Causes and consequences

Political violence prior to the 2003 US-led invasion

Iraq was an autocratic state that allowed no political dissent. Of vital importance to the maintenance of Saddam Hussein’s regime was the vast and infamous security apparatus that he controlled directly through his youngest son Qusai. The government's security apparatus included militias attached to the President, the Ba'ath party, and the Interior Ministry. These played a central role in maintaining an environment of intimidation and fear.

Iraqi people were afraid of expressing any opinion that could have been deemed negative of the government, anywhere, to anyone. The Iraqi government has been known to carry out random arrests of thousands of citizens, subjecting them to inhuman treatment, in order to flush out any opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, 'Arbitrary arrest is a powerful tool for the repression of political dissent. The knowledge that the knock on the door could come at any hour is enough to inspire terror in most people. But it is only one, and in fact the most gentle of those that the Iraqi regime is known to employ.'

The United Nations Security Council created a special commission on human rights in Iraq in March 1991 and requested its chairman to appoint a special rapporteur to make 'a thorough study of the violations of human rights by the government of Iraq.' The Special Rapporteur Max Van der Stoel reported on 26 March 1992 that violations of human rights by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein were 'one of the worst since World War Two - comparable in gravity to crimes of the Khmer Rouge (in Cambodia) or Idi Amin (in Uganda).' Reports from the commission have listed the following human rights violations:

• 'Summary and arbitrary executions, orchestrated mass executions and burials, extrajudicial killings including political killings, in particular in the northern region of Iraq, in southern Shi'a centres and in the southern marshes;
• Widespread routine practice of systematic torture in its most cruel forms, including the torture of children;
• Enforced or involuntary disappearances, routinely practiced arbitrary arrest and detention including of women and children, consistent and routine failure to respect due process and the rule of law;
• Hostage-taking and the use of persons as "human shields," a most grave and blatant violation of Iraq's obligations under international law;
• Suppression of freedom of thought, expression and association, violations of property rights.'

Political opponents were expelled or forced to flee Iraq regardless of their ethnic or religious background. Such persecution dates back to the 1950s, with stronger trends in the 1970s and 1990s. One such example is the Iraqi Communist Party. In terms of organised political opposition inside Iraq, the Iraqi Communist Party was one of the organisations that bore the brunt of the repression by successive governments, as leading figures and cadres of the Party were tortured to death or executed. However, in Iraq the ethnic or religious group with which you were affiliated was enough to subject you to the wrath of the regime. Two groups in particular have suffered under Saddam Hussein’s rule: the Kurds living in northern Iraq and the Shi'ites living in and around the southern marshes of Iraq. The persecution of these groups continued throughout his rule, and intensified in the aftermath of international conflicts.

The Kurds

Since the first days of Iraqi independence, Iraq's 4 million Kurds have fought either for independence or for meaningful autonomy. In 1970, the Ba'ath party, anxious to secure its precarious hold on power, did offer the Kurds a considerable measure of self-rule, but the regime defined the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in such a way as deliberately to exclude the vast oil wealth that lies beneath the fringes of the Kurdish lands. The Autonomous Region, rejected by the Kurds and imposed unilaterally by Baghdad in 1974, comprised the three northern governorates of Erbil, Suleimaniyeh, and Dohuk. Covering some 14,000 square miles (roughly the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island), this was only half the territory that the Kurds considered rightfully theirs.

In the wake of the autonomy decree, the Ba'ath party embarked on the 'Arabisation' of the oil-producing areas of Kirkuk and Khanaqin and other parts of the north, evicting Kurdish - as well as Turkoman and Assyrian - farmers and replacing them with poor Arab tribesmen from the south. Northern Iraq did not remain at peace for long. In 1974, the long-simmering Kurdish revolt flared up once more under the leadership of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who was supported this time by the governments of Iran, Israel, and the United States. The revolt collapsed precipitately in 1975, when Iraq and Iran concluded a border agreement and the Shah withdrew his support from Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). After the KDP fled into Iran, tens of thousands of villagers from the Barzani tribe were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to barren sites in the desert south of Iraq. Here, without any form of assistance, they had to rebuild their lives from scratch.

In the mid- and late 1970s, the regime again moved against the Kurds, forcibly evacuating at least a quarter of a million people from Iraq's borders with Iran and Turkey, destroying their villages to create a cordon sanitaire along these sensitive frontiers. Most of the displaced Kurds were relocated into mujamma'at (amalgamations or collectives), crude new settlements located on the main highways in army-controlled areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. They were forbidden to move back to their homes. Baghdad continued its systematic efforts to 'Arabize' these areas up until the latest conflict.

