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Iraqi Civil War 1991
Date March 1 - April 5, 1991 Location Iraq Result Uprisings crushed by Iraqi military Establishment of Iraqi no-fly zones
Combatants
Republican Guard other loyalist forces People's Mujahedin of Iran	Shi'a rebels: Badr Organization Iraqi Hezbollah Army deserters Kurdish peshmerga: Democratic Party Patriotic Union Jash militia defectors
Commanders
Saddam Hussein Qusay Hussein Ali Hassan al-Majid	Abdul Aziz al-Hakim Nawshirwan Mustafa Massoud Barzani Jalal Talabani

The 1991 uprisings in Iraq were a series of intifada rebellions in Southern and Northern Iraq in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War.

The revolts in the Shia-dominated cities of Basra and Nasiriyah broke out in March 1991, sparked by demoralized Iraqi Army troops returning from Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf War. Another uprising in the Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq broke out shortly thereafter. Unlike the spontaneous rebellion in the South, the uprising in the North was organized by two rival Kurdish militias, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Although they presented a serious threat to his regime, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was able to suppress the rebellions with massive force and maintain power, as the expected intervention by the United States never materialized. The uprisings were eventually crushed by the Iraqi Republican Guard, followed by mass reprisals and intensified forced relocation of Marsh Arabs, including draining of the marshlands. In few weeks tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

Contents 1 U.S. radio broadcasts 2 The uprisings 2.1 South Iraq 2.2 North Iraq 3 Suppression of the uprisings 3.1 Atrocities 4 Aftermath 4.1 Exodus 4.2 Destruction of the Iraqi marshlands 4.3 Kurdish-Iraqi conflict 4.4 Mass graves 5 U.S. non-intervention 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

This remark by George H. W. Bush was heard by Iraqis on the Voice of America on February 15, 1991:

“

There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: And that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations. [1]

”

On the evening of February 24, 1991, several days before the cease fire was signed in Safwan between Iraqi and Coalition military commanders, a radio station called the Voice of Free Iraq based in the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji, funded and run by the American Central Intelligence Agency, broadcast a message to the people of Iraq to rise and overthrow Saddam.^[1] The speaker on the radio was a man named Salah Omar al-Ali, a former member of the Iraqi Baath Party and Revolutionary Command Council. Al-Ali's message urged the Iraqis to overthrow the "criminal tyrant of Iraq":

“

Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honourable sons of the Tigris and Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but put an end to to the dictator and his criminal gang.[2]

”

The radio broadcast encouraged Iraqis to "stage a revolution" and claimed that "[Saddam] will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq."^[3]

The outpouring of popular support for the uprising was largely spontaneous, although some long-term planning had taken place, particularly in the North. The revolt was fueled by a perception that Iraqi security forces were uniquely vulnerable at the time, and by long-smoldering anger at government repression and the devastation wrought by two wars in a decade, the Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq War.

The revolts of March 1991 followed a general pattern. On the day that a city rebelled, masses of unarmed civilians and small contingents of rebels converged in the streets. Shouting anti-regime slogans, they descended on government buildings, especially offices of the security forces. These were then attacked, usually with considerable bloodshed on both sides. Government forces fought back, but then were either killed or captured, or allowed to flee. Once in control, the rebels flung open the regime's prisons and interrogation centers, and seized small caches of weapons.

The turmoil began in Basra on March 1, 1991, one day after the Gulf War cease fire, when a T-72 tank gunner fired a shell into a portrait of Saddam, and soldiers around him applauded jubilantly. [2] In Najaf a demonstration near the city's great shrine became a gun battle between army deserters and Saddam's security forces; the rebels seized the shrine, and Baath Party leaders fled the city or were killed. The uprising spread within days to all of the largest cities of Southern Iraq: Karbala, Hilla, Nasiriyah, Amarah, Samawa, Kut, and Diwaniya; smaller cities were also swept up in the revolt.

Unlike the Kurds, the Shi'a resistance lacked an organized fighting force, although it maintained cells and had carried out armed operations on occasion. The Shi'a opposition has long enjoyed sanctuary and support from the Iranian regime, although Tehran does not appear to have furnished significant material or logistical assistance during the March 1991 uprising.

The rebellion in the North erupted on or about March 4 in the town of Rania, northwest of Sulaymaniyah. Within ten days, the Kurds controlled every city in the North except Kirkuk and Mosul. In Sulaymaniyah, the rebels captured the Mukhabarat headquarters. Inside, they found torture devices smeared with blood and rooms holding the corpses of women and children, victims of Saddam's executioners; in retaliation, the rebels massacred any Baath officials and police officers they could find. Their greatest triumph - the capture of Kirkuk - came on about March 20.

