1991 Iraqi uprisings

1991 uprisings in Iraq
Part of the aftermath of the Gulf War and the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict
Date March 1 - April 5, 1991 Location Iraq Result Iraqi government victory Mass reprisals against the population and exodus of nearly 2 million refugees from the country Continued conflict in parts of the north until October 1991 and in the rural south until 1994 Accelerated destruction of the Tigris-Euphrates marshes Territorial changes Establishment of the Kurdish Autonomous Republic, as well as the Iraqi no-fly zones
Belligerents
Iraq Republican Guard Ba'ath Party loyalists People's Mujahedin of Iran	Shi'a rebels: SCIRI & Badr Islamic Dawa Party Iraqi Hezbollah Iraqi Army deserters Kurdish Peshmerga: KDP PUK IMK
Commanders and leaders
Saddam Hussein President of Iraq Ali Hassan al-Majid Interior Minister Taha Yasin Vice President of Iraq Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri Deputy Chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council Tariq Aziz Foreign Minister Qusay Hussein Son of Saddam Hussein Massoud Rajavi President of National Council of Resistance	Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim Leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq Abdul Aziz al-Hakim Leader of the Badr Organization Hadi al-Amiri Badr Organization member Massoud Barzani Leader of the KDP Jalal Talabani Leader of the PUK
Strength
300,000 4,500	SCIRI: 4,000 - 8,000 15,000 - 45,000 4,000
Casualties and losses
5,000 killed	30,000 - 180,000 killed (including civilians)

The 1991 uprisings in Iraq (Arabic: انتفاضة 1991 في العراق او الانتفاضة الشعبانية) consisted of simultaneous anti-governmental rebellions in southern and northern Iraq during the aftermath of the Gulf War in March – April 1991. The revolt was fueled by the perception that the power of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was vulnerable at the time; as well as by heavily fueled anger at government suppression and the devastation wrought by two wars in a single decade, the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War.

Saddam suppressed the rebellions with massive and indiscriminate force, maintaining power while the rebels were decisively defeated by the loyalist forces, spearheaded by the Iraqi Republican Guard. During the few weeks of unrest, tens of thousands of people died and nearly two million became refugees.

In the aftermath of the failed revolution, the Iraqi government intensified its forced relocation of Marsh Arabs and the draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes in the Tigris-Euphrates river system, the Coalition established the Iraqi no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq, and the Kurds created the Kurdish Autonomous Republic in a part of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Prelude

See also: Gulf War

On February 15, 1991, President of the United States George H. W. Bush announced on the Voice of America radio:

"There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: And that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations."

On the evening of February 24, several days before the Gulf War ceasefire was signed, the Saudi Arabia-based Voice of Free Iraq radio station, allegedly funded and operated by the CIA, broadcasted a message to the Iraqis telling them to rise up and overthrow Saddam. The speaker on the radio was Salah Omar al-Ali, an exiled former member of the Ba'ath Party and the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. Al-Ali's message urged the Iraqis to overthrow the "criminal tyrant of Iraq" and asserted that Saddam "will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq":

"Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honorable sons of the Tigris and Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang."

The uprisings

See also: 1991 uprising in Karbala and 1991 uprising in Sulaymaniyah

The revolts in Shia-dominated southern Iraq involved demoralized Iraqi Army troops and anti-government Shia groups, in particular the Islamic Dawa Party and Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Another wave of insurgency broke out shortly afterwards in the Kurdish populated northern Iraq; unlike the spontaneous rebellion in the South, the uprising in the North was organized by two rival Kurdish party-based militias: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were both well planned. The uprising gathered momentum as many of the government's troops switched sides, defecting to the rebels. Iraqi armed forces contained substantial anti-regime elements, being composed largely of Shia conscripts. In the north, the defection of the government-recruited Kurdish home guard militia, known as Jash, gave considerable force to the revolution.

The turmoil began in Basra on March 1, 1991, one day after the Gulf War ceasefire, when a T-72 tank gunner, returning home after Iraq's defeat in Kuwait, fired a shell into an enormous portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging over the city's main square, and the other soldiers applauded. The news of this event and Bush's radio broadcasts encouraged the Iraqis to revolt against the regime in the other cities. In Najaf, a demonstration near the city's great Imam Ali Mosque became a gun battle between army deserters and Saddam's security forces; the rebels seized the shrine as Ba'ath Party officials fled the city or were killed and prisoners were freed from jails. The uprising spread within days to all of the largest Shia cities of southern Iraq: Amarah, Diwaniya, Hilla, Karbala, Kut, Nasiriyah and Samawah. Smaller cities were swept up in the revolution as well, and there was also an unrest in the vast slum of Sadr City (then called Saddam City) in the capital Baghdad.

