The Destruction of Koreme
On August 29, 1988, Koreme was uninhabited. The bodies of those massacred lay where they had fallen, unburied, stiffened with rigor mortis, and starting to swell in the summer heat; according to Mengish residents, they were covered over with earth only several weeks later. Koreme's remaining villagers were in the hands of army forces in Mengish, and would soon be transferred to Dohuk. There the men would disappear, while the remainder would eventually make their way to Beharke and Jeznikam.
But the Anfal campaign was planned differently from earlier campaigns against the Kurds. One difference was that the Baghdad regime planned that the rural Kurds -- those rural Kurds, anyway, who remained alive -- would never return to their lands. In keeping with this strategic goal, the Anfal campaign devoted astonishing resources to the "destruction and removal of the remnants of the saboteurs and their premises."1 In practice, this meant that the army destroyed whole villages down to the foundations of their buildings. Many of these buildings, the schools and often the mosques, had been built by the government only a few years before at some expense. Koreme was typical of the many destroyed villages seen by the forensic team in its travels through Iraqi Kurdistan.
Prior to Anfal, Koreme had some 160 houses made from mud bricks or from stone and cement; it also had a school and a mosque made from stone and cement. It had limited irrigation works attached to its springs. Electricity was installed in 1987. Following Anfal, nothing was left. The houses were gone. The school and mosque had been destroyed down to the foundations. The power lines were pulled down and the power poles knocked over. Between 1988 and 1992, vegetation had overgrown the site so that only the rubble of the school and mosque suggested to the uninitiated that there had once been a village there. Wildflowers that grow best in disturbed earth sprang up, and in the spring, much of the flattened village was covered with mustard flowers, dandelion, and Queen Anne's lace. The orchards had been burned, and the vineyards uprooted.
The village springs were cemented over, and cement was poured into the wells.
Both the forensic team's archaeological examination of the destruction at Koreme and captured Iraqi army documents show that the destruction was neither the product of battle nor simply an afterthought. Instead it was a carefully planned, executed and integral part of Anfal. "The End of Anfal" notes that the "magnitude of the engineering work" needed to carry out the destruction of the villages "was so big that it put an extra burden on the shoulders of the command of a unit," particularly in the "procurement and distribution of explosives."2
Explosives indeed performed a sizable part of the Iraqi army's destructive work. The forensic team archaeologist noted the clean lines of debris in Koreme and other villages, including Birjinni. These lines are consistent with implosions, occasioned by explosives placed inside the buildings, causing them to collapse on themselves, without throwing debris outward. However, the success of such operations required the use of highly trained demolition squads, as "The End of Anfal" confirmed.
The forensic team archaelogist's conclusions are buttressed by the testimony of a Christian priest who witnessed the destruction of an Assyrian Christian church in April 1987 in the village of Bakhtoma. The priest said he was allowed to remain behind to collect certain items. He said he watched army demolition teams placing dynamite inside the church and other permanent structures in the village that could not be destroyed by bulldozer, and then watched the explosion.3
The villagers' possessions, particularly their animals and livestock, were plundered. One Kurdish man serving in the army at the time of Anfal reported seeing "huge pens where what they called 'the animals of the saboteurs'" were kept. Other Kurds in the Iraqi army at that time reported seeing "the animals of the saboteurs" being sold to Iraqi Arabs at cheap prices.
1 "The End of Anfal" at 33.
2 "The End of Anfal" at 33.
3 See note 8, chapter IV, The Chemical Weapons Attack on Birjinni, p. 41.