Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven
by Robin Miller
Is it really true that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people" while committing genocide against Iraqi Kurds, images that have become woven into the fabric of the American perception of Iraq?
Human Rights Watch, the respected New York City NGO, has long championed these claims. According to its reports, "at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 persons, many of them women and children, were killed out of hand between February and September 1988," the victims being Iraqi Kurds "systematically put to death in large numbers on the orders of the central government in Baghdad." Iraq allegedly used chemical weapons in "forty separate attacks on Kurdish targets" during a campaign that HRW characterizes as genocide. The most prominent of these purported attacks was the March 1988 "chemical assault" on the town of Halabja, in which the number of dead, according to Human Rights Watch, was "in excess of 3,200," or perhaps "up to 5,000," or even "as many as 7,000."
Horrifying claims, these, but how much of this is true?
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