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Thursday, August 21, 2003

# Posted 9:01 AM by Patrick Belton  

WE'VE GOT CHEMICAL ALI: Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's cousin and the officer who ordered a massive chemical weapons attack against Iraq's Kurds in 1988, has been taken into U.S. custody.

For an idea about what this means, read this Chemical Ali quote from Human Rights Watch's dossier: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F_ck them! the international community, and those who listen to them!... I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days."

And more from that dossier:
Ali Hassan al-Majid, as secretary general of the Northern Bureau of Iraq's Ba'th Party, held authority over all agencies of the state in the Kurdish region from March 1987 to April 1989, including the 1st and 5th Corps of the army, the General Security Directorate, and Military Intelligence. This included the period of the "Anfal" genocide against the region's Kurdish residents. One of his orders, dated June 20, 1987, directed army commanders "to carry out special bombardments [a reference to chemical weapon use]...to kill the largest number of persons present in...prohibited zones."

Named after a Koranic verse, justifying pillage of properties of infidels, the "Anfal" campaign unfolded as the 1980-1988 Iran/Iraq war was winding down. The Anfal campaign, under al-Majid's command, resulted in the murder and "disappearance" of some 100,000 noncombatants, the use of chemical weapons against non-combatants in dozens of locations, and the near-total destruction of family and community assets, including agricultural and other infrastructure, throughout the rural Kurdish areas. Documents captured from Iraqi intelligence services demonstrate that the mass killings, "disappearances," forced displacement, and other crimes were carried out in a coherent and highly centralized manner under al-Majid's direct supervision. Ali Hassan al-Majid was subsequently in charge of Iraq's military occupation of Kuwait and led forces that suppressed the popular uprising in the south of the country in March 1991. All of these campaigns were marked by executions, arbitrary arrests, "disappearances," torture and other atrocities.

According to Iraqi opposition activists and refugee testimony, al-Majid also played a leading role in the campaign against Iraq's Marsh Arab population in the 1990s, a campaign that included the systematic bombardment of villages, torture, "disappearances," forced displacement, which reduced a community that once numbered over a quarter of a million people to less than 40,000 today.
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