Anfal's Kurdish victims impatient for Saddam's trial 15.4.2006

However that trial is not expected to start until the conclusion of the current case before the tribunal involving the execution of 148 Shiite villagers in Dujail after a failed 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.

For Hassan and many other Kurds in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, the trial cannot come soon enough.

"The proof is there, it's not like Dujail," said his cousin Abdallah Hassan.

In his mind, the Dujail case pales in comparison to the sheer scale of the Anfal campaign mounted under Saddam's paternal cousin Ali Hassan Majid, who earned the sobriquet Chemical Ali for his alleged gassing of the Kurds.

Majid, appointed head of the ruling Baath party's northern branch in 1987, launched ruthless strikes upon assuming near presidential powers in Kurdistan, but the Anfal started in earnest in February 1988.

It counted eight offensives before ending that September.

With the Anfal, Majid wanted to break the back of Kurdistan's longstanding insurgency by uprooting villages across its mountainous terrain. The northern region had been swept up in the violence of Iraq's 1980-1988 war with Iran. Kurdish rebels had received financial backing and troop support from Tehran.

The Anfal campaign witnessed the widespread use of chemical weapons and nerve agents against at least 60 Kurdish villages and Majid first employed the tactic as early as April 1987 when he shelled Kurdish fighters with mustard gas and sarin, according to Human Rights Watch.

Although not technically part of the Anfal campaigns, the incident which came to symbolise the regime's "scorched earth" tactics was the March 1988 chemical attack on the village of Halabja that claimed the lives of up to 5,000 people.

According to Human Rights Watch, Majid described his rationale in a meeting of Baath officials in April 1988: "By next summer there will be no more villages remaining spread out here and there ... We'll put the people in the complexes and keep an eye on them. We'll no longer let them live in the villages where the saboteurs can go and visit them."

Eighteen years later, many in Kurdistan remain haunted by their memories of the brutal campaign.

Guidam Mahdi Hamzab remembers being 18 when the Iraqi army attacked his village and killed 86 people, while sending hundreds of others fleeing towards the Iranian border.

For him though, the trial "will not make up for the misfortune suffered by our people".

"Regardless of what the verdict is, I don't see how you can redress the thousand and one wounds suffered by the Kurdish people," said the former peshmerga.

"The effects of this campaign of repression are always with us," he said, adding that he still has no news about many members of his family who disappeared in the assault on his village.

"In Kurdistan, we live always with the nightmare of the Anfal."

Hassan Abdel Karim, who is in his 60s, says many Kurds still believe they will find relatives who vanished during the Anfal campaign.

"Despite the trauma experienced by our people, the Kurds always hope to find a brother or sister even many years after our tragedy," he said.

But Karim harbours no sentiments of forgiveness for Saddam or Chemical Ali.

"The Kurdish people want Saddam and his fellow defendants to be swiftly executed."

In the tiny stone village of Swayssan, nestled in a valley just to the northeast of Sulaimaniyah is a memorial to 50 victims of the Anfal campaign. There, Golshin Ali, an elderly woman who prefers not to reveal her age, prays over the graves of her husband and six children.

"I pray over the tombs of my family and the other victims of Saddam," she said. "It is my only comfort.

"As for Saddam, God will take care of him."

AFP

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