The Kurdish Files of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Regime: Struggle for Reconciliation in Iraq

The U.S.-led wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 resulted in the seizure of vast quantities of internal state security documents from the former regime of Saddam Hussein. Following Iraq’s 1991 defeat in Kuwait, the Kurds staged a popular uprising against Saddam’s dictatorial rule, capturing tons of secret police files that detailed vast humanitarian crimes, including corroborating evidence of the “al-Anfāl” (referring to Quran: “The Spoils of War”) genocide, against the Kurds in the late 1980s. These files were transferred to the U.S. where they were digitized and analyzed for a possible genocide case against the Saddam regime. Another estimated 120 million pages of documents were seized by U.S. forces in the 2003 war in the failed hunt for evidence of Saddam’s alleged unconventional weapons and ties to al Qaeda. Most of the seized Ba’athist records, along with digital copies of the Anfāl files, have since been returned to Baghdad and various parties in Iraqi Kurdistan. The state security files of Saddam’s regime hold considerable historical importance and value for the peoples of Iraq. The documentary legacy of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime should be used to help Iraqis come to terms with their tragic history and initiate sweeping democratic reforms on behalf of reconciliation and the rule of law. This has proved difficult to achieve. Corruption and the cycle of revenge in both Baghdad and Erbil have fueled the increased exploitation and weaponization of these state security records against political and sectarian rivals. In Baghdad, the sectarian misuse of the files has helped to fuel new waves of still escalating tensions, confrontations, and the continuing destabilization of Iraq. The Kurdish political parties also have exploited the Anfāl files against their political adversaries, raising the specter of new infighting, division, civil war, and the continued supplication to foreign influence. Nonetheless, several positive and countervailing developments have fostered greater access to these documents in digital form among Iraqi Kurds in the hope of promoting human rights, the rule of law, and learning from Iraq’s recent history under Saddam’s homicidal regime. This article explores these topics in detail, including the seizure and restitution of the records, the political and sectarian misuse of the files, and the recent positive trends that hold the possibility of using the files in the spirit of human rights and the rule of law in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. It also outlines a number of concrete steps that Iraq’s political leaders can take to reinforce these positive trends with the help of international supporters.