The Faili Kurds

The Faili Kurds, most of whom are Shi'ite, form a distinctive group of repressed people in Iraq, many of them twice displaced and now back in their country of origin. Unlike most Iraqi Kurds, until the early 1970s they lived mainly in the urban centres of central and southern Iraq, many of them in Baghdad. Beginning in 1974 and in subsequent waves, around 130,000 Failis were deported to Iran by the Iraqi government, on the pretext that they were not Iraqi citizens, though in fact it was because their loyalty was considered suspect. Most had lived in Iraq for generations, but in Ottoman times had not registered as citizens in order to avoid conscription. Since the 1970s most of the Faili Kurds have lived in Iran. Those who remained in Iraq were targeted once again by the repression that followed the 1991 uprising in the south, and clamp-downs by the Iraqi government against pro-Iranian clergy and their followers in 1996 and 1998-9. It was partly as a consequence of the Faili Kurds' flight to the Marshes that the southern Shi'ites living in the marshlands of Iraq started suffering persecution.

The Iran-Iraq War and the Anfal Campaign 1980-8

The Iran-Iraq War was complex and included religious schisms, border disputes, and political differences. Conflicts contributing to the outbreak of hostilities ranged from centuries-old Sunni versus Shi'a and Arab versus Persian religious and ethnic disputes, to a personal animosity between Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini. Above all, Iraq launched the war in an effort to consolidate its rising power in the Arab world and to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. The war began on 22 September 1980, when Iraqi troops launched a full-scale invasion of Iran. Although Iraq hoped for a quick strike, it was not until 20 August 1988 that the guns fell silent.

The eight years of war exhausted both countries, but it allowed Saddam to further consolidate his rule in Iraq. When the war wound down, Saddam turned to damping internal divisions in his country and began a campaign against a Kurdish insurgency in the north.

After 1980 many Iraqi garrisons in Kurdistan were abandoned or reduced in size, and their troops transferred to the front. In the vacuum that was left, the Kurdish peshmerga ('those who face death') once more began to thrive. The KDP, now led by one of Barzani's sons, Mas'oud, had revived its alliance with Teheran, and in 1983 KDP units aided Iranian troops in their capture of the border town of Haj Omran. Retribution was swift: in a lightning operation against the complexes that housed the relocated Barzanis, Iraqi troops abducted between 5,000 and 8,000 males aged 12 or over. None of them have ever been seen again, and it is believed that after being held prisoner for several months, they were all killed.

Towards the end of the war, following increasing collaboration between Iran and Kurdish guerrilla forces, the Iraqi regime pursued military operations, a campaign referred to as Anfal, killing between 50,000 and 200,000 people (a chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja left an estimated 5,000 dead) and destroying about 3,000 Kurdish villages and hamlets. Their inhabitants - over half a million people - were deported to new 'collective settlements' away from border or mountain areas, or to detention camps in south and west Iraq. Others fled to Iran. Many of these people have been displaced more than once since then.

The 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath

The 1991 Gulf War originated with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Saddam Hussein declared that the invasion was a response to overproduction of oil in Kuwait, which had cost Iraq over US$14 million when oil prices fell. He also accused Kuwait of illegally pumping oil from Iraq's Rumaila oil field. When he refused to comply with a UN demand to withdraw, 'Operation Desert Storm' was launched on 18 January 1991. The US-led coalition began a massive air war to destroy Iraq's military and civil infrastructure. Although the war was a decisive military victory for the coalition, Kuwait and Iraq suffered enormous property damage, and Saddam Hussein was not removed from power; in fact, as was the case with the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, he was free to turn his attention to internal revolts and moved to brutally suppress them.

Just after the Gulf War in early 1991, the Iraqi Kurds rebelled against the government. The Kurdish military leaders were overconfident, inexperienced in conventional war, and disorganised. They believed too readily that a collapse in Baghdad would come soon and that, if things did by some mischance go wrong, the United States would rescue the situation. They were wrong and the plight of the Kurdish refugees fleeing reprisal became a matter of intense international scrutiny. While Iran opened its borders to the fleeing Kurds, the Turkish government closed its border, arguing that to let the refugees enter would destabilise its country. Several hundred thousand Kurds were therefore stranded in inhospitable, snow-covered mountain passes along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Without international pressure to make Turkey open its borders - key states were too concerned about the need for NATO to maintain the use of air bases in Turkey - the Turkish President proposed creating a 'safe haven' for the Kurds in northern Iraq. This resulted in the establishment of the US-led 'Operation Provide Comfort', through which the Kurds were protected from Iraqi government reprisals against them by, among other measures, the establishment of a no-fly zone over a part of Kurdish homelands in northern Iraq.

