Saddam’s deadly chemical campaigns

The most interesting thing about this is–I’ve noticed quite a bit of the evidence I could easily find a year ago has mysteriously disappeared on the net about this. I thought I’d snatch some of it up before it disappears altogether and post some of it here with a few comments.

According to HRW/ME, the “standard operating procedures” of the horrible murders of the kurds (extended, in some cases, to other segments of the population) were “uncannily reminiscent of … the activities of the Einsatzkommandos, or mobile killing units, in the Nazi-occupied lands of Eastern Europe”.

For all the comparisons you see in the media between Bush and Hitler, you have to wonder what they’re really trying to accomplish when the facts are that the muslim brotherhood, from which Al Qaeda sprang forth, is connected with the Nazi ideology. And Saddam Hussein’s Uncle was a nazi who raised Saddam to support the sadistic brand of fascism.
Why should anyone be surprised that he carried a copy of Mein Kampf with him?

For all the whining and complaining the libs do about poor Saddam, since we we went to Iraq, now there are 87% less violent deaths of Iraqis annually than under Saddam Hussein. Mary Mostert writes:

The war crimes and chemical weapons of Saddam Hussein were the subject of a talk given by U.S. War Crimes Ambassador David J. Scheffer at the National Press Club. Scheffer, on September 18, 2000, when he was working for a Democrat President Bill Clinton. Scheffer, listed 8 specific incidents of war crimes to illustrate what he called “the magnitude” of Saddam Hussein’s “criminal record.” Scheffer said that Hussein’s “criminal record” goes to the “very heart of why his conduct deserves an international response.” The eight points of evidence Scheffer listed were:

5000 dead kurds-a tragedy the leftists don’t want to acknowledge

1. The Iran-Iraq War in which approximately 5,000 Iranians were killed with chemical weapons between 1983-1988, plus the several thousand Iranian prisoners of war killed by Hussein. (In the “legal” part of the war between these two powerful Muslim nations, 200,000 Iraqis died and over 300,000 Iranians died. They are not counted in Scheffer’s report on war crimes.)
2. The dropping of chemical weapons on the Kurdish city of Halaja in Iraq in March of 1988, that killed over 5,000 civilians. The U.S. government has satellite photos of the carnage. The Kurds have since reported that five to seven thousand people of 80,000 inhabitants died immediately and a further 20,000 to 30,000 were injured, many severely. Initial studies indicate approximately 52% of current inhabitants were exposed at the time of the chemical warhead attack on Halaja.
3. The Anfal campaigns, also against the Kurds, when Chemical Ali, Hussein’s cousin, was given the orders to slaughter the Kurds. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed. Scheffer called it genocide.
4. The invasion and occupation of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 in which Saddam Hussein’s forces killed more than 1000 Kuwaiti nationals, and an uncounted number from other nations while launching the environmental crime “such as the destruction of oil wells in Kuwait’s oil fields. War crimes also were committed against other nationals in an “effort to coerce their governments into pro-Iraqi policies.”
5. In 1991, when the United Nations failed to approve the actual removal of Saddam Hussein from power, from 30,000 to 60,000 Iraqi civilians, mostly Kurds and Shiites were killed.
6. In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein drained the southern marshes, which deprived over 100,000 people of their livelihood and their ability to live on land their ancestors had lived on for thousands of years.
7. The ethnic cleansing of Persians and other non-Arabs from Iraq,
8. The killing, torturing and raping of political opponents and their wives and daughters and the disappearance of 300,000 people, the remains of many of whom have been found in mass graves following Iraq’s liberation in 2003.

And, according to a booklet written by the U.S. Agency for International Development approximately 400,000 Iraqi civilians were seized by Saddam Hussein’s various “security” organizations and simply never heard from again.

Iraq, a country approximately the size of California, but with only 2/3 of its population, suffered more than a million violent deaths under Saddam Hussein’s regime. That would average out at about 50,000 deaths a year in a population of 25 million before the Americans got involved. In the two years since the Americans have been fighting in Iraq, 13,650 Iraqis, have been killed, many of them by terrorist attacks by their own countrymen. Others were by military action. That averages out at 6, 825 deaths per year in a population of 25 million.

So, the mostly American liberation of Iraq dropped the rate of violent deaths from 50,000 a year under Saddam Hussein to 6,825 a year with the Americans in Baghdad. What Kennedy has labeled as American “savagery” has REDUCED deaths from violence in Iraq by 87%.

