saddam killed 5000 a week, tied people to telephone polls and cut their tongues out, put people in leaf shredders
Number of Victims[ edit]According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule". [9] Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, [10] [11] including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion. [12] [13] Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000. [14]
Other atrocities[ edit]During the 1991 rebellion, several "dungeons" were liberated, revealing "disoriented and confused" inmates that believed Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was still the president. [15] Of nearly 2 million refugees created by the 1991 crackdown on dissent, it is estimated that 1,000 died every day for a period of months due to unsanitary and inhumane conditions. [16] The destruction of Shi'ite religious shrines by Hussein's regime has been called "comparable to the levelling of cities in the Second World War, and the damage to the shrines [of Hussein and Abbas] was more serious than that which had been done to many European cathedrals." [17] Methods of torture used by Hussein's regime included assault with brass knuckles and wooden bludgeons; electric shocks to the genitalia; scorched metal rods being forced into body orifices; the crushing of toes and removal of toenails; burning off limbs; lowering prisoners into vats of acid; poisoning with thallium; raping women in front of their family members; burning with cigarette butts; the crushing of bones; the amputation of ears, limbs, and tongues; and the gouging of eyes. [18] After the 1983-88 genocide, some 1 million Kurds were allowed to resettle in "model villages". According to a U.S. Senate staff report, these villages "were poorly constructed, had minimal sanitation and water, and provided few employment opportunities for the residents. Some, if not most, were surrounded by barbed wire, and Kurds could enter or leave only with difficulty." [19] |