Since the establishment of the northern no-fly zone, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a twenty-year-old Iraqi Kurdish political party, had been struggling for power with another older and more traditional Kurdish political party, the fifty-year-old Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). The PUK had in various circumstances applied for and received aid from the Iranian government in its struggles. The KDP gradually lost ground to the PUK and finally appealed to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein for support. In the first week of September 1996, the KDP, with Iraqi troops behind them, quickly took over the major towns and cities in the Kurdish area of Iraq that had been under the control of the PUK. US President Clinton responded by extending the no-fly zone in the south and launching two groups of missile strikes to destroy Iraqi surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites in southern Iraq. Fearing a new campaign of repression by Saddam Hussein, thousands of Kurds fled to the Turkish and Iranian borders.

The Marsh Arabs and the southern Shi'a

The land of the Marsh Arabs, or Maadan, once covered more than 15,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) around Qurna, where Iraq's two main rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, join, stretching from Basra in the south to Nassiriya in the west and Amara in the north. Its inhabitants had a unique lifestyle, living on floating islands made from reeds and in cathedral-like houses, also built from reeds. They were self-sustaining, living mainly on fish and birds. In a habitat that provided good cover, they sustained a long guerrilla campaign against Saddam and have suffered continually for their resistance.

Increased persecution after the 1991 Gulf War

Following the 1991 Gulf War, the Shi'a of southern Iraq, like the Kurds of the north, launched an uprising that was quickly suppressed by Saddam Hussein. Many opponents of the Baghdad regime - the Faili Kurds amongst them - fled to the marshes, and the Iraqi government intensified a pacification campaign it had been directing toward the Marsh Arabs since 1989. On 24 April 1994 the Iraqi government announced the completion of a 65-mile canal through southern Iraq that diverted river waters away from marshlands. The primary reason for the project was to punish the Shi'a for their support of the anti-government rebels and to make rebel bases more accessible to government attack. Apart from the drainage operations the campaign included arrest, detention, torture, summary execution, and military operations such as poisoning and napalming. The UN estimates that 85 per cent of the marshlands, the largest wetland area in the Middle East, have been lost. Doctors report that epidemics of cholera and chronic diarrhoea are spreading among the remaining Maadan, who are now deprived of clean water by the drainage projects.

Following the February 1999 assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shi'a population and a vocal critic of the central government, there were reports of widespread rioting, as well as allegations of summary executions and arrests. At the time, the Iraqi authorities also reportedly burned houses as collective punishment against rebellious villages and neighbourhoods. According to reports by the UN Special Rapporteur and Amnesty International, repression of Shi'a clergy and their followers continued in 2001. The numbers of Maadan are believed to have decreased from 250,000 in 1991 to 40,000 in 2003.

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Population movements up to March 2003

Population movements as a result of conflict and political violence have characterised Iraq’s social landscape for decades. They fall into three main categories: internally displaced people; refugees inside Iraq; and Iraqi exiles.

Internally displaced people (IDPs)

As of late 2002, the Global IDP Project estimated that there were 1 million IDPs in Iraq. The US Committee for Refugees (USCR) estimated between 600,000-700,000 IDPs. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cited a figure of 830,000; and the Brookings Institution estimated between 900,000 and 1.1 million.

Although there were no reliable estimates of the number of displaced people in southern Iraq prior to the latest conflict, USCR conservatively estimates that about 100,000 were internally displaced from and within the southern region. However, according to a Brookings Institution report, there are at least 300,000 IDPs in government-controlled Iraq. This report bases its numbers on a paper given at the AMAR conference in May 2001. At the start of the 1990s, prior to the initiation of the large-scale marsh-draining program, an estimated original population of 400,000 Marsh Arabs had dwindled to about 250,000 due essentially to economic migration. Of this remaining number, 40,000 fled into Iran as refugees and an estimated 20,000-40,000 remained in their homes. This leaves the 80,000 from the Iran-Iraq War living in Basra, and 170,000-190,000 who are either dead or displaced. Numbers for other Shi'ite Arabs expelled are equally hard to determine: the only firm numbers are recorded for the 25,000 people that the government itself has admitted expelling from a Baghdad neighbourhood in 1998. In addition an estimated 45,000 al-Qilaa, or Jash Kurds, are known to be IDPs. This group of Kurds fought or supported the Iraqi government during the 1980s destruction of the Kurdish villages and the incarceration of the inhabitants of the collective towns, leaving when Kurdish rule was established in the North in 1991. Finally there are reports of some non-Arabs who, forced out of Kirkuk, have moved south instead of north and into Kurdish areas.