There is a documentary available called “Saddam’s Mass Graves”. You can see a review of it here. If Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, even more Iraqis would have ended up in mass graves. Click here for photos.

The lone Iraqi woman in one scene makes a sound of profound despair. Her whole family has been wiped out by the Saddam Hussein regime. “I have no one left,” she cries. The first several minutes of the new documentary Saddam’s Mass Graves, depicts similar stories of ordinary Iraqis who lost many or all of their family members to the former regime’s brutality.

The documentary is the work of Kurdishi-Iraqi director Jano Rosebiani. “When they were crying, they were genuinely crying, but their eyes were dry,” he recalled. “And we decided that they have no tears left.” He said at first, in the 1970s, the former Iraqi regime tried to keep the mass killings a secret. “But then it came a time, they were not only not secretive, but they were using it as an instrument of fear” he said. “For instance, they would be killing groups of people for an audience and force the audience to applaud. Or they would pile up bodies on roadsides as a warning to passerbyers, to create a state of fear.” In the film, one man who actually saw mass killings taking place says he remembers hearing the victims, young and old, crying. Meanwhile, Mr. Rosebiani said it was not hard finding Iraqis to tell him stories about loved ones being killed. “It wasn’t hard finding people. You just knock on any door and if they’re not victims, then they will point to the household that is,” he added.

The Iraq Truth Project has also produced a film called “WMD” click here there’s a link here for the movie trailer. Click here to see the trailer. WMD is available and can be ordered click here.

Click here for a map of the Anfal Campaign. You can see how it spread across the country…5,000 people died from the chemical assault from Saddam’s horrible campaign, and interestingly, there are some very visible comparisons a person could make to the Nazis and how they did things.

Gendercide Watch Case Study:
The Anfal Campaign
(Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988

The anti-Kurdish “Anfal” campaign, mounted between February and September 1988 by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, was both genocidal and gendercidal in nature. “Battle-age” men were the primary targets of Anfal, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East (hereafter, HRW/ME). The organization writes in its book Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: “Throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, although women and children vanished in certain clearly defined areas, adult males who were captured disappeared en masse. … It is apparent that a principal purpose of Anfal was to exterminate all adult males of military service age captured in rural Iraqi Kurdistan” (pp. 96, 170). Only a handful survived the execution squads.

The other interesting thing I’ve been getting from folks is how “tolerant” Saddam was of other religions. As if! Do you suppose Christians and Jews and others had to pay jizya to show their dhimmitude to Islam?

In March 1987, Saddam’s cousin, Chemical Ali, was appointed secretary-general of the Ba’ath Party’s Northern Region, which included Iraqi Kurdistan. Under al-Majid, who “even by the standards of the Ba’ath security apparatus … had a particular reputation for brutality,” control of policies against the Kurdish fighters passed from the Iraqi army to the Ba’ath Party itself. This was the prelude to the “final solution” to the “Kurdish problem” undertaken within months of Ali’s arrival to his post. The “al-Anfal” campaign (e.g.,”The Spoils”), was a reference to the eighth sura of the Qur’an, which spells out what the Prophet Muhammed received after the first great victory of Islamic forces in A.D. 624. “I shall cast into the unbelievers’ hearts terror,” reads one of the verses; “so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them … the chastisement of the Fire is for the unbelievers.” Anfal, officially conducted between February 23 and September 6, 1988, consisted of eight stages altogether, seven of them targeting areas controlled by the PUK. For these assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000 soldiers with air support –matched against Kurdish guerrilla forces that numbered no more than a few thousand. (see Gendercide Watch Case Study)

Assyrian and Caldean Christians and Yezidi Kurds, were just subsidiary targets of the slaughter. Many of the men of Badinan did not even make it as far as “processing” stations, being simply “lined up and murdered at their point of capture, executed by firing squads on the authority of a local army officer.” (Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, pp. 178, 190, 192; on the fate of the Christians and Yezidi Kurds, see pp. 209-13.)

You can see the maps of how many villages and how many attacks were served on the Iraqi people here.

There were more chemical attacks by Saddam at Halajba. Another spelling, I think, is Halaja or Halabja. Or it could be another city–I’m not sure. But there were hundreds of cities where these atrocities were committed by Saddam…

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