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April 29, 2005
Spot the Missing Piece
Heartbreaking pictures from a mass grave in Samawa, Iraq were made public today. The non-acidic soil preserved the bodies of these victims of Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Almost all the murdered were women and children, some shot at point blank range in the head, dressed in many layers of their best clothes because they were probably told of being relocated.
There was something missing, though, in this otherwise informative article about the mass grave published in the Washington Post. Here's Post's description of the Anfal campaign:
From 1987 to 1988, Hussein initiated a wave of violence, called the Anfal campaign, to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Hussein's forces forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their lands in northern Iraq. Amin said that as many as half a million people died or were killed outright and thousands of villages were destroyed.
Hmmm, what else could be crucial to this story?
Let's think for a minute. Saddam Hussein, our then-close-ally gasses the Kurds. Our response was, naturally ... to help cover it up.
Yes, here's the missing piece of information:
... 16 years ago today was the gassing of the northern Iraqi town of Halabja, which killed 5-8,000 people. It was part of the Anfal campaign, which is estimated to have killed 100-180,000 Kurds.At the time it happened, only the left in the United States, and in Turkey, took heed and criticized the U.S. government for its support of Saddam Hussein. They might as well have been speaking in outer space. The Reagan administration squelched efforts in Congress to react to the atrocity, kept the Security Council from passing a resolution on the issue, and kept up the stream of agricultural credits and export licenses to firms to provide chemicals, biological materials, and weapon components to Iraq. Most damning of all, it organized a disinformation campaign to help suggest that Iran was the real culprit (it didn't address who was behind the numerous other chemical attacks on civilian populations that characterized Anfal).
The regime we went to such lengths to protect and prop up at the time did this:
Yes, that blue thing in the bottom third of the photo is a baby's bottle.
Posted by zeynep at April 29, 2005 11:10 PM
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