Destructive Coordination, Anfal and Islamic Political Capitalism A New Reading of Contemporary Iran - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Mehrdad Vahabi
خلاصه: xi The term Anfal in the title of this book is not familiar for the general readership and its meaning cannot be easily understood by referring to English dictionaries. What is Anfal? If you launch an internet search on Anfal, you will encounter two main strands of literature. The first one relates to the Kurdish genocide by Saddam’s regime in the late eighties, and the second is about the eight Surah (chapter) of the Koran known as ‘Al-Anfal’. As Kurdistan regional government has aptly underlined, in Kurdish society, the word Anfal has come to represent the entire genocide over decades. Anfal was the term used by Saddam Hossein to describe a series of eight military campaigns conducted by the Iraqi government against rural Kurdish communities in Iraq, which lasted from February 23 to September 6, 1988.1 The campaign took its name from Surah al-Anfal in the Koran. Al-Anfal literally means the spoils of war (bounties) and was used to describe the military campaign of extermination and looting commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin of Saddam Hossein. As President of Iraq, Saddam Hossein frequently used religious language when describing the actions of his Ba’athist regime (see Johns, 2006), portraying Arabs as true defenders of Islam and Kurds as infidels.2