The USCR estimates that the number of persons displaced in northern Iraq was about 600,000, having reached a peak of 800,000 in 1999. Apart from the displacement caused by the Anfal Campaign in the 1980s, some 1.5 million Kurds sought temporary refuge in Iran and along the Turkish border following the failed Kurdish uprising in early 1991. By the end of 1991 most Kurdish refugees had returned, but some 700,000 remained displaced within northern Iraq. During 1992 and 1993 more Kurds were displaced by skirmishes and shelling along the line dividing the Kurdish zone from government-controlled Iraq. During 1996, the most significant cause of internal displacement was fighting between the Kurds themselves - the KDP and PUK, and the KDP and PKK. In 1997, the Iraqi government intensified its systematic efforts to Arabize the predominantly Kurdish cities of Kirkuk, Khanaqin, and Douz.

Refugees inside Iraq

There were more than 128,100 refugees in Iraq in 2001. The refugees comprised about 23,700 from Iran and 13,100 from Turkey (in both cases, mostly Kurds); about 90,000 Palestinians; and about 1,300 refugees of other nationalities, including Eritreans (573), Somalis (313), Sudanese (224), and Syrians (101).

Iraqis in exile

For more than two decades, Iraqis have constituted one of the largest refugee groups in the world and one of the largest groups of asylum-seekers in Europe. Apart from the deportation of the Faili Kurds in the 1970s, there have been two major waves of refugees from Iraq over the past quarter-century: the first in the early 1980s prior to and following the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, and the second as a result of the violent reaction of the regime to the popular uprisings of the 1991 Gulf War. A third category consists of persons fleeing over the past few years out of fear of persecution and human rights abuses. Many of these were granted asylum, while others, unable to return or facing compelling humanitarian circumstances, were either allowed to remain in their respective asylum countries under various protection or humanitarian arrangements, or are still living under refugee-status determination processes. Still others left Iraq as a result of the acute economic crisis and found themselves abroad, undocumented, and without legal status.

The official figures of the number of Iraqi refugees available to UNHCR are believed to be lower than real figures, as many Iraqi refugees have not contacted the authorities in some countries for fear of being deported back to Iraq, but it is estimated that up to 4 million Iraqis are scattered throughout the world. This figure does not refer to refugees or asylum-seekers per se, but comprises all Iraqis who have left their country for various reasons as well as those directly affected by the situation in the country over the last few decades: those who were forced to flee the two Gulf conflicts, those expelled from Iraq, those who disappeared or were taken as POWs, refugees and asylum-seekers, and those forced to leave due to socio-economic reasons.

Prior to the latest conflict, the total number of Iraqi refugees was estimated at some 400,000, spread over more than 40 countries. Most Iraqi refugees live in the countries neighbouring Iraq, and nearly 50 per cent of these refugees were in Iran - 204,000 persons. They represented the second-largest refugee community in Iran after the Afghans, and comprised the Faili Kurds discussed above, Sunni Kurds from the northern Iraqi provinces who fled to Iran following the Anfal campaign, and Shi'ites from the central and southern provinces of Iraq who entered Iran in waves during the Iran-Iraq War, during the 1991 uprisings, and since.

After Iran, Jordan has been the main gateway for Iraqis leaving their country for fear of persecution and/or socio-economic conditions over the twelve years prior to the latest conflict. Some 300,000 Iraqis work as unskilled labourers in Jordan - illegally. Over 80 per cent are Arab Shi'a originating from the southern provinces of Iraq, the remainder coming from Baghdad. Around 5,000 refugees are registered with UNHCR, awaiting resettlement to another safe country. Saudi Arabia hosted about 17,000 Arab Shi'a Iraqis who fled during the Iran-Iraq War and who were granted de facto refugee status. A residual caseload of 5,200 refugees remained in the Rafha camp, having fled in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. The UNHCR has granted or is considering granting refugee status to 2,400 Iraqis in Syria, while an additional 60,000-70,000 Iraqis who did not approach the UNHCR or were denied refugee status continued to reside there illegally. Smaller numbers lived in Kuwait, Yemen, UAE, and Lebanon in refugee-like situations.