The rebellion in the north (Iraqi Kurdistan) erupted on March 4 in the town of Rania. Within 10 days, the rebels controlled every city in the north except of Kirkuk (which fell to them on March 20) and Mosul. In Sulaymaniyah, the rebels besieged and captured the regional headquarters of the dreaded Mukhabarat and took a bloody revenge, killing several hundred of captured Ba'athist officials and security officers without a trial; years later, the building, known as Amna Suraka ("Red Security" in Kurdish), became a museum to the crimes of Saddam's regime. The rebels also captured enormous quantities of the government documents related to the notorious Al-Anfal Campaign in which the government forces had systematically killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and members of other ethnic minorities three years earlier in 1988; some 14 tons of these documents were obtained by Human Rights Watch and sent to the United States.

At the height of the revolution, the government lost effective control over 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. On March 7, in an effort to quiet the uprisings, Saddam Hussein offered the Shia and Kurds shares in the central government in exchange for loyalty, but both groups rejected the proposal. However, the outgunned rebels had little heavy weapons and few surface-to-air missiles, which made them almost defenseless against helicopter gunships and indiscriminate artillery barrages when the Ba'athists responded to the uprisings with crushing force. According to Human Rights Watch:

In their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of anyone who opposes them whether a rebel or a civilian by firing indiscriminately into the opposing areas; executing them on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them with or without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack those who try to flee the cities.

In the south, Saddam's forces quelled all but scattered resistance by the end of March. On March 29, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim conceded that Shia rebel forces have withdrawn from the cities and that fighting is limited to rural areas. The Kurdish uprising in the north of the country collapsed even more quickly than it had begun. After ousting the Peshmerga (Kurdish rebel fighters) from Kirkuk on March 29, the government tanks rolled into Dahuk and Irbil on March 30, Zakho on April 1, and Sulaymaniyah, the last important town held by the rebels, over the next two days. The advance of government forces was halted at Kore, a narrow valley near the ruins of Qaladiza on the Iranian border, where a successful defense was held by the Kurds led by Massoud Barzani. According to the United States Department of State and the Foreign Affairs group of the Parliament of Australia, Iranian rebel organization People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), sheltered in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, assisted the Iraqi Republican Guard in brutally suppressing the uprisings. Maryam Rajavi has been reported by former PMOI members as having said, "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."

The death toll was high throughout the country. The rebels killed Ba'athist officials in many southern cities. In response, thousands of unarmed civilians were killed by indiscriminate fire from loyalist tanks, artillery and helicopters. Later, when security forces entered the cities, often using women and children as human shields, Saddam's loyalists detained and summarily executed or "disappeared" thousands of people at random in a policy of collective responsibility. Suspects were tortured, raped and burned alive. The government forces used napalm bombs and were several unconfirmed reports of chemical warfare attacks, including of nerve gas being used during the assault on Basra (following an investigation, the UN found that there is no evidence that Iraq used chemical weapons to repress the uprisings, but not rule out the possibility that Iraq could have used phosgene gas which would not have been detectable after the attack). On April 5, the government announced "the complete crushing of acts of sedition, sabotage and rioting in all towns of Iraq." On that same day, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 688 condemning the Iraqi government's oppression of the Kurds and requiring Iraq to respect the human rights of its citizens.

Aftermath

In March and early April, nearly two million Iraqis, 1.5 million of them Kurds, escaped from strife-torn cities to the mountains along the northern borders, into the southern marshes, and into Turkey and Iran. By April 6, the UNCHR estimated that about 750,000 Iraqi Kurds had fled to Iran and 280,000 to Turkey, with 300,000 more gathered at the Turkish border. Their exodus was sudden and chaotic, with thousands of desperate refugees fleeing on foot, on donkeys, or crammed onto open-backed trucks and tractors. Many were gunned down by Republic Guard helicopters, which deliberately strafed columns of fleeing civilians in a number of incidents in both the north and south. Others were maimed when they stepped on land mines planted by Iraqi troops near the eastern border during the war with Iran. According to the U.S. Department of State and international relief organizations, between 500 and 1,000 Kurds have been dying each day along Iraq's Turkish border. According to some reports, hundreds of refugees were dying each day along the way to Iran as well. Beginning in March until July 1991, the U.S. and some of the Gulf War allies barred Saddam's forces from conducting jet aircraft attacks by establishing the no-fly zone over northern Iraq and provided humanitarian assistance to the Kurds during Operation Provide Comfort. On April 17, U.S. forces began to take control of areas more than 60 miles into Iraq to build camps for Kurdish refugees; the last American soldiers left the northern Iraq on July 15. In Yasilova incident in April, British and Turkish forces confronted each other over the treatment of Kurdish refugees in Turkey.

