small in comparison, the funds used are small, but the work has never stopped and never stopped having a real impact.
Wadi 