From the late 1960s, and especially under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government pursued a systematic 'Arabization' policy in the oil-rich Kirkuk region, expelling Kurdish, Turkmen, and Assyrian families and resettling Arab families from central and southern Iraq in their place. This policy culminated in the 1986–1989 Anfal campaign, a military operation against Kurdish rural areas that destroyed an estimated 1,200 or more villages, forcibly relocated survivors to guarded camps, and killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people according to Human Rights Watch, including roughly 5,000 killed in the March 1988 chemical attack on Halabja. Iraqi, Kurdish, and international bodies have variously recognized these events as genocide against the Kurds. The demographic status of Kirkuk, contested between Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab communities, remains legally unresolved under Article 140 of Iraq's post-2003 constitution.
The Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein's Baath Party carried out the Anfal campaign (1986–1989, most intensely in 1988) against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq, including chemical attacks such as the 1988 Halabja massacre, alongside a decades-long 'Arabization' policy expelling Kurdish, Turkmen, and Assyrian residents from the Kirkuk area and replacing them with Arab settlers.
Iraq's 1987 census recorded a national population of about 16.3 million, with Kurds generally put at 20-23 per cent, or roughly 3.5-3.7 million. Both the census and the ethnic share are contested: the 1977 and 1987 censuses required residents of Kirkuk and other disputed districts to register as Arab or Kurd, and Arabization made the ethnic count an instrument of policy rather than a neutral record.
Human Rights Watch's 1993 investigation 'Genocide in Iraq' concluded that by the most conservative estimate 50,000 rural Kurds died during Anfal, adding that possibly twice that number is more accurate; the Kurdistan Regional Government and Kurdish organisations have long used 182,000, a figure derived from wartime population and village-destruction records and disputed by some Iraqi Arab nationalist accounts as inflated. The Halabja chemical attack of March 1988 alone killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people according to HRW. The range therefore runs from HRW's deliberately conservative floor to the Kurdish authorities' ceiling.
Documented by Human Rights Watch's 'Genocide in Iraq' (1993) — mass summary executions and the mass disappearance of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the warehousing of women, children and the elderly in camps where many died of malnutrition and disease, and the wholesale destruction of some 2,000 villages — and confirmed by the Iraqi High Tribunal in the 2007 Anfal judgment.
Iraq, Iran