In March 1987, Saddam Hussein had appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid to lead the Baath Party’s Northern Bureau, encompassing Iraqi Kurdistan, the region inhabited primarily by ethnic Kurds who spilled across Iraq’s north, as well as swaths of Iran, Turkey, and Syria. Saddam granted Majid authority over all Iraqi security forces in the area. His cousin was then forty-five years old, just a few years younger than Saddam. In Tikrit’s pinched world of tribal peasants that he and Saddam had shared as boys, Majid had claims to prestige. One of his grandfathers had been a governor of Tikrit. Majid considered himself a sheikh of a branch of the Albu Nasr tribe to which Saddam also belonged. After Saddam attained power, Majid served him in a succession of administration and security jobs. He was rougher and more traditional than Saddam’s three half brothers—an intimidating man steeped in Tikrit’s social codes who saw himself as Saddam’s peer. Yet he also lived in fear of his cousin. “I was afraid that if I disobeyed him, he would tell our tribe that I was a coward,” Majid explained years later. He exhibited some of Saddam’s diligent work habits and ruthlessness but little of his cousin’s charisma.[1]
Saddam had handed Majid one of the knottiest problems in the Iran-Iraq War. The region’s rough mountains made it difficult for either Iraq or Iran to maneuver forces in large numbers. (Most of the war’s major artillery and tank battles took place across flatter borderlands and deserts to the south.) Iraqi Kurdish rebel groups opposed to Saddam sometimes collaborated with Khomeini’s Iran. The rebels were a political and military wild card—an independent but fractious Iraqi movement fighting for autonomy and the possibility of a new Kurdish nation.
The Kurdish insurgents were also a fixture of Saddam’s conspiratorial thinking about Iran, Israel, and America—thinking rooted in recent history. After the Baath takeover in 1968, Saddam, as vice president, had negotiated an autonomy agreement with Mustafa Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a lion of the Kurdish opposition. The deal soon foundered. Barzani secretly received arms and money from Israel, the shah of Iran, and, later, the Nixon administration’s C.I.A. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, wary of the Baath Party’s ideology and ties to Moscow, sought to destabilize Iraq by aiding the Kurdish rebels. Yet Kissinger cynically hoped the Kurds “would not prevail” and would merely weaken Iraq, as a congressional investigation concluded.
In 1975, Saddam helped his regime wriggle out of this scheme by negotiating the Algiers Agreement, which settled several border disputes between Iraq and Iran. The shah pulled support for the Kurds, and the C.I.A. followed, betraying Barzani. “Complete destruction hanging over our head,” the Kurdish leader wrote to his C.I.A. liaison. “No explanation for this.” He died in bitter exile in suburban Virginia four years later. For the Kurds, the 1970s taught that America could not be trusted. For Saddam, the era provided concrete proof that the C.I.A., Iran, and Israel would not hesitate to collaborate against the Baath Party.[2]
Barzani’s son Masoud succeeded him, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party revived itself during the 1980s. For Saddam, the ongoing rebellion by Iraqi Kurds, in the midst of an existential war against Ayatollah Khomeini, offered a glaring sign that his grip on the nation was weak, at least in the north. He regarded Kurdish rebels who collaborated with Iran as traitors and insurrectionists who had crossed the Rubicon. Kurdish guerrillas relentlessly attacked Baath Party outposts in the region. Between 1980 and 1986, of the approximately 1,700 Baathists assigned to Kurdish provinces, just over 500 were killed by local rebels. By the late 1980s, Saddam had decided to unleash fury on Kurdistan. He told comrades: “The Kurds we have are traitors and agents of Israel, and Iran has been playing them for tens of years. . . . This is our opportunity to remove the traitors and never bring them back. If they come back, they’ll come back according to our law, not theirs.”[3]
For what followed, Ali Hassan al-Majid would earn the immortal nickname Chemical Ali.
On March 15, 1988, Kurdish rebels entered Halabja, a Kurdish mountain city near the Iranian border that was then home to about eighty thousand people and was tenuously under Baath Party control. Some Iranian forces accompanied the rebels into the city. Seemingly liberated, Halabja’s Kurds sacked the local party headquarters and offices of the secret police.
