Saddam Hussein's regime

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On 16 March 1988 Iraqi aircraft dropped chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve agents, on the Kurdish town of Halabja near the Iranian border. About 5,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed.

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Source A suggests that Saddam was to blame because it shows him relaxing by the pool of a gleaming new palace while thin mothers and children queue outside an empty shop. During the 1990s Saddam did build many new palaces while ordinary Iraqis suffered under sanctions, which suggests that he chose to spend money on himself rather than his people. The workmen carrying 'UN Oil-for-Food' sacks into the palace suggest that the regime diverted aid meant for the people; a later UN inquiry found that the regime made about 1.8 billion dollars from kickbacks in the programme. The sign 'Closed - blame the UN' mocks Saddam's propaganda, which blamed all Iraq's suffering on the UN. My knowledge supports this view: Saddam rejected UN offers to let Iraq sell oil for food in 1991 and only accepted the programme in 1996, and in the Kurdish north, where the UN distributed the aid, child deaths fell while they rose in areas Saddam controlled. The cartoon was published in an American newspaper, reflecting the US view at a time when sanctions were being widely criticised.

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Source B is very useful for studying how Saddam's regime treated the Kurds, because it describes the Anfal campaign in detail: the destruction of thousands of villages, the use of chemical weapons, mass deportations and the execution of men and boys, with an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people killed. This matches my knowledge of the campaign of 1988, led by Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, and of the chemical attack on Halabja, which killed about 5,000 people. Its provenance makes it particularly strong. Human Rights Watch is an independent organisation, and the report was written after careful research, using interviews with hundreds of survivors and the regime's own documents, captured by Kurdish fighters in 1991, which recorded what had been done. However, its purpose was to prove that the Anfal was genocide and to press for international action, so it concentrates on the crimes, and its casualty figures are estimates; Kurdish groups believe that even more people died.

Source C is useful in a completely different way. As a broadcast on Iraqi state radio, controlled by the regime, it is not reliable evidence of what actually happened: it denies the use of chemical weapons, which we know were used at Halabja and elsewhere, and it describes deportation as moving people to 'modern new towns'. In reality these were 'collective towns' where Kurds who survived were kept under the watch of the army. However, this makes it valuable evidence of the regime's propaganda. It shows how Saddam justified the campaign, calling the Kurds 'traitors' and 'agents of Iran', which reflects the fact that the Kurdish parties had fought alongside Iran in the war. It also shows how the regime tried to hide its crimes from its own people and the world, which worked for a time, because Western governments, which were backing Iraq against Iran, did little.

Overall, Source B is far more useful for discovering what the regime actually did to the Kurds, because it is based on careful research and the regime's own documents. Source C is useful for understanding the regime's motives and how it disguised its actions. Used together, they show both the reality of the Anfal and the cover-up that surrounded it.

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Religious differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims were an important source of division in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and they became more important after 1991. However, I do not think they were the main cause of division. The most important division was between Saddam's narrow ruling circle and everyone else, and ethnic and political divisions were at least as significant as religious ones.

Religious division was certainly real. The Shia made up about 60 per cent of the population, yet power was held mainly by Sunni Arabs, who were only about 20 per cent. Sunni Arabs had dominated Iraq since Ottoman and British times, and under Saddam they controlled the officer corps, the Republican Guard and the security services. After Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979, Shia religious parties such as Dawa, inspired by Iran, became the regime's most dangerous opponents. In 1980 Dawa membership was made punishable by death and the cleric Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr was executed. After the Shia uprising of 1991 was crushed, Shia pilgrimages were restricted and in 1999 Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadiq al-Sadr was assassinated. Saddam's Faith Campaign, launched in 1993, also made religion more central to politics.

However, the bitter conflict between the regime and the Kurds was not religious at all. The Kurds, about 15 to 20 per cent of the population, are mostly Sunni Muslims, like Saddam's ruling group. Their struggle was about national identity: they were a different ethnic group with their own language who wanted self-rule. The worst atrocities of Saddam's rule, the Anfal campaign and the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988, were carried out against fellow Sunni Muslims, which shows that ethnic division could be even more deadly than religious division.

Political division was also crucial. The Ba'ath Party was secular, and many of its ordinary members were Shia. During the Iran-Iraq war, most Shia soldiers fought loyally for Iraq against Shia Iran, which shows that Arab and Iraqi identity often mattered more than religion. Saddam's terror was aimed at anyone who threatened him, whatever their religion. In 1979 he purged Sunni rivals in the Ba'ath leadership, and army officers suspected of disloyalty were executed. Even his deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian.

Most importantly, Saddam relied above all on his own family and tribe from around Tikrit, not on Sunnis in general. His sons, cousins and fellow tribesmen held the most sensitive posts. Many Sunni Arabs outside this circle were also excluded and watched. There were regional and economic divisions too: the Shia south and the Baghdad slum known as 'Saddam City' were poor and neglected compared with the favoured towns of the Sunni centre.

In conclusion, religious differences were a significant cause of division, especially between the regime and the Shia majority after 1991. But they were not the main cause. The deepest division was between Saddam's clan-based regime and all those outside it, and the ethnic division with the Kurds produced the worst violence of all. Religious division was intertwined with ethnic, political and economic divisions, which is why Iraq fell apart along all these lines after Saddam's fall in 2003.