Iraqi army attacks on Koreme prior to the Anfal campaign, as described by surviving villagers, were indiscriminate, illegal, and violated norms of both international human rights and international humanitarian law.
The fact that some, most, or even all of Koreme's inhabitants may have sympathized or materially supported the peshmerga can never excuse abuses of human rights committed in the name of counterinsurgency. Governments have wide powers under international law to deal with persons who materially aid internal insurrection or participate in insurgency in violation of domestic law.1 Those powers do not however include shelling, bombing, and destroying whole villages on the basis of presumed support for the rebels; collective punishments; or indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants. Such measures are forbidden by human rights and humanitarian law.
Still, measures taken by the Iraqi government against Koreme prior to 1988 were recognizable as repression against a population which, although subjected to extraordinarily brutal, indiscriminate, and illegal methods of control, was still tacitly acknowledged to be in its place, viz., its traditional Kurdish lands. It was, strictly speaking, repression of the population, rather than elimination of it.
By the summer of 1988, the villagers of Koreme-in-hiding began to hear of attacks on Kurdish villages and towns to the south of a different caliber and strategic aim than anything that had taken placebefore. They did not know then the name of the operation, nor did they know its full extent or ambitions.2
The villagers did know, however, that a wave of violence was sweeping northwards. It included destruction on an unprecedented scale and attacks with chemical weapons. Part of this they learned from displaced people fleeing northwards; the peshmerga had also begun in 1987, following gas attacks, to provide instruction on crude protection against chemical weapons, usually consisting of breathing through a wet cloth or lighting fires. The villagers of Koreme were not easily frightened; they had endured destruction and the shocks of a largely one-sided war several years. Yet what they had heard by late August 1988 was enough to persuade them to undertake the difficult and risky flight on foot to Turkey -- itself a highly uncertain haven for the Kurds.3
During the weeks before August 27, 1988, Koreme villagers saw many signs that the Anfal campaign was about to break upon them.
A woman took her daughter to a local healer in a small town to treat a sore on her hand and saw many troops and vehicles. Her husband, later executed at Koreme, told her the army was merelyreplacing National Defense Battalions units with regular troops. Their 18-year-old son Nausad, who later disappeared at Dohuk fort and who had made regular trips to Turkey to buy food, also reported seeing many Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish refugees at the border.
Nausad believed, his mother said, that "something serious was underway." He thought the family should go to Turkey while there was still time; they could use his connections to get across the border. But his father believed it would be better to stay. The peshmerga, he said, would fight a holding action against the government soldiers, providing a screen behind which the families could escape. Besides, his father said, he had money and could bribe the army even if the family was captured.
Many families had such discussions in the days immediately before August 27. Some families fled earlier and made it over the border. Some decided to stay. Others decided to flee further into the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan; one father told the other village men that it was better to "be hungry in the mountains of Iraq than to be shot by Turkish troops at the border" trying to keep them out. Another man decided not to take his family and flee because he thought the mines laid at the border by both Iraqi and the Turkish forces made the trip too dangerous. Still another man prudently left early for the border with his family; he later discovered, from a refugee camp in Turkey, that his brother's family, which had stayed behind, had all perished.
By August 23 and 24, aerial bombardment around Koreme had begun, shelling was nearly nonstop, and villagers saw helicopters dropping troops into nearby areas. No chemical weapons were reported at Koreme, although they were used extensively in the areas around it.4 So on August 25 and 26, the main body of Koreme families, together with their relatives from Chalkey, decided, as one villager recalled, "that for us, time had run out and we had to try and reach Turkey."
Estimates by survivors of the number of Koreme people who fled range between 40 and 70 families, or 200 to 350 individuals. The best guess is perhaps 250 people, together with as much of their livestock as they could shepherd along. This number included perhaps 60 men and teenage boys who were later targets of execution and disappearance. Thenumber of adult and teenage males was lower than might have been expected, for several reasons. First, some men were fighting with the peshmerga and were not with their families. Second, some men correctly realized that they were likely to be singled out by the army, so they refrained from fleeing with their families toward the Turkish border, or took other evasive steps.
The Koreme villagers gathered together "what they could carry," survivors said, including food for several days. They put the elderly and infirm "on the horses that were left," and set off on the morning of August 27. Some started out a day or so earlier while others waited until evening to be less conspicuous. To evade army patrols, they avoided main roads and tried to avoid even minor roads, traveling more or less cross-country. The route made progress slow. In addition, the whole countryside was filled with thousands of others attempting to flee. Planes flew overhead, and on occasion they "were forced to hide in the brush" to avoid harassing gunfire.
The main body of families went first to Hamsawa, near the ravines, where some of the Chalkey families joined them. The group then continued to the village of Deje.
On the road they met people who told them of chemical attacks taking place that very day, August 27, in villages nearby. Koreme villagers described the people they met as "terrified and disoriented." These were people who had survived shelling and aerial bombardment for years, but chemical gas attacks from the air created unprecedented terror.