The next day, the Iraqi Air Force counterattacked with chemical bombs. Low-flying Soviet-made Sukhoi bombers spread sickly gas clouds across the region’s fields and villages. A Kurdish witness with a video camera recalled that gas “had killed all natural life, animals and trees. I saw thousands of goats and sheep, all dead.” An acquaintance he met, a survivor, led him to the cellar of her home, where he saw her family, unmarked by violence, lying dead in a heap. In another basement, a dead woman lay with her arm outstretched, holding her son.[4]
The gas attacks unfolded over several days and claimed about three thousand to five thousand lives, according to contemporaneous Iraqi intelligence assessments. Iran’s government—long frustrated in its efforts to discredit Saddam Hussein on the world stage over his use of chemical arms—ferried journalists to Halabja by helicopter on March 20. David Hirst, a veteran Middle East correspondent with The Guardian, described what he found: “No wounds, no blood, no traces of explosions can be found on the bodies. . . . The skin of the bodies is strangely discolored, with their eyes open and staring where they have not disappeared into their sockets, a grayish slime oozing from their mouths and their fingers still grotesquely twisted. Death seemingly caught them almost unawares.”[5]
Within days, Halabja had become a famous place around the globe, the site of one of the most visible instances of Iraq’s gas attacks during the war, all the more outrageous for the high and indiscriminate civilian toll. The Reagan administration could not ignore it, but it did not want to break with Saddam over the event, either.
The administration embraced flawed intelligence reports from both the D.I.A. and the C.I.A. that both Iraq and Iran had resorted to gas. On March 23, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that while Iraq had committed a “grave violation” of the Geneva Protocol at Halabja, Iran “may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting.”[6]
This was misleading at best. The question of whether Iran had used chemical weapons against Iraq at any point in the war—apart from smoke or tear gas—would remain controversial. It is clear, however, that the impression publicized by the Reagan administration after Halabja—that the use of gas by Iraq and Iran in that atrocity might be militarily and morally equivalent—was false. This line was supported by Pat Lang, the Middle East analyst at the D.I.A. who was deeply involved in the intelligence liaison with Baghdad and who “insisted” that Iran share blame for Halabja. “Who defended the Iraqis?” Lang recalled. “I did.” The “both sides do it” narrative settled like fog over a war the world mainly ignored.[7]
There is no public evidence that any of the D.I.A.’s Druid Leader target packages were used to support the Halabja attacks or other gassing campaigns carried out against Kurdish civilians during 1988. According to Lang, the D.I.A. told the Iraqis that it would not provide satellite-derived intelligence to support strikes in Kurdistan. Still, the Reagan administration would largely evade accountability for the support it provided to the chemical war machine Iraq deployed elsewhere against Iran.
Later, referring to Halabja, Rick Francona asked an Iraqi pilot, “Why did you drop chemical weapons on your own people?”
“They’re not my own people,” he answered. “They’re Kurds.”
In the late spring of 1988, Francona recalled, a series of interagency meetings at the White House reviewed whether to terminate the intelligence sharing program with Iraq because of the fallout over Halabja. But the word soon came down to the D.I.A.: Druid Leader would continue.[8]
The gassing of Halabja had been opportunistic, a ruthless attempt by Majid to punish the enemy and regain local control after an unexpected success by Kurdish rebels and Iranian allies. But the atrocities there coincided with a more systematic campaign to remove large numbers of Kurdish villagers from militarily sensitive regions near Iran—a campaign that also involved chemical weapons. Its goal was to deprive Iraqi Kurdish rebels of their population base and to relieve the Iraqi Army of fighting the rebels in hostile and mountainous terrain.
