Insurgencies in the North and South of Iraq (1991 - 2003)

The 1991 March uprising by the population in the the Shia-dominated south were largely spontaneous revolts against the regime, in the cities of Basra, al-Amara, al-Nasiriyya, Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Samawa, Kut, and Diwaniyya. The revolts were supported, among others, by underground Islamic organisations such as al-Dawa. The rebels also received support from the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade, under the command of Bakir Al Hakim, Head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and in exile in Iran, as well as from Iraqi army deserters who were fleeing the military operations in the south. The revolts were encouraged by a speech of US President George Bush, who on 15 February 1991 called on “[…] the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside […].” They believed that the U.S. would send support in case of a revolt, but this never happened. Within a couple of weeks, the Republican Guard divisions, which Saddam kept in reserve for such a purpose, had recaptured all cities with massive loss of life and destruction of affected cities. Thousands of people fled to either Iran, Ahwar (also known as the Mesopotamian Marshes) or Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia was one of the coalition partners in the Second Gulf War. Around 35,000 Iraqi refugees were settled in the Rafha camp in the north of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia lacked a legal framework for determining refugee status. Many could resettle to third countries until 1997, but when foreign countries stopped taking refugees from Rafha, some 5,000 remained in the desert camp until 2003, suffering solitude and being outcast. Other rebels sought refuge in the Southern marshes (Ahwar). Saddam started his campaign against those hiding, including Ahwaris (the wetlands indigenous), because they were ‘assumed’ to be co-conspirators. Unlike in the well-prepared Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, he reacted to the moment, in an indiscriminate way with fire from helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, summary executions, arrests and killings of rebels and indigenous. Little is known about the real happenings in Ahwar, because of Saddam’s refusal to give independent international organisations access, plus an internationally collective, unconscious neglect about this area. Moreover, Saddam continued with what he already began during the Iran-Iraq War – the deliberate and well-organised drainage of Ahwar Southern Iraq which resulted in a mass exodus of Ahwari and the disappearance of a worldwide inimitable wetland. In 2000, less than 10 % of the original area of Ahwar was left.

Encouraged by the Shia uprising in the south, the Kurds followed suit and rose in revolt in the north just a few days later. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and part of jahsh (pro-governmental Kurdish National Defense Battalion), conquered one town after the other until they captured Kirkuk on 19 March 1991. Saddam turned his forces to Kurdistan and within ten days, the Iraqi government took Kirkuk and went to the rebel-held areas. Memories of al-Anfal and its chemical disaster led to a mass exodus among the Kurdish population. Within a few days, two million people were on the move fleeing to Turkey and Iran. Because of this exodus, the UN Resolution 688 in April 1991 served the US, the UK and France to set up a no-fly zone, to create a Kurdish ‘safe haven’ north of the 36th line of latitude.,   This forced the Iraqi military to withdraw from an area in October 1991 which happened to coincide – more or less – with that of the Kurdish region of 1974. Thus, allied intervention and protection led to the creation of an autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Iraq. Free democratic elections were held throughout the Kurdish region in May 1992 – the first ever in Iraq –, and in June 1992, the Kurdistan National Assembly had been formed. This Assembly faced deep internal contestation, primarily between the rival factions KDP and PUK, which led to years of armed conflicts between the two parties as from 1994. In 1998, Jalal Talabani (PUK) and Massoud Barsani (KDP) finally signed a peace agreement in Washington, but the government of the Kurdish region remained split between the two rival administrations.

This article was written by Hella Mewis and is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.