Human Rights Watch´s comprehensive report “Genocide in Iraq - The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds,” originally published in July 1993, details the systematic and deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. The killings occurred between February and September 1988. “Genocide in Iraq” shows that the Kurdish victims were targeted on the basis of their ethnicity.

Drawing on extensive interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis of Iraqi government internal communications, the report meticulously documents Baghdad’s eight-stage military campaign as it moved systematically from the southeastern part of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq to the northwestern corner over six months. This campaign, under the leadership of the then secretary of the Ba’ath Party’s Northern Bureau, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was directed against the Kurdish guerilla organizations known as peshmerga, as well as civilians living in what the government had declared “prohibited zones.”

Read the report