Iraq Press
April 19, 2002

Kurdish scholars ended this week a three-day conference on the Anfal campaign of genocide in which an estimated 180,000 civilian Kurds are reported to have perished.

The conference, in which 20 research papers were presented, discussed the political, social, economic and religious aspects of the Anfal, a genocide which historians say has no parallel even in Nazi Germany.

The genocide took place in 1988 and is reported to have lead to the death of nearly 180,000 Kurds. Saddam's henchman and relative Ali Hassan al-Majeed executed the murderous campaign.

The genocide would have almost passed unnoticed by the outside world but thanks to the more than eighteen metric tons of official Iraqi documents, some four million in all, that the Kurds captured and had sent to the United States in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait.

Now the world knows the details of al-Majeed's efforts to exterminate an ethnic minority. Specialists sifting through the cache say in terms of documentation it surpasses the Nazi documents captured in 1945.

The documents reveal that Anfal was carried out in eight stages with details on every assault.

The participants in the Arbil conference on Anfal, the first in Iraqi Kurdistan, called on the international community to launch an independent investigation of the genocide and establish a tribunal to try the perpetrators.

The participants intend to hold a similar conference in Europe to draw international community's attention to the genocide.