During a speech to Baath Party loyalists, Majid explained his strategy. He recounted how he had recently threatened a Kurdish audience to encourage voluntary evacuations: “I cannot let your village stay. I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die. You must leave right now.” He made a promise to his Baathist comrades: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!”[9]
He issued orders banning Kurds from remaining in villages that fell within designated security zones and gave permission to raze villages and exterminate all life if the Kurds did not comply. “The presence of human beings and animals is completely prohibited in these areas,” one of Majid’s directives read. His order used a common code for chemical strikes (“special bombardments”) and made explicit that the goal of the campaign was mass killing of Kurds:
The Corps Commands shall carry out random special bombardments using artillery, helicopters and aircraft at all times of day or night in order to kill the largest number of persons present in those prohibited areas. . . . All persons captured in those villages shall be detained because of their presence there, and they shall be interrogated by the security services, and those between the ages of 15 and 70 must be executed.[10]
In early 1988, embracing this methodology, the authorities in Baghdad announced the start of a military operation they called “the Anfal,” or “Spoils of War”—officially, a counterinsurgency campaign. It would become notorious years later as one of Saddam Hussein’s greatest crimes against humanity.
In the weeks following the gas attacks on Halabja, rumors circulated from village to village in the Garmian region of Kurdistan, about fifty miles to the southeast. Entire families in Halabja had apparently suffered gruesome deaths. Wahid Kochani, twenty-three, a farmer and occasional armed scout for Kurdish rebels, who were called peshmerga, or “those who confront death,” knew he and his family were living on borrowed time. The previous October, the Baghdad administration had formally designated his village as part of a “prohibited zone.” The Kochanis had ignored their evacuation order, as had the great majority of their neighbors. But on April 10, 1988, government jets dropped gas bombs on a village close to the Kochanis’ home. Iraqi ground forces then moved in and bulldozed that village to the ground. They plowed under every home and shed until a mud-brick enclave where hundreds of families had lived for centuries became a pile of debris.[11]
The Iraqi Army was moving freely across the region, destroying one village after another. Kochani and other auxiliary fighters grabbed their assault rifles, gathered their families, and hiked into the mountains to take shelter in a network of caves. Kochani’s wife, Selma, and their two young sons accompanied him. With scores of others, Kochani and his family slept in the mountains for five or six nights. At nighttime, they looked down at the plain below and saw fires burning. There was not enough food or milk at the caves to feed everyone, so the men snuck back to their villages during the day to make bread and to milk their cows and goats. At one point, from a distance, Kochani watched bulldozers crush his village—and, as it turned out, his home—into a jumble of broken bricks.[12]
Kochani was uncertain about what to do. Local Kurdish paramilitaries on the regime’s payroll—known derisively as jash, or baby donkeys—rode around in trucks, attempting to coax the locals out of hiding, promising men of military age that they could join the Iraqi Army. “You are going to be safe!” they called out. “Just come to the city.” Kochani was a draft dodger, but as long as fugitives like him were not guerrillas named on government lists as “saboteurs,” they might be conscripted, earn salaries, and return to their families after a tour of military duty. They would be resettled in slums near urban areas, where the regime hoped closer surveillance would prevent Kurdish guerrillas from reorganizing. These were the rumors, at least.
Kochani knew that his family could not hold out in the caves for very long. A few days before he and Selma had left their home, they had lost an infant son to illness; they had not even had time to put a marker on the boy’s grave before they fled. They were hardened to difficulties, but there was only so much grief and fear anyone could endure.
Days passed and Kochani managed to dispatch Selma and their two boys to the home of a relative. He returned to the caves with a friend, Luqman. Some neighbors approached them.
“What are you guys doing up here?” they asked. “Go surrender. If they catch you, they’re going to slaughter you.”
The next morning, they woke up to the raspy sound of megaphones. The jash were back, urging surrender and making promises. The two men gave in to fate and packed up their belongings. They both carried loaded AK-47 assault rifles as they walked to the road. They climbed into the back of a vehicle filled with pro-regime paramilitaries and rode about a mile to a leveled village. They found hundreds of men like themselves milling about under the eye of Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish allies.
They lined up to register. When it was their turn, they handed over their rifles, accepted receipts, and submitted to interrogation. “Are you peshmerga? Did you dodge the draft?” Kochani admitted the truth: he was an auxiliary fighter, and yes, he had evaded military conscription.
