ABSTRACT
The term 'Al-Anfal' means 'the spoils of war'. Anfal consisted of a series of eight military offensives that annihilated Kurdish rural life between February and September 1988. Between 1980 and 1988, prior to Anfal, 1650 villages were destroyed by the Iraqi government. In the light of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK's) neutrality in the Iraq-Iran war, the Iraqi government started negotiations with the PUK at the end of 1984. The PUK was initially established by leftist intellectuals in 1976, after the breakdown of the Mala Mustefa Barzani revolution. The first Anfal attack targeted the Jafati valley where the headquarters of the PUK was based. Peter Galbraith of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had visited the Kurdish region in 1987 and seen the mujama'ts that were made for the Kurds, concluded that what was happening in Iraq was genocide. The Genocide Act, although not adopted by the US government, was a strong enough message to the Iraqi government.
