Mr. Hussein sat stone-faced in a courtroom in the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, listening as prosecutors gave a detailed account of how Mr. Hussein and six co-defendants embarked on an eight-stage military campaign in 1988 to eliminate the Kurds from swaths of their mountainous homeland in northern Iraq. Prosecutors said the campaign, called Anfal, killed at least 50,000 Kurds and resulted in the destruction of 2,000 villages.
Recently, Time magazine published an interview with a senior leader in charge of the forces that doused Halabja and other villages with chemicals in 1988 during the Anfal campaign. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri also claims that he and other Saddam loyalists are behind much of the insurgency. During the first Gulf War, he warned Kurds to stay out of the fight or face another chemical attack: “If you have forgotten Halabja, we are ready to repeat the operation.” Saddam and his senior Baathist leadership targeted Kurdish villages with a mixture of mustard gas and nerve agent. Here’s a reminder of the result:
(source: http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil) And here’s what the Iraq Survey Group concluded on Saddam’s wmd production capability:
[T]here is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD production after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserved capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as sanctions were lifted.
The ISG continued:
Based on an investigation of facilities, materials, and production outputs, ISG also judges that Iraq had a break-out capability to produce large quantities of sulfur mustard CW agent, but not nerve agents…. Iraq retained the necessary basic chemicals to produce sulfur mustard on a large-scale, but probably did not have key precursors for nerve agent production. With the importation of key phosphorus based precursors, Iraq could have produced limited quantities of nerve agent as well. Mustard production could have started within days if the necessary precursor chemicals were co-located in a suitable production facility; otherwise production could have started within weeks. Nerve agent production would have taken much longer.
After losing power, I’m sure al-Douri would like to “repeat the operation” in Halabja if given the opportunity.
