Kurdish villages destroyed during the Iraqi Arabization campaign
Encyclopedia
Kurdish villages destroyed during the Iraqi Arabization campaign refers to villages razed by Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

 in the Iraqi government's "Arabization campaign" of areas, excluded from Kurdistan under the Iraqi-Kurdish Autonomy Agreement of 1970
Iraqi-Kurdish Autonomy Agreement of 1970
Iraqi-Kurdish Autonomy Agreement of 1970 is an agreement which in March 1970, the Iraqi government and the Kurds reached, to be implemented within four years, for the creation of an Autonomous Region consisting of the three Kurdish governorates and other adjacent districts that have been determined...

.

History

Some 4,000 villages were destroyed from 1975 until the end of the Al Anfal Campaign in late 1980s.

During the mid-1970s, hundreds of Kurdish villages were destroyed in the northern governorates of Ninawa
Ninawa Governorate
Ninawa is a governorate in northern Iraq, and the Arabic name for the biblical city of Nineveh in Assyria. It has an area of and an estimated population of 2,453,000 people in 2003. Its chief city and provincial capital is Mosul, which lies across the Tigris river from the ruins of ancient...

 and Duhok, and around 150 in Diyala.

In 1977-1978, in response to the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq began clearing swaths of land along its northern border with Iran. During the first waves of clearances, residents were given five days to leave their homes and as many as 500 villages were then destroyed, mostly in the As Sulaymaniyah Governorate.

In the spring of 1987, Ali Hassan al-Majid
Ali Hassan al-Majid
Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti , , was a Ba'athist Iraqi Defense Minister, Interior Minister, military commander and chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service...

 instructed that "no house was to be left standing" in the Kurdish villages of the Erbil plain. Only Arab villages would be spared.

Resettlement

In late 1991, the international community launched a large-scale project to reconstruct housing in 1,500 of the 4,000 destroyed villages of northern Iraq.
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