Once under way, the March 1991 uprising gathered momentum as regular soldiers and militiamen switched sides. The army, which is said to have grown from 140,000 in 1977 to around 1 million at the time of the invasion of Kuwait, contained substantial anti-government elements; Shi'a Arabs accounted for 80 percent of the fighting ranks and about 20 percent of the officers. In the North, the defection of much of the government-recruited Kurdish Jash militia, who vastly outnumbered the Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas, gave considerable force to the revolt. Journalists reported that their defection was the fruit of months of planning and psychological warfare by Kurdish rebel leaders.

Once the loyalist troops regrouped and mounted their counteroffensive, only massive foreign assistance or intervention could have saved the ill-equipped and inexperienced rebels. With little more than rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and a few captured tanks and artillery pieces, the Shi'a and Kurdish rebels were almost defenseless against helicopter gunships and indiscriminate artillery barrages. They had few anti-tank weapons and even fewer surface-to-air missiles.

The government of Saddam Hussein responded to the uprisings with crushing force. According to Human Rights Watch:

“

In their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack unarmed civilians as they fled the cities.

”

The Kurdish uprising collapsed even more quickly than it began. After ousting the peshmerga from Kirkuk on March 29, the Iraqi army rolled into Dahuk and Irbil on March 30, Zakho on April 1, and Sulaymaniyah, the last important town held by the rebels, over the next two days.

In the South, the government had quelled all but scattered resistance by the end of March. On April 5, 1991, Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Command Council announced "the complete crushing of acts of sedition, sabotage, and rioting in all towns of Iraq."

The civilian toll was high throughout the country. Thousands of unarmed civilians were killed by indiscriminate fire from loyalist tanks, artillery guns and helicopters; and later, when security forces rolled into a city and executed people at random.

The violence was heaviest in the South, where a smaller portion of the local population had fled than in Kurdish areas, owing partly to the danger of escaping through the South's flat, exposed terrain. Those who remained in the South were at the mercy of advancing government troops, who went through neighborhoods, summarily executing hundreds of young men and rounding up thousands of others.

Some civilians were tied to tanks and used as human shields; Iraqi helicopters dropped a variety of ordnance on civilians, including napalm and white phosphorus bombs, and chemical agents. In Karbala, some of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines were destroyed; others were used as centers for murder, torture and rape. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered.

The homes of suspected rebels were destroyed while the suspects were executed in the streets. Many Shi'a institutions were destroyed or badly damaged during the suppression of the uprising, or subsequently demolished. Hundreds of clerics and their aides and students were arrested and forcibly disappeared after the uprisings, and religious activities at the remaining institutions have been curtailed by the state.

The rebels also committed gross abuses during the uprising, summarily executing suspected members of the security forces, including many who were in custody.

Just as the experience of years of repression fed the fury of the uprising, it fueled the terrified exodus as soon as the rebellion began to falter. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees called the exodus the largest in its 40–year history. During March and early April, nearly two million of Iraqis escaped from strife-torn cities to the mountains along the northern borders, into the Southern marshes, and into Turkey and Iran. Their exodus was sudden and chaotic, with thousands fleeing on foot, on donkeys, or crammed onto open-backed trucks and tractors.

Thousands, many of them children, are thought to have died or suffered injury along the way, primarily from adverse weather, unhygienic conditions and insufficient food and medical care. Some were killed by army helicopters, which deliberately strafed columns of fleeing civilians in a number of incidents in both the North and South. Others were injured when they stepped on land mines planted by Iraqi troops near the eastern border during the war with Iran. The environmental organization Greenpeace has estimated that the death rate among Kurdish and Shi'a refugees and displaced persons averaged 1,000 daily during April, May and June 1991. At one point in 1991, an estimated 2,000 Kurds were dying every day.

In South-eastern Iraq, thousands of Shi'a civilians, army deserters and rebels have sought precarious shelter in remote areas of the marshes that straddle the Iranian border. The Marsh Arabs have been singled out for a mass reprisals, accompanied by ecologically catastrophic drainage of the Iraqi marshlands and the large-scale and systematic forcible transfer of the local population. In 1991, an estimated 250,000 Marsh Arabs lived in the region; today only 20,000 to 40,000 remain. Human Rights Watch has referred to the attacks on the Marsh Arabs as crimes against humanity. [3]

Many observers believe that attacks by Baghdad on the Kurdish-held zone have been restrained to some extent by Saddam's fear that they would provoke the intervention of Allied forces. A long positional war followed, and estimated 100,000 to 150,000 soldiers remained along the front, backed by tanks and heavy artillery. Iraqi government established a blockade of food, fuel and other goods going to the rebel-controlled zone in the North, which targets one segment of the Iraqi populace -- predominantly Kurds -- for punishment. The peshmerga have captured large numbers of Iraqi soldiers during the clashes that have occurred since the uprising, including 4,040 reported captured between October and December 1991.