Concerned that they, too, might be attacked with chemicals in the open countryside, Koreme's village elders and family heads decided to send several younger men ahead to investigate conditions. One of those sent was Nausad, driving a flock of goats. He arrived in the village of Warmeli sometime soon after it was bombed with chemical weapons on August 27.
Nausad told his parents when they arrived later with the main body of families that he had seen planes flying around Warmeli as he came toward it on the road with his goats. There was smoke in the air,and he did not know whether or not it was poisonous chemicals or when the attack had taken place. But he saw people fleeing the village in terror, screaming and weeping. He hid in the brush above the road and did not approach any closer to the village at that time. His eyes were affected as the smoke drifted toward him, and he felt nauseated. As he later told his mother, his cousin had gone ahead toward the village and was "burned" on the exposed parts of his body, although he survived. Some of the animals died on the road; Nausad told his mother they just "fell over and after a little while stopped breathing."
Inhabitants of Warmeli who survived the chemical attack said that it occurred about 6:00 a.m. on August 27. Seven planes flew circles around the village, according to Warmeli villagers, and then two planes each dropped one bomb containing some kind of chemical smoke. Other planes dropped bombs that caused fires. One old man said he saw a chemical bomb explode, releasing a "white and then yellowish cloud that rose and drifted" down into the valley. He reported that he and his family tried to escape the gas by running up the valley, but one of his adult sons was "trapped in the gas and breathed it many times." The son fell to the ground and remained there as the rest fled "and no one could help him because we didn't dare go back while the cloud was there."
After the smoke dispersed and the planes departed, the Warmeli villagers returned to their homes. The injured man was taken and washed with water many times. He was suffering from "suffocation, he couldn't breathe, and then he had vomiting and diarrhea. He couldn't concentrate on anything and he was disoriented." The family put him on a wooden board and laid him on the flat roof of the house. They and the rest of the Warmeli villagers decided to flee immediately to Turkey, according to Warmeli villagers, that same day, on August 27. Warmeli survivors reported four deaths and an unknown number of injuries from the chemical weapons attack.5
Meanwhile Nausad rejoined the main group of Koreme villagers, meeting them as they came up the road to Warmeli several hours later. By that time the Warmeli villagers were already hurrying out of the village toward Turkey. "Great fear" came on the Koreme villagers as they passed through Warmeli, only a few hours after the attack, and they "rushed through the village," not stopping to bury the dead, apparently the victims of gas, lying by the side of the road. "We left them there," said one Koreme woman. "We were scared to touch them, even though they looked like they were asleep." Another old man said, "we thought the planes would come back for us. We had to hurry away."
The Koreme villagers knew that a massive military operation was underway throughout the entire Dohuk region, from the news they gathered from displaced persons fleeing through the countryside. They knew it was a coordinated land and air attack of great ferocity. They knew chemical weapons were being used and were sowing terror. They knew the operation was directed against the villages and not strictly against peshmerga.
What they could not know, without access to Iraqi military plans for the operation, was that it constituted a massive strategic envelopment of the Kurdish rural population in the regions of Zakho, Dohuk and Zawita. Documents captured by Kurdish forces from the Iraqi army in the March 1991 Kurdish uprising clarify the scope of the operation. One document, "Analysis: The Operation of the End of Anfal" ("The End of Anfal"), apparently written by staff of the Command of the Fifth Corps of the Iraqi Army, sets out in minute detail certain aspects of the Fifth Corps' attack plans in the August 28 operation.6 It states that the "pivotprinciples" of the operation were "to operate from the outside toward the inside so as to encircle the saboteurs and destroy them ... [and] to suppress the saboteurs and deny them any chance to flee."7 Later it describes the aim of "aerial capabilities" as "obstruction of [the saboteurs'] withdrawal lines toward the Turkish borders."8
Operating from the "outside toward the inside" meant attacking from the south while simultaneously cutting off access to the Turkish border on the north, and squeezing the population in between. The Koreme villagers came to understand this at the end of the day on August 27, as they saw increasing signs that they were going to be cut off by the Iraqi army before they could reach Turkey. They came under increasing aerial attack, and had to hide under covering brush and trees. They gradually abandoned many of their animals along the roadsides and in the valleys, to make themselves less conspicuous targets and to permit them to move faster. Loss of the animals meant, however, less protection from landmines, for the animals could be used as an advance guard to detonate mines.
The Koreme villagers met more and more people on the trails returning unsuccessfully from trying to cross the border.9 Near the village of Girke, they met people from villages near Mengish, who told them the border was closed and that the army would capture them if they went further. By the evening of August 27, the families of Koreme wereasking themselves whether it would be better to return home. They had also heard rumors that an amnesty was supposed to take effect that would allow them to go home peacefully.10
And so, later that evening they returned to Koreme, with the animals they had kept through the day. It was a dangerous and difficult night. They feared capture by army patrols, whose locations they did not know. Artillery continued sporadically throughout the night. They went slowly; they worried that surrender to the army was not a wise thing to do. On the morning of August 28, they were still walking and only reached the outskirts of Koreme in the afternoon. The late August heat was oppressive and they stopped for water wherever they found it.