In southeastern Iraq, thousands of Shia civilians, army deserters and rebels began seeking precarious shelter in remote areas of the Hawizeh Marshes straddling the Iranian border. After the uprising, the Marsh Arabs were singled out for mass reprisals, accompanied by ecologically catastrophic drainage of the Iraqi marshlands and the large-scale and systematic forcible transfer of the local population. The Marsh Arab resistance was led by the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq (completely unrelated to the Hezbollah of Lebanon), which after 2003 became their main political party. On July 10, 1991, the United Nations announced plans to open a humanitarian center at Lake Hammar to care for Shia opposition hiding out in the southern marshlands, but Iraqi forces did not allow UN relief workers into the marshlands or the Shia out. A large scale government offensive against estimated 10,000 Shia fighters and 200,000 displaced persons hiding in the marshes began in March-April 1992, using fixed-wing aircraft; a U.S. Department of State report claimed that Iraq dumped toxic chemicals in the waters in an effort to drive out the Shia. In July 1992, the government has begun trying to drain the marshlands and the government ordered the residents of settlements to evacuate, after which the army burned down their homes there to prevent them from returning. A curfew was also enforced throughout the south and Iraqi government forces began arresting and moving large numbers of Shia out of the south and into detention camps in the central part of the country. At a special meeting of the UN Security Council on August 11, 1992, Britain, France and the United States accused Iraq of conducting a "systematic military campaign" against the marshlands, warning Baghdad to face possible consequences. On August 22, 1992, President Bush announced that the U.S. and allies have established a second no-fly zone for any Iraqi aircraft south of the 32nd parallel to protect Shia dissidents from attacks by the government, as sanctioned by UN Security Council Resolution 688. On March 2, 1993, a UN investigation reported hundreds of executions of Shia from the marshes in the preceding months, asserting that the Iraqi army's behavior in the south is the most "worrying development [in Iraq] in the past year" and adding that following the formation of the no fly zone, the army switched to long-range artillery attacks, followed by ground assaults resulting in "heavy casualties" and widespread destruction of property, with allegations of mass executions. In November 1993, Iran reported that as a result of the drainage of the marshlands, Iraqi Shia can no longer fish or grow rice and that over 60,000 of them have fled to Iran since 1991; Iranian officials appealed to the world to send aid to help the refugees. That same month, UN reported that 40% of the marshlands in the south have been drained, while unconfirmed reports surfaced that the Iraq army has used poisonous gas against Shia villages near the border of Iran. In December 1993, the U.S. Department of State accused Iraq of "indiscriminate military operations in the south, which include the burning of villages and forced relocation of non-combatants." On February 23, 1994, Iraq diverted waters from the Tigris river to Shia areas south and east of the main marshlands, resulting in floods of up to 10 feet of water, in order to render the farmlands there useless and drive the rebels who have been hiding there to flee back to the marshes which ere being drained of water. In March 1994, a team of British scientists estimated that 57% of the marshlands have been drained and that in 10 to 20 years the entire wetland ecosystem in southern Iraq will be gone. In April 1994, the U.S. officials said Iraq is still continuing a military campaign in Iraq's remote marshes.

Area controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga rebel forces after October 1991

In the north, fighting continued until October when an agreement was made for Iraqi withdrawal from parts of Iraq's Kurdish-inhabited region. This led to the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government and creation of a Kurdish Autonomous Republic in three provinces of northern Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers dug-in along the front, backed by tanks and heavy artillery, while the Iraqi government established a blockade of food, fuel and other goods going to the area. The United States Air Force kept enforcing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq; the U.S. forces have also built and maintained several refugee camps there in 1991. The general stalemate was broken during the 1994-1997 Iraqi Kurdish Civil War, when due to the PUK alliance with Iran, the KDP called in Iraqi support and Saddam sent his military into Kurdistan, capturing Arbil and Sulaymaniyah, but his forces retreated after the U.S. intervened by launching air raids over Iraq. Kurds further expanded their area of control after participating in the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, which led to the recognition of Kurdish autonomy by the new Iraqi government.