When the Shia revolt was crushed as many as 30,000 people were killed, many of them buried in mass graves. Several mass graves containing thousands of bodies have been uncovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, notably in the Shia south and Kurdish north. [4]

Of the 200 mass graves the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry has registered in the three years since the American-led invasion, the majority are in the south. One, at Mahawil, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, is believed to hold as many as 10,000 to 15,000 victims. The Ministry estimates at least 100,000 Shias, and possibly 180,000, died in the 1991 repression. [5]

The Iraqi survivors and American critics of the President George H. W. Bush say that the president encouraged the rebellion after halting American troops at Iraq's southern border with Kuwait at the end of the Persian Gulf war. [6] Soon after the uprising began, fears of a disintegrating Iraq led the Administration to distance itself from the insurgents.

Officials downplayed the significance of the revolts and spelled out a policy of non-intervention in Iraq's internal affairs. On March 5, 1991, Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that "chaotic and spontaneous" uprisings were under way in thirteen Iraqi cities, but stated the Pentagon's view that Saddam would prevail because of the rebels' "lack of organization and leadership."

On the same day, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said that "it would be very difficult for us to hold the coalition together for any particular course of action dealing with internal Iraqi politics, and I don't think, at this point, our writ extends to trying to move inside Iraq." Marine Major General Martin Brandtner, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added the same day, "There is no move on the [part of] U.S. forces...to let any weapons slip through [to the rebels], or to play any role whatsoever in fomenting or assisting any side."

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher explained on March 6: "We don't think that outside powers should be interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."

Consequently, U.S. occupation forces who were stationed only a few miles from Nasiriyah, Samawa and Basra did nothing to help the rebels who rose up in these cities. Soldiers watched helplessly as Iraqi troops devastated the cities, and wounded civilians fled on foot to U.S. bases nearby telling of the atrocities that were taking place.

Thomas Isom, a U.S. Army officer, described what he saw from his post at the edge of Samawa:

“

They fired at the hospital twice. We were watching them shell the train station and other small houses. This was simply designed to kill civilians or terrorize them, which it did. It did not have a military purpose, just artillery impacts on large concentrations of civilians.

”

The Administration did sternly warn Iraqi authorities on March 7 against the use of chemical weapons during the unrest, but equivocated about Iraq's use of helicopter gunships against civilians. President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker stated in mid-March that helicopter gunships should not be used, but other Administration officials gave conflicting signals. The question of helicopters was ignored in the March 3 cease-fire agreement, which clearly prohibited Iraq's use of fixed-wing aircraft. In the end, the aircraft were employed with impunity to attack rebels and civilians alike, and proved instrumental in quelling the insurrection.

The decision to permit Iraq to use helicopters in suppressing the revolt has been the subject of lively debate. Some believe that the rebels would have triumphed had helicopters been included in the Allies' cease-fire ban on flights by Iraqi aircraft. Others believe that a ban on helicopters would have merely prolonged the bloodshed without altering the outcome.

In a carefully crafted statement, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said on April 2 that the Bush Administration had "never, ever stated as either a military or a political goal...the removal of Saddam Hussein." President Bush insisted three days later,

“

I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America. I don't think the Shias in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad or the Kurds in the north, ever felt that the United States would come to their assistance to overthrow this man. (...) I made clear from the very beginning that it was not an objective of the coalition or the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

”

The contradictions of U.S. policy may have reflected a lack of sufficient concern for the consequences of the call to rebel. It may have been due to miscalculation; or it may be attributable to a preoccupation with political considerations unrelated to the well-being of the residents of Iraq. Whatever the reasons, the George H. W. Bush Administration contributed to the making of a tragedy that left tens of thousands of civilians massacred by Saddam's troops and nearly two million forced to flee their homes.

George H. W. Bush himself has said that what happened to the Shias was one of the deepest regrets of his presidency.^{[citation needed]}

• Al-Anfal Campaign
• Human rights in Saddam's Iraq
• Iraqi no-fly zones
• Three Kings (film)
• Trial of Saddam Hussein
• Yasilova incident

• Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq And Its Aftermath by Human Rights Watch
• Supression of the 1991 Uprising by PBS Frontline
• The Iraqi Government Assault on the Marsh Arabs by Human Rights Watch