Anfal campaign

Before dawn, 23 February 1988

In the early hours of 23 February 1988, the Iraqi army and air force began a large-scale assault on Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headquarters in the high Jafati Valley northeast of Suleimaniyeh, firing chemical rounds and dropping chemical bombs around Sergalou and Bergalou.

It was the opening of the First Anfal — a siege lasting more than three weeks, and the first of the eight stages in the Iraqi state’s campaign against rural Kurdish areas.

Three weeks on high ground

Kurdish fighters used the high ground above the heavier poison clouds, lit fires, and used gas masks and atropine supplied by Iran. The Iraqi advance did not carry the headquarters quickly.

Command sat with Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Ba’ath Northern Bureau secretary, who held presidential-equivalent authority in northern Iraq over the army, security services and party apparatus. Human Rights Watch identifies the First and Fifth Corps as central military actors.

Which numbers hold up

Human Rights Watch estimates at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 people killed during the complete campaign, and about 2,000 villages destroyed across 1987–1989. The 182,000 total is an early PUK and Kurdish claim; Sciences Po describes it as extrapolated from assumed village size rather than counted.

The date carries a caveat too. Human Rights Watch’s 1993 account and the Sciences Po study give 23 February, while an earlier 1992 HRW report dated the attack on Sergalou to the night of 25–26 February and noted the controversy over when Anfal began and ended.

And 23 February opened a military campaign, not the repression: prohibited-zone directives, mass village clearances and chemical attacks on Kurdish targets were already under way in 1987.