Outside of Iran only a fraction of Iraqi refugees held official refugee status. Assistance to those without such status does not meet minimum international standards. In some cases, their freedom of movement is severely restricted; they are vulnerable to police harassment, beatings, sexual violence, extortion, and possible deportation. Their chances of being offered resettlement in the USA, Canada, Australia, or Europe are extremely slim; they cannot integrate with local populations in the Middle East; they are refused permission to work; they live in limbo. Consequently, many Iraqis have risked their lives and those of their families by paying smugglers to help them reach the shores of Western countries to seek asylum.

Outside the Middle East, the number of Iraqis looking for asylum has increased steadily. Approximately 225,000 Iraqi refugees and asylum-seekers were being protected in European countries prior to the latest conflict. Between 1989 and the end of 2001, 277,500 Iraqis applied for asylum in Western countries, mostly in Europe. Over 50,000 asylum applications were lodged during 2002 alone, with Germany hosting the highest number of Iraqis, with 50,900 refugees and 10,000 asylum seekers, followed by the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia, and Norway. Since 11 September 2001 the withdrawal of protection of Iraqi asylum-seekers in some Western states and the halt of resettlement programmes has increased the vulnerability of this group considerably.

Iraqi opposition groups

In addition to the Iraqi refugees in neighbouring states, prior to the 2003 US-led invasion, there were estimated to be an additional 4 million Iraqis living outside Iraq: an older generation of educated migrants, including opponents of the regime in its earlier days; those who left Iraq to avoid the war with Iran; and the wave after wave of mainly middle-class migrants who left in the 1990s. Over the years, opposition groups have been plagued by feuds, receptive to foreign manipulation and incapable generally of building a genuine presence inside Iraq. The opposition existed only in exile, aside from the Kurdish organisations (the PUK, founded in 1975 and led by Jalal Talabani, and the KDP, founded in 1946 and led by Masoud Barzani), the Islamist Shi'ite forces (The Islamic Unity Movement of Kurdistan, founded in 1986 and led by Sheikh Ali Abdel Aziz), and the Iraqi Communist Party (founded in 1934 and based in Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria), all of which maintained a limited presence within the country.

The main groups that were established outside of Iraq in opposition to Saddam Hussein include the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was formed in 1992 and was supported financially by the United States under the leadership of Dr. Ahmad al-Chalabi; the Shi'a Al Dawa Party that had three centres in London, Damascus, and Tehran; SCIRI, an umbrella for small Shi'a organisations and individuals, headed by religious leader Sayed Mohammed Bakr al-Hakeem, that was based in and supported by Tehran; the Organisation of Islamic Action, founded in 1965 and based in Iran, Europe, and Syria with some clandestine presence in Iraq; the Imam al-Khoei Foundation, originating in the late 1980s and with its headquarters in London; the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a London-based organisation of Iraqi exiles, many of whom were former members of the Ba'ath party and once supported financially by the USA; the Iraqi Free Officers, founded in 1996 and led by General Najib Al-Salhi, based in Washington; numerous pan-Arab and Ba'athist parties; and numerous Democratic parties based in London.

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'Operation Iraqi Freedom'

On 8 November 2002 the UN Security Council voted unanimously to back a US-British resolution (no. 1441) requiring Iraq to reinstate weapons inspectors after a four-year absence. One month later Iraqi officials in Baghdad presented the UN with a 12,000-page dossier disclosing Iraq's programmes for weapons of mass destruction, as demanded by the UN resolution. On the basis of this report, the United States accused Baghdad of being in 'material breach' of the UN resolution. Despite intense diplomatic efforts, on 5 March 2003 the foreign ministers of France, Russia, and Germany released a joint declaration stating that they would 'not allow' a resolution authorising military action to pass the UN Security Council. With China, France, and Russia opposed to an attack, the US and UK abandoned hope of gaining Security Council support for a second resolution authorising war on Iraq. On 20 March 2003, shortly after the 48-hour deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq had expired, America launched its first series of air strikes on Baghdad. Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on 5 November after a year-long trial over the killings of 148 Shias from the town of Dujail in the 1980s. On 30 December 2006, the former Iraqi leader was hanged in northern Baghdad for crimes against humanity. In a statement, Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, said the execution had closed a dark chapter in Iraq's history.

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