In March and early April, nearly two million Iraqis, 1.5 million of them Kurds,
[34] escaped from strife-torn cities to the mountains along the northern borders, into the southern marshes, and to Turkey and Iran. By April 6, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) estimated that about 750,000 Iraqi Kurds had fled to Iran and 280,000 to Turkey, with 300,000 more gathered at the Turkish border.
[21] Their exodus was sudden and chaotic with thousands of desperate refugees fleeing on foot, on donkeys, or crammed onto open-backed trucks and tractors. Many were gunned down by Republican Guard helicopters, which deliberately strafed columns of fleeing civilians in a number of incidents in both the north and south.
[15] Numerous refugees were also killed or maimed by stepping on land mines planted by Iraqi troops near the eastern border during
the war with Iran. According to the U.S. Department of State and international relief organizations, between 500 and 1,000 Kurds died each day along Iraq's Turkish border.
[21] According to some reports, up to hundreds of refugees died each day along the way to Iran as well.
[35]
Kurdish children in a refugee camp built during the U.S. and coalition
Operation Provide Comfort play on a
ZPU gun which was abandoned by Iraqi forces during
Operation Desert Storm, 1 May 1991
Beginning in March 1991, the U.S. and some of the Gulf War allies barred Saddam's forces from conducting jet aircraft attacks by establishing the
no-fly zone over northern Iraq and provided humanitarian assistance to the Kurds. On April 17, U.S. forces began to take control of areas more than 60 miles into Iraq to build camps for Kurdish refugees; the last American soldiers left northern Iraq on July 15.
[21] In the
Yeşilova incident in April, British and Turkish forces confronted each other over the treatment of
Kurdish refugees in Turkey. Many Shia refugees fled to Syria, where thousands of them settled in the town of
Sayyidah Zaynab.
[36]
Resistance and reprisals in the south[edit]
In southeastern Iraq, thousands of civilians, army deserters, and rebels began seeking precarious shelter in remote areas of the
Hawizeh Marshes straddling the Iranian border. After the uprising, the
Marsh Arabs were singled out for mass reprisals,
[37] accompanied by
ecologically catastrophic drainage of the
Iraqi marshlands and the large-scale and systematic
forcible transfer of the local population. The Marsh Arab resistance was led by the
Hezbollah Movement in Iraq (completely unrelated to the
Hezbollah of Lebanon), which after 2003 became the Marsh Arabs' main political party. On July 10, 1991, the United Nations announced plans to open a humanitarian center at
Lake Hammar to care for those hiding out in the southern marshlands, but Iraqi forces did not allow UN relief workers into the marshlands or the people out. A large scale government offensive attack against the refugees estimated 10,000 fighters and 200,000 displaced persons hiding in the marshes began in March–April 1992, using fixed-wing aircraft; a U.S. Department of State report claimed that Iraq dumped toxic chemicals in the waters in an effort to drive out the opposition. In July 1992, the government began trying to drain the marshlands and ordered the residents of settlements to evacuate, after which the army burned down their homes there to prevent them from returning. A
curfew was also enforced throughout the south, and government forces began arresting and moving large numbers of Iraqis into detention camps in the central part of the country.
[21]
U.S.
3rd Infantry soldiers wait to be deployed in support of
Operation Southern Watch, the U.S. and coalition enforcement of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq
At a special meeting of the UN Security Council on August 11, 1992, Britain, France, and the United States accused Iraq of conducting a "systematic military campaign" against the marshlands, warning that Baghdad could face possible consequences. On August 22, 1992, President Bush announced that the U.S. and its allies had established a
second no-fly zone for any Iraqi aircraft south of the
32nd parallel to protect dissidents from attacks by the government, as sanctioned by UN Security Council Resolution 688.
In March 1993, a UN investigation reported hundreds of executions of Iraqis from the marshes in the preceding months, asserting that the Iraqi army's behavior in the south is the most "worrying development [in Iraq] in the past year" and added that following the formation of the no-fly zone, the army switched to long-range artillery attacks, followed by ground assaults resulting in "heavy casualties" and widespread destruction of property, along with allegations of mass executions. In November 1993, Iran reported that as a result of the drainage of the marshlands, marsh Iraqis could no longer fish or grow rice and that over 60,000 had fled to Iran since 1991; Iranian officials appealed to the world to send aid to help the refugees. That same month, the UN reported that 40% of the marshlands in the south were drained, while unconfirmed reports surfaced that the Iraq army had used poisonous gas against villages near the border of Iran. In December 1993, the U.S. Department of State accused Iraq of "indiscriminate military operations in the south, which include the burning of villages and forced relocation of non-combatants." On February 23, 1994, Iraq diverted waters from the Tigris river to areas south and east of the main marshlands, resulting in floods of up to 10 feet of water, in order to render the farmlands there useless and drive the rebels who have been hiding there to flee back to the marshes which were being drained of water. In March 1994, a team of British scientists estimated that 57% of the marshlands have been drained and that in 10 to 20 years the entire wetland ecosystem in southern Iraq will be gone. In April 1994, the U.S. officials said Iraq was continuing a military campaign in Iraq's remote marshes.
[21]
Iraq saw
further unrest in its Shia dominated provinces in early 1999 following the killing of Grand Ayatollah
Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr by the government. Like the 1991 uprisings, the 1999 uprising was violently suppressed.
Kurdish sovereign enclave[edit]
Area controlled by Kurds after the
Iraqi Kurdish Civil War (area controlled after October 1991 is a combination of both KDP and PUK areas, controlled by Kurdish
Peshmerga rebel forces
In the north, fighting continued until October when an agreement was made for Iraqi withdrawal from parts of Iraq's Kurdish-inhabited region. This led to the establishment of the
Kurdistan Regional Government and creation of a Kurdish Autonomous Republic in three provinces of northern Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers dug-in along the front, backed by tanks and heavy artillery, while the Iraqi government established a blockade of food, fuel, and other goods to the area. The
U.S. Air Force continued to enforce a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, and the U.S. military built and maintained several refugee camps in 1991.
This general stalemate was broken during the 1994–1997
Iraqi Kurdish Civil War, when due to the PUK alliance with Iran, the KDP called in Iraqi support and Saddam sent his military into Kurdistan, capturing
Arbil and Sulaymaniyah. Iraqi government forces retreated after the U.S. intervened by launching
missile strikes on southern Iraq in 1996. On January 1, 1997, the U.S. and its allies launched
Operation Northern Watchto continue enforcing the no-fly zone in the north the day after Operation Provide Comfort was over. Kurds further expanded their area of control after participating in the U.S.-led
2003 invasion of Iraq, which led to the recognition of Kurdish autonomy by the new Iraqi government.