A Kurdish paramilitary officer picked up a microphone tethered to a loudspeaker. “I welcome you all! You are going to become soldiers.”
He explained that the men would board buses and ride to a nearby military base, where they would be issued army identification. Kochani and Luqman crammed their way onto one of the buses. When they reached a military base, they were kept aboard for many hours, without food or access to a bathroom. The heat and stench from human waste became unbearable.
An Iraqi soldier boarded the bus and asked them more basic questions. Daylight faded and they rolled out again. They reached a base called Topzawa, near Kirkuk. The bus stopped and new soldiers ordered the passengers out, motioning them to the ground, where they sat cross-legged in a mass. “No more jash,” Kochani recalled. They had been comfortable with their Kurdish captors, traitors though they were. Now they confronted unhinged-looking Iraqi soldiers, “like the movies, evil-looking people.” Kochani and his comrades felt trapped.[13]
The Anfal campaign unfolded in eight stages between late February and early September of 1988. Each of the eight Anfals, as they came to be known, opened with gassing attacks—to kill and demoralize villagers and to smoke them out of their homes so that they would move onto roads where Iraqi forces could round them up. The Third Anfal, between April 7 and April 20, targeted the Garmian region where Wahid Kochani lived. Because of the area’s relatively level topography, it was the stage of the Anfal in which the Iraqi forces used the least gas. Yet it was perhaps the cruelest.
Ali Hassan al-Majid exercised overall command. “I’m going to evacuate it,” he told colleagues on April 15, speaking of Garmian. He made his remarks shortly after Wahid Kochani had surrendered to government forces.
“For five years, I won’t allow any human existence there,” Majid continued. “I don’t want their agriculture. I don’t want tomatoes. I don’t want their okra and cucumbers. If we don’t act in this way, the saboteurs’ activities will never end—not for a million years.”[14]
The Topzawa military base contained filthy warehouses crammed with people—hundreds of men, women, and children in each building. A newcomer could barely fit in standing up. The soldiers threw bread to the crowds, setting off melees; to eat, you had to be fierce or lucky. Kochani’s warehouse contained only men. The soldiers locked the doors on the outside but sometimes allowed groups of ten to walk to latrines, passing through a gauntlet of armed guards. That night, cheek by jowl with hundreds of other young men, Kochani napped by crossing his legs and tucking his head into folded arms.
Early in the morning, Iraqi soldiers appeared with lists and read out names. Each detainee was assigned a bus. Kochani was on the last one to be loaded. The vehicle’s windows had been painted over in white. The front door folded open like a typical bus door, but a metal barrier separated the driver’s cabin from the passenger seats. The barrier had a small window that allowed some passengers to look forward through the windshield at the world outside. Kochani took a seat on the left in the second row, behind the driver. Three dozen or so detainees boarded—all from Kochani’s home district. The barrier door slid shut. In addition to the driver, there was a single armed guard stationed in the front cab.
The bus roared off at about 9:00 a.m. Kochani recognized one other detainee, Anwar Tayyar. He was an older, locally well-known peshmerga fighter of stalwart reputation. Like Kochani, Tayyar was sitting up front, and he could peer through the small window at the road ahead. He had worked as a taxi driver in the region and would point out landmarks he recognized. He narrated for the men the possibilities that awaited them. He spoke in Kurdish dialect; it was evident that the Arab soldier and driver up front could not understand him. He shared rumors of recent mass executions of captured peshmergas.[15]
Every so often, the driver pulled over for a food and bathroom break. He and the armed guard would eat, rehydrate, and smoke while their prisoners remained locked inside with no food or water. Tayyar told the men that back in 1975, after he had been arrested, he and another prisoner had attacked and killed a driver and guard taking them to prison. “I hope that we are going to do the same as we did then,” Tayyar said. He counted the passengers. “There’s thirty-four of us.”
As evening fell, the bus turned off asphalt roads onto tracks leading into the desert. The area was flat and sandy. The sun set, and in the darkness they could no longer see through their small window. After a time, the bus halted. Now they could see other buses parked nearby. Headlights flickered, and they heard the sounds of bulldozers or other heavy equipment rumbling.
