Iraqis charge Hussein with genocide
Describe killings in 1988 as effort to wipe out Kurds
BAGHDAD -- Iraq's special criminal court filed genocide charges against Saddam Hussein yesterday, charging that the deposed dictator ordered a series of military attacks in 1988 that killed as many as 100,000 Kurds.
Six aides, including Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, known as Chemical Ali, also would stand trial for the Anfal campaign, which included attacks against civilian populations using mustard gas and sarin nerve agent.
The trial could prove far more complex and sweeping in scope than the ongoing Dujail case, which involves the massacre of at least 148 Shi'ite townspeople in 1982. That trial is scheduled to resume today with further testimony from Hussein.
Tribunal officials said they have accumulated a vast body of evidence, including Ba'athist command documents and hundreds of witness statements, to present at the genocide trial. Investigators exhumed mass graves throughout the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan and conducted forensic tests that allegedly confirm traces of banned chemical agents.
The Anfal campaign was launched, in part, as retribution for an alliance between Kurdish peshmerga soldiers and Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war, according to a 1993 Human Rights Watch Report on Anfal. But investigators also say the campaign, which destroyed 2,000 villages, was part of a widespread ethnic cleansing effort, to rid swaths of the northern province of Kurds.
In the course of eight attacks, Hussein's army deployed chemical weapons with truck-mounted rocket launchers and crop duster planes, according to Human Rights Watch. The victims, most of whom were civilians, died of asphyxiation and chemical burns.
Other victims were killed by conventional attacks or rounded up and executed by firing squads. Still others were buried alive, according to survivors' testimony.
Still pained by muted global outrage during the Anfal campaign, many Kurds have eagerly anticipated the exposure the genocide case would generate. But it was unclear yesterday whether the trial would have to be delayed until the conclusion of the Dujail case.
Hussein has a right, under Iraqi law, to attend both trials.
A US diplomat also suggested that the Anfal case could be cut short if Hussein receives a death sentence in the Dujail trial.
News of the impending trial overshadowed Iraq's struggle to form a government. With formal discussions in recess, leaders of Iraq's leading Shi'ite alliance met privately yesterday to discuss whether to replace Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
A parked car exploded near a used-car lot in western Baghdad yesterday, killing 10 people and injuring 28. Elsewhere in Baghdad, four people were killed in three separate drive-by shooting incidents.
In Basra, gunmen shot to death Sheik Nawaf Ahmed Aqrab, a local leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab political organization, as he left his house.
The US Navy yesterday announced the death Sunday of a serviceman in the western Anbar province.
