1991 Uprisings in Iraq - Revolution

Revolution

Further information: 1991 uprising in Karbala and 1991 uprising in Sulaymaniyah

The revolts in Shia-dominated southern Iraq involved demoralized Iraqi Army troops and anti-regime Shia groups, in particular the Islamic Dawa Party and Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Another wave of insurgency broke out shortly afterwards in the Kurdish populated northern Iraq; unlike the spontaneous rebellion in the South, the uprising in the North was organized by two rival Kurdish party-based militias: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were both well planned. The uprising gathered momentum as many of the government's troops switched sides, defecting to the rebels. Iraqi armed forces contained substantial anti-regime elements, being composed largely of Shia conscripts. In the north, the defection of the government-recruited Kurdish home guard militia, known as Jash, gave considerable force to the revolution.

The turmoil first began in in the Shia towns of Abu Al-Khaseeb and Az Zubayr, south of Basra, at the end of February. On March 1, 1991, one day after the Gulf War ceasefire, a T-72 tank gunner, returning home after Iraq's defeat in Kuwait, fired a shell into a gigantic portrait of Saddam Hussein towring over Basra's main square and other soldiers applauded. The revolt in Basra was led at first by Muhammad Ibrahim Wali, an Iraqi army officer who gathered a force of military vehicles to attack the government buildings and prisons in the city; he was backed by a majority of the population. The uprising in Basra was entirely spontaneous and disorganised. The news of this event and Bush's radio broadcasts encouraged the Iraqis to revolt against the regime in the other towns and cities. In Najaf, a demonstration near the city's great Imam Ali Mosque became a gun battle between army deserters and Saddam's security forces; the rebels seized the shrine as Ba'ath Party officials fled the city or were killed and prisoners were freed from jails. The uprising spread within days to all of the largest Shia cities of southern Iraq: Amarah, Diwaniya, Hilla, Karbala, Kut, Nasiriyah and Samawah. Smaller cities were swept up in the revolution as well. Many exiled Iraqi dissidents, including thousands of Iranian-based Badr Brigades militants of SCIRI, crossed the borders and returned home, joing the rebellion. SCIRI concentrated their efforts on the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, alienating many people who did not subscribe to their fringe Shia Islamist agenda and pro-Iranian slogans, for which they were later criticized by the Dawa Party. Ranks of the rebels through the region included mutinous Sunni members of the military, leftists such as Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) factions, anti-Saddam Arab nationalists and even disaffected Ba'athists. Disastrously for them, all of the revolutionary forces had no common political or military program, no integrated leadership, and there was very little coordination between them.

The rebellion in the north (Iraqi Kurdistan) erupted on March 4 in the town of Rania. Within 10 days, the Kurdish nationalist, Islamist and communist (from the ICP and the Communist Party of Kurdistan; the Kurdistan Workers' Party was also active to some extent) peshmerga rebels, joined by tens of thousands of defecting militiamen and more than 50,000 army deserters, controlled every city in the north except of Kirkuk (which eventually fell to them on March 20) and Mosul. Whole units surrendered without much or any resistance, including the entire 24th Division which did not fire a single bullet. In Sulaymaniyah, the rebels besieged and captured the regional headquarters of the dreaded Mukhabarat secret police and took a bloody revenge, killing several hundred of captured Ba'athist officials and security officers without a trial (reportedly, over 900 of them were killed in the fighting or executed); years later, the building, known as Amna Suraka ("Red Security" in Kurdish), became a museum to the crimes of Saddam's regime. The rebels also captured enormous quantities of the government documents related to the notorious Al-Anfal Campaign in which the government forces had systematically killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and members of other ethnic minorities three years earlier in 1988; some 14 tons of these documents were obtained by Human Rights Watch and sent to the United States. Unlike in the south, the Kurdish rebellion was preceded by demonstrations held under clear political slogans: democracy for Iraq and autonomy for Kurdistan. After Mosul was taken, Jalal Talabani proposed to march on the capital Baghdad.

At the height of the revolution, the government lost effective control over 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, people remained largely passive, as the Dawa Party, Communist Party and the pro-Syrian Ba'ath splinter party all have failed to build underground resistance structures there prior to the revolution. In effect, there was only a limited unrest in the vast Shia slum of Saddam City, while the rest of the capital remained calm. On March 7, in an effort to quiet the uprisings, Saddam Hussein offered the Shia and Kurd leaders shares in the central government in exchange for loyalty, but the opposition groups rejected the proposal. However, the outgunned rebels had little heavy weapons and few surface-to-air missiles, which made them almost defenseless against helicopter gunships and indiscriminate artillery barrages when the Ba'athists responded to the uprisings with crushing force. According to Human Rights Watch:

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In their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of anyone who opposes them whether a rebel or a civilian by firing indiscriminately into the opposing areas; executing them on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them with or without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack those who try to flee the cities.

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In the south, Saddam's forces quelled all but scattered resistance by the end of March. On March 29, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim conceded that Shia rebel forces have withdrawn from the cities and that fighting is limited to rural areas. The Kurdish uprising in the north of the country collapsed even more quickly than it had begun. After ousting the peshmerga from Kirkuk on March 29, the government tanks 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. The advance of government forces was halted at Kore, a narrow valley near the ruins of Qaladiza on the Iranian border, where a successful defense was held by the Kurds led by Massoud Barzani. According to the United States Department of State and the Foreign Affairs group of the Parliament of Australia, Iranian rebel organization People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), sheltered in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, assisted the Republican Guard in brutally suppressing the uprisings. Maryam Rajavi has been reported by former PMOI members as having said, "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."

The death toll was high throughout the country. The rebels killed Ba'athist officials in many southern cities. In response, thousands of unarmed civilians were killed by indiscriminate fire from loyalist tanks, artillery and helicopters, and many historical and religious structures in the south were deliberately targeted on the orders from Saddam Hussein. Later, when security forces entered the cities, often using women and children as human shields, Saddam's loyalists detained and summarily executed or "disappeared" thousands of people at random in a policy of collective responsibility. Many suspects were tortured, raped and burned alive. The government forces used napalm bombs and there were several unconfirmed reports of chemical warfare attacks, including of nerve gas being used during the assault on Basra (following an investigation, the UN found that there is no evidence that Iraq used chemical weapons to repress the uprisings, but did not rule out the possibility that Iraq could have used phosgene gas which would not have been detectable after the attack). On April 5, the government announced "the complete crushing of acts of sedition, sabotage and rioting in all towns of Iraq." On that same day, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 688 condemning the Iraqi government's oppression of the Kurds and requiring Iraq to respect the human rights of its citizens.