U.S. Makes List for a War Crimes Tribunal
The Bush administration has drawn up a list of about a dozen senior Iraqi officials, including President Saddam Hussein’s two sons, who could be tried for war crimes in postwar Iraq or by an international tribunal, a senior U.S. official said Saturday.
Top Iraqi military and security commanders are on the list. They include Ali Hassan Majid, who is blamed for a 1988 campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq that killed tens of thousands. The most notorious incident of the campaign was a chemical attack on the town of Halabja in which about 5,000 Kurds are said to have died from poisonous gas.
Commanders who engineered the occupation of Kuwait in 1990, which was reversed in 1991 by a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and those in Hussein’s “small clique” who put down a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, also are on the list, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
They would be detained and could be tried either by Iraqi courts or internationally, or possibly both, the official said.
Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusai, also are on the list.
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