Then they heard gunshots. Through their narrow prism, they could see men being dragged to the edge of a pit—some blindfolded, some not—where firing squads shot them. Some of the executioners had assault rifles; others, pistols. Some sprayed bullets but aimed badly. The bus driver and the armed guard left the bus. It seemed as if the passengers on the bus parked next to them were being executed now, and they would be next.
Kochani and the men around him prayed. They embraced and offered forgiveness, one to another, for any transgressions in this life. Kochani pictured his oldest son, Hemin, who was barely a toddler. He thought about what it would be like for the boy to grow up without him. He wondered what it would feel like to have a bullet go through his head or his body.
Tayyar spoke up again. “My dear brothers!” he said. “We are a group of men able to do something. We should keep calm and collected until we all get off, and then we attack them.” His idea was to try to grab the soldiers’ guns and open fire on their captors. As they waited, another former peshmerga offered an amendment to the plan: as soon as an armed guard came onto the bus, they should jump him and try to take his gun.
After about fifteen minutes, three new armed guards approached their bus. Two stood outside and the third entered. He unlocked a sliding door to the passenger area and pulled out the first prisoner in front of him—a beardless teenager who Kochani reckoned was no more than fourteen. The guard put a white blindfold on him. Tayyar leapt forward and tried to punch the guard and seize his gun. Other men tried to join the attack. They fell into a chaotic scrum, powered by adrenaline and terror.
The two soldiers outside opened fire at the side of the bus, unleashing a wild fusillade through the skin of the vehicle. Bullets struck Tayyar, but he kept fighting. He wrested the first guard’s gun away, shot him dead, and then shot one of the two soldiers outside.
Kochani took a bullet in his back and fell to the floor. He reached around to feel his wound—a flesh wound but deep. Dead and dying comrades fell on top of him. He forced himself to stand up, lurched toward the bus door, punched one of the guards, and stepped outside. On one side he saw the shadowy outlines of what appeared to be construction equipment. He ran in the opposite direction, into the darkness.[16]
He was dressed in Kurdish robes and wore rubber shoes. As he ran, his shoes slipped off, and he kept going in bare feet. He could feel his back bleeding. He saw some bushes, sat down, and rested. He prayed to God: “Why is this happening to us?”
He pulled himself up and started moving randomly forward, sometimes walking, sometimes jogging. The pain in his back faded; he felt another surge of adrenaline. He stumbled ahead in the dark. Finally, he saw lights in the distance. It was a cluster of family homes. He approached and stared at the houses, uncertain which door to knock on. He prayed again, this time for guidance to make the right choice. He selected a one-story house, walked to the front door, and knocked.
A girl of about fourteen or fifteen answered. She summoned her father, mother, a brother, and two sisters. “Tfadal,” they said, speaking Arabic. Welcome, come in. They led him to a living room with pillows and cushions on the floor and against the walls. Kochani sat on his knees to minimize his back pain. They saw that he was dripping blood onto their cushions.
“Sir, what happened to you?” the father asked in Arabic. Kochani knew just enough Arabic to explain the very basics. He said the Iraqi Army was taking women, children, and men into the desert. He tried to explain that they were carrying out executions. Not too far from you, he said. They are killing everyone.
The father exclaimed, “Why are they doing this?!” Family members soon carried in bread, sweets, water, and tea for Kochani.
The family led him to another room, peeled off his bloody clothes, and had him lie down on his belly. They washed his back, daubed his wound with alcohol, and covered it with gauze. Then they brought him a clean robe to wear. He slept. The next morning, the women served him breakfast—meat, chicken, and bread. The girls brought in a cassette player and played some Arabic music to cheer him up. They apologized for not having Kurdish songs.
He stayed with the family that day. The next morning, two women—nurses—arrived at the house. They washed his wound again and rebandaged it.
Kochani’s host also brought home a Kurdish acquaintance, a man named Amin who lived in a nearby camp for Kurdish refugees from Iran. Amin spoke fluent Kurdish and Arabic. Now Kochani was able to tell the story in full as Amin translated.
