Who is Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri? (The Commander of the North.. the profile of great human right leader who Russians, Chinese and French are saving from elimination.. )
Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri has been a leading figure in the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein since the mid-1970s when he served as Minister of Interior. For most of the period since 1979, when Saddam Hussein took over as president and head of the Revolutionary Command Council, Ibrahim has served as Deputy Chair of the RCC—effectively number two in the government. In 1988, he was also a member of the RCC's Northern Affairs Committee that, along with the Ba'th Party's Northern Bureau Command, was the administrative backbone for the genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurdish population. The Northern Affairs Committee placed its seal on a June 20, 1987 directive, coded SF/4008, which called for "special strikes”—i.e., chemical attacks—“to kill the largest number of persons" in designated zones, as well as the capture and execution of all adults found in prohibited areas. The directive remained in force as the standing orders for Iraqi armed forces and security services throughout the Anfal campaign and beyond. Izzat Ibrahim was reported in the Washington Post on January 24, 1991, as warning the people of Sulaimaniyya, a major city in the Kurdish north, "if you have forgotten Halabja, I would like to remind you that we are ready to repeat the operation." Halabja was the Kurdish city that was the target of a major Iraqi chemical weapons assault on March 16, 1988 that killed as many as 5,000 residents. |
