Abstract
In September 2003, just months after the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies, a memorial was inaugurated in Halabja, the Iraqi Kurdish town where some 5,000 Kurds had been killed in the Bath regime’s chemical weapon’s attack on March 16, 1988. The Halabja attack and the memorial may serve as a case study for tracing the vicissitudes in the fortunes of the Kurds in Iraq at the turn of the twenty-first century.1 Taking place 16 years after the event, with the participation of Paul Bremer, who was then American proconsul in Baghdad, the inauguration illustrated the big transformation in the Kurds’ standing in Iraq, and the U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Kurds. The Halabja massacre may be considered as the formative event for Kurdish nation building. Taking the Halabja affair as a starting point, this paper will analyze these sea changes from differing viewpoints: the internal Kurdish scene itself, the regional angle, with special emphasis on the Arab discourse; and the Americans’ change of heart and its causes.
Keywords
Arab World Kurdish Region Iraqi Regime Paramilitary Force Senate Foreign Relation CommitteePreview
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Notes
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