At the first sight of soldiers, just outside the village, the men and boys put their hands in the air to signal their surrender. They feared the soldiers would open fire as soon as they saw them and not let them surrender, but nothing happened. The army, accompanied by National Defense Battalions units, took them into custody. The militiamen herded away their remaining animals. The villagers were hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and frightened. They were uncertain what would happen next.
1 International law recognizes the power of states to maintain order within their borders, including suppressing rebellion, insurrection, and insurgency. However, there are two categories of restriction on their powers: (i) non-derogable human rights, such as those made non-derogable under Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and (ii) international humanitarian law applicable to non-international armed conflict, such as common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Neither body of international law prohibits rebels from being "punished under municipal law and there is no obligation to treat them as prisoners of war." Heather A. Wilson, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements, Oxford University Press, 1988, at 23.
2 Although Koreme villagers did not know the full extent of the Anfal campaign, the extraordinary violence of the campaign -- especially the use of chemical weapons -- and the volume of refugees it caused to flee into Turkey and Iran brought some media attention in the West. See e.g. Int'l. Herald Tribune, "Messages Said to Indicate Use [of Chemical Gas Against Kurds]," Sept. 16, 1988; Financial Times, "Kurds Flee Iraqi Army Into Turkey," Sept. 5, 1988; Le Monde, "Des centaines de civils Kurdes ont ete tues a l'arme chimique par les forces irakiennes," Sept. 5, 1988; Tribune Juive, "Iraq Plans to Relocate Kurds from Mountain Habitat," Sept. 20, 1988; Int'l. Herald Tribune, "UN Is Asked to Check Reports on Kurds," Sept. 14, 1988; The Washington Times, "U.S. Protests Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons on Kurds," Sept. 9, 1988; The Independent, "Iraqi Deal Threats Halt Kurd's Escape," Sept. 6, 1988; The Sunday Times, "Kurds Flee Chemical Terror into Turkey," Sept. 11, 1988; the N.Y. Times, U.S. Asserts Iraq Used Poison Gas Against the Kurds," Sept. 9, 1988.
3 See Int'l. Herald Tribune, "Taking In the Fleeing Kurds: Turkey Treads a Difficult Path," Sept. 9, 1988; Sydney Morning Herald, "Ankara Shuts Door on Kurds Fleeing Iraq," Sept. 1, 1988.
4 See Staff of Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations, 100th Cong., 28 Sess., Chemical Weapons Use in Kurdistan: Iraq's Final Offensive (P. Galbraith & C. Van Hollen, Jr. auth. 1988) ("Galbraith & Van Hollen") for lists of villages attacked with chemical weapons in Dohuk governorate.
5 The Warmeli villagers subsequently split into two groups: the families who reached safety in Turkey, and the families who returned to Warmeli and were captured by the army. The group that turned back did so because, according to witnesses, it was attacked by planes with machine gun fire and driven back down the road. They returned to Warmeli and were captured by soldiers who arrived two days later. Their history from that point on is similar to that of the Koreme residents. Taken to forts in Mengish and Dohuk, 39 of the village men disappeared and have been not seen since. The remainder of the population waseventually sent south to the camp of Beharke, where, according to villagers, another 60 or 70 women, children and elderly died.
6 While "The End of Anfal" sets out in great detail tactical aspects of the Fifth Corps' role in the August 28 operation, it does not describe the role of other units also involved in the operation, such as the First Corps. It likewise describes only briefly the operation in relation to the months-long Anfal campaign. Koreme, in fact, does not appear in the document, although Mengish does, most likely because Koreme fell in the jurisdiction of other corps. Still, it is a highlysignificant document for understanding the grand envelopment envisioned by the Iraqi army command.
8 "The End of Anfal" at 38. The document consistently refers to "saboteurs," implying armed combatant peshmerga. This is disingenuous. "The End of Anfal" discusses, at 33, the "magnitude of the engineering work needed for the destruction and removal of the remnants of the saboteurs and their premises ...." Since the "remnants" and "premises" of the saboteurs included every sign of Kurdish habitation in scores of villages, including Koreme, it is evident that "saboteur" meant simply any Kurd in the zone of operations. See Chapter VIII, The Destruction of Koreme.
9 See e.g., The Australian, "Turkey Flooded by Refugees, Sept. 5, 1988; Int'l. Herald Tribune, "Turkey Says Iraqis Have Blocked Routes Used by Kurdish Refugees," Sept. 9, 1988.
10 In fact, the amnesty was not issued until a week later, on September 6. See e.g. The Sunday Times, "Kurds Flee Chemical Terror Into Turkey," Sept. 11, 1988 ("...the Iraqi president's offer of amnesty, announced last week").