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

The 1991 March uprising by the Shia population in the South were largely spontaneous revolts against the regime, mainly in the cities of Basra, Amara, Nasseriya, Najaf and Karbala. The revolts were supported by underground Islamic organisations such as Al Dawa. Bakir Al Hakim, Head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and in exile in Iran, sent a few thousands of his Badr Brigade to help the rebels which were joined by army deserters fleeing the military in the south. The revolts happened under the impulse of the moment of the Second Gulf War ceasefire and were encouraged by a speech of US President George Bush, who in February 1991 "called the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein". They seriously believed that the U.S. would send support in case of a revolt, but this action neither 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 33,000 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, 5,200 remained in the desert camp until 2003, suffering solitude and outcastness. Another thousand rebels sought refuge in Ahwar. Saddam suddenly started his campaign against the hiding people, including Ahwaris (the wetlands indigenous), because they were 'assumed' as 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 real happenings in Ahwar, because of Saddam's refusal to give independent international organisations access and an eventually unconscious neglect of the international community 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, only 10% of the original area of Ahwar was left.

Encouraged by the Shia uprising in the south, the Kurds had risen in revolt in the north as well. 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 Anfal and its chemical disaster led to a mass exodus. Within a few days two million people were on the move fleeing to Turkey and Iran. Because of this exodus the UN passed Resolution 688 in April 1991, which paved the way to create a Kurdish 'safe haven' north of the 36th parallel in Iraq. The coalition declared the area to a no-fly zone (another no-fly zone was later proclaimed on the 32nd parallel on 25 August 1992 to improve protection for Shiites in the south), forced the withdraw of Iraqi armed forces and established a cease-fire line in October 1991 which roughly matched the lines in 1974. Allied intervention and protection had led to the creation of an autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Iraq. Free elections were held throughout the Kurdish zone in May 1992 and in June 1992 the Kurdish Assembly began its session in Erbil. This entity faced deep internal contestation between rival factions KDP and PUK, which led to armed conflicts between the two parties lasting for years. 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.