He learned that he had stumbled onto the outskirts of Ramadi, an Arab-majority city in Anbar Province, not far from Baghdad. It was a place where Saddam’s secret police would be all around. Who knew what the government was doing to track down stragglers who escaped from the execution sites? On his third night with the family, Kochani talked with the father about his unease. He said he needed to find his way to a city with a large Kurdish population, such as Kirkuk. “I have cousins there. They can hide me.”
The father agreed. The next day he provided Kochani with traditional Arab robes, sandals, and a headdress so that Kochani would not stand out in Ramadi. He asked how much money Kochani had with him.
“Seven dinars,” Kochani answered, then worth about twenty dollars. The family gave him five more dinars. But the journey would be risky. Kochani had no official identification or documents of the sort necessary to travel between cities.
He embraced his host family, expressed his thanks emotionally, and left with his host’s son. It turned out that the young man was a serving Iraqi soldier. He drove Kochani in a pickup truck to a taxi stand in Ramadi and escorted him to a particular vehicle. “This will take you to Baghdad,” he said, and from there Kochani could find cars going to Kirkuk.[17]
There were two senior Iraqi Army officers in the taxi—men in uniform with stars on their shoulders. They made way for Kochani to sit between them in the back seat so that they could have the window seats. The taxi left for Baghdad. At numerous checkpoints, soldiers looked into the back seat, saw the uniformed officers, and waved the vehicle through without asking for any documents. Kochani would long wonder if the family had arranged this privileged escort for him or if he had just enjoyed God’s protection.
In Baghdad, he found a bus for Kirkuk, but before it had gone very far, soldiers boarded and asked everyone for identification. They scoffed at the papers Kochani presented. They arrested him and about a dozen other young men on the bus whom they judged to be draft dodgers or soldiers absent without leave. His captors took him to a military prison. But they didn’t question him closely, and he kept his wound a secret. Over the next weeks, Kochani endured beatings in several prisons, but he also managed to get in touch with some cousins from home. They posted bond for him in exchange for his commitment to serve in the army. He was released with a military identification card that allowed him to travel freely.
He made his way home. Selma and his boys were safe. Kochani’s only brother and his friend Luqman had both disappeared, along with almost everyone else who had surrendered themselves in the days when Kochani had walked down from the caves.
Eventually, Kochani and his family visited the remains of their village and their home. Their saddest task was their search for the grave of Awara, Kochani and Selma’s baby, whom they’d had to bury in haste. They could not find him. After the destruction of their village, wild dogs had scavenged in the ruins. Their neighbors speculated that the dogs must have dug up the baby’s corpse and dragged it away.
Wahid Kochani was among six Kurdish men and one boy who survived the desert executions and later provided testimony to human-rights researchers and Iraqi courts. Scholars and researchers estimate that Saddam Hussein’s regime killed at least 50,000 people during the Anfal, between February and September; Kurdish authorities place the death toll at 182,000. Most of the victims were military-age men, but many women, children, and older civilians were also executed and buried in mass graves, as the Kurdish researcher Choman Hardi has documented. The Iraqi Army destroyed more than 2,600 villages. At least one bulldozer driver who participated in digging mass graves during desert executions has provided a vivid account of the killings; he described how he and other drivers at the pits were ordered to keep their engines running to cover up the sounds of shootings and screaming.[18]
Records from the campaign described the bureaucratization of mass detention and killing. Medals went to lists of “heroic and brave” Iraqi officers battling “saboteurs,” “traitors,” and “Iranian agents.” The correspondence includes light chiding of comrades who acted too hastily, as in a letter from the Northern Bureau of the party to an Iraqi Army Corps commander, quoting Ali Hassan al-Majid: “We have no objection to beheading the traitors. However, it would have been preferable to send them to security for interrogation before executing them.”[19]
While Iraq’s gassing of Kurdish civilians at Halabja in March 1988 caused a global sensation, the expulsions and exterminations of the Anfal were less visible. The Reagan administration had a weak grasp of the campaign’s dimensions during the time it unfolded. “We did know that villages were being razed and that people were being taken to the desert,” David George Newton, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad during the first half of 1988, recalled. “We had the impression they were being executed. . . . What nobody realized at the time was the scale of the campaign.”[20]