Many of the people killed were buried in mass graves. Several mass graves containing thousands of bodies have been uncovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, notably in the Shia Arab south and Kurdish north. Of the 200 mass graves the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry had registered in the three years since the American-led invasion, the majority were in the South, including one located south of Baghdad that is believed to hold as many as 10,000 to 15,000 victims. The trial of 15 former aides to Saddam Hussein, including Ali Hassan al-Majid also known as "Chemical Ali", over their alleged role in the 1991 suppression of the Shia and the deaths of 60,000 to 100,000 people, took place in Baghdad in 2007-2008. According to the prosecutor, "The acts committed against the Iraqi people in 1991 by the security forces and by the defendants were among one of the ugliest crimes ever committed against humanity in modern history." Al-Majid had been already sentenced to death in June 2007 for genocide regarding his role in the Operation Anfal; he was also convicted for his role in the events of 1991, given another death sentence, and executed in 2010. The issue was also given much attention during the trial of Saddam Hussein.

U.S. non-intervention controversy

Many Iraqis and American critics of President George H. W. Bush accuse the president and his administration of having encouraged and then abandoned the rebellion after halting UN Coalition forces at Iraq's southern border with Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War. Soon after the uprisings began, fears of a disintegrating Iraq led the Bush Administration to distance itself from the rebels. American military officials downplayed the significance of the revolts and spelled out a policy of non-intervention in Iraq's internal affairs. On March 5, Rear Admiral John Michael McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged "chaotic and spontaneous" uprisings were under way in 13 cities of Iraq, but stated the Pentagon's view that Saddam would prevail because of the rebels' "lack of organization and leadership." On the same day, U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said "it would be very difficult for us to hold the coalition together for any particular course of action dealing with internal Iraqi politics, and I don't think, at this point, our writ extends to trying to move inside Iraq." U.S. Major General Martin Brandtner, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added, "there is no move on the [part of] U.S. forces...to let any weapons slip through [to the rebels], or to play any role whatsoever in fomenting or assisting any side." Consequently, U.S. forces still in Iraq, stationed a few miles from Basra, Nasiriyah and Samawah, did nothing to help them when they and random civilians were being killed in the reported "brutal" attacks by Saddam's loyalists. The U.S. Department of State spokesman Richard Boucher said on March 6, "We don't think that outside powers should be interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." The Bush Administration accused Iran of sending arms to the rebels and sternly warned Iraqi authorities on March 7 against the use of chemical weapons during the unrest, but equivocated use of helicopter gunships. The question of helicopters was also ignored in the ceasefire agreement of March 3, which prohibited Iraqi use of fixed-wing aircraft over the country. On April 2, in a carefully crafted statement, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said, "We never, ever, stated as either a military or a political goal of the coalition or the international community the removal of Saddam Hussein." President Bush himself insisted three days later, just as the Iraqi loyalist forces were putting down the last resistance in the cities:

"I made clear from the very beginning that it was not an objective of the coalition or the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein. So I don't think the Shiites in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam In Baghdad, or the Kurds in the north ever felt that the United States would come to their assistance to overthrow this man. [...] I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America, or has any other coalition partner, all of whom to my knowledge agree with me in this position."

In 2011, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, finally apologized for the U.S. abandonment of the 1991 revolution, adding, "At the least, from what we are facing now, this would have been a much better solution than the solution of 2003. The role of Iraq’s people would have been fundamental, not like in 2003." A spokesman for a top Shia religious leader, Ayatollah Basheer Hussain Najafi, commented, "The apology of the U.S. has come too late, and does not change what happened. The apology is not going to bring back to the widows their husbands, and bereaved mothers their sons and brothers that they lost in the massacre that followed the uprising."

In film

The southern rebellions were subjects of the 1999 film Three Kings by David O. Russell and the 2008 film Dawn of the World by Abbas Fahdel, as well as the 1993 Frontline documentary Saddam's Killing Fields by Michael Wood.

See also

• Civil war in Iraq
• History of Iraq under Ba'athist rule
• Human rights in Saddam's Iraq
• Iraqi revolt against the British
• Libyan civil war
• List of modern conflicts in the Middle East
• Syrian civil war

Further reading

• Goldstein, Eric; Whitley, Andrew (1992). Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq and its Aftermath. New York: Middle East Watch (Human Rights Watch). ISBN 1-56432-069-3.