When I was referring to the "killings" I mean direct killing of Iraqis by Iraqi government agents, not the dead of the Iran-Iraq war.
Here's your link:
In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern and Southern Iraq. This is known as the Anfal campaign. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands, the arbitrary imprisoning of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months in conditions of extreme deprivation, forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers after the demolition of their homes, and the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations.
In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against uprisings in the Kurdish north and the Shia south. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against both groups similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 40,000 to 100,000 for Kurds, and 60,000 to 130,000 for Shi'ites.
Human rights in Saddam's Iraq
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org
Your Observer article, which implies that 5,000 is some kind of a total for the mass graves, is absurd. The estimate of 290,000 disappeared persons comes from Human Rights Watch (many think it was too low) and they have already uncovered nearly 300 mass graves in Iraq. You don't dig a mass grave to put 10 people in it.
See, this is just the kind of thing I'm talking about. In their eagerness to yell "liar, liar, pants on fire" at Tony Blair, for talking about 400,000 dead in mass graves, the Left rushes to put out articles that make it sound like all the stuff about Saddam filling mass graves was an invention. Saddam's criminal history gets more whitewashed by the day. |