Yet the Anfal was announced by name in Iraqi official media, although it was described as a military campaign, not a mass killing of unarmed prisoners. Thousands of Kurdish refugees poured into Iran and Turkey during 1988, testifying to the terror they had endured, but they did not know what had become of the many men and families detained. In any event, the alliance between the Reagan administration and Saddam Hussein against Iran—especially as Iraq at last won battles that winter and spring and brought a long war to the brink of closure—remained the White House’s priority. In the summer of 1988, Peter Galbraith, a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, took a fact-finding trip to Kurdistan to look into reports of atrocities after Halabja. When he got back, he spurred the committee’s chairman, Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, to introduce the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have sanctioned Iraq for its gassings and devastation of Kurdistan. The Reagan administration lobbied successfully against the bill.[21]
As the Anfal wound down, Saddam met with Tariq Aziz and other foreign-policy advisers to discuss the pressure they were under because of international publicity about their gassing attacks. They continued to deny publicly that Iraq had ever used chemical weapons. Aziz read out a draft public statement for Saddam’s approval: “Iraq respects and abides by all international laws and treaties . . . including the Geneva Protocol of the year 1925, which forbids the use of chemical weapons, poison gas, and biological weapons in warfare, and all other treaties within the frame of international humanitarian law.”
“All right,” Saddam said.
“Can I send it, sir?”
“Yes.”
“So we gain time,” Aziz noted.
Saddam went on to speak about the future of negotiations with Iraqi Kurds. He laughed when he said, “Autonomy? Let’s discuss autonomy. Kurdish state? Let’s discuss a Kurdish state!”[22]
He was not jesting. In private, Saddam periodically expressed openness to a future of Kurdish political autonomy and even independence—a taboo subject for Turkey and Iran, each with large, restive Kurdish populations. Often, Saddam seemed to want to promote his openness to Kurdish autonomy in order to irritate his neighbors. Yet he had enough experience of the intractable problem of Kurdish separatism to think that some sort of negotiated autonomy would be required. He laid out a long-term policy that summer. He would cut off the heads of “those who oppose the nation,” he said, pointing to his neck to emphasize the point. Yet he would also construct a new politics between Baghdad and Kurdistan to provide Kurds with “peaceful and prosperous circumstances with autonomy and real governance.”[23]
To Saddam, the summer of 1988 seemed a season of great victory. On July 20, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was nearing his eighty-sixth birthday and in failing health, at last capitulated and announced a cease-fire, a decision that effectively ended the Iran-Iraq War. It was the outcome Saddam had long sought—an armistice and a return to prewar borders. “Taking this decision was more deadly than poison,” Khomeini admitted. By September, Saddam had terminated cooperation with the D.I.A. and no longer welcomed American spies to Baghdad.[24]
The Iraqi leader had needlessly started one of the most costly and aimless wars in recent world history and, after eight terrible years, had ended up where he started. His nation had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, inflicted a comparable number on Iran, and spent more than $500 billion. When the war began, Iraq had at least $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves; when it ended, the country owed more than $80 billion—about twice the size of its economy— to various lenders, including Japan, France, West Germany, America, and the Soviet Union. Its two largest creditors were Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Iraq owed them as much as $35 billion and $10 billion, respectively. Yet Saddam had no choice but to declare this fiasco another win in his series of glorious triumphs; to do otherwise would be to admit weakness and invite more attempts to overthrow him. To the United States, he would soon insist: “Victory in the war against Iran made a historic difference to the Arab world and the West.”
In Washington, Saddam sounded delusional. It seemed to many White House and State Department experts that he couldn’t possibly believe what he said, that he was just speaking for political and diplomatic effect, as many politicians do. As it turned out, the end of the Iran-Iraq War touched off a new cascade of misunderstandings between Washington and Baghdad, a chain of events that would soon shatter their fragile alliance and wreak yet more devastating violence and disruption.[25]