Memos suggest Kurds targeted

Documents presented in court Wednesday suggested Saddam Hussein’s government deliberately targeted Iraqi civilians with chemical weapons during a late 1980s counter-insurgency operation meant to stamp out a Kurdish rebellion.

Hussein, facing charges of genocide against the Kurds, has vehemently maintained that his so-called Anfal campaign was a justified attempt to defend the country against Iranian invaders and their agents in Iraq.

But prosecutors Wednesday pointed to a sentence in a document that apparently showed government officials knew the chemical weapons would have little effect on Iranian troops. Iran and Iraq fought a brutal eight-year war ending in 1988.

“Most Iranian agents in the targeted area have the necessary equipment and medical kits to protect themselves from a ‘special ammunition’ attack,” said a letter signed by Col. Farhan Mutlaq Jubouri, a military intelligence officer now standing trial as one of Hussein’s six codefendants.

Hussein already faces the death penalty for his conviction last month in the 1980s killings of 148 Shiite Muslim villagers from Dujayl. While an appellate case scrutinizes the capital verdict, the Anfal case continues.

Hussein’s Anfal campaign was meant to crush an insurgency by Iraq’s rebellious Kurds, an ethnically distinct Iraqi minority, who allied with Iran during the war. Prosecutors and human rights activists allege that as many as 100,000 Kurds may have been killed in the Anfal, or “spoils of war.” The seven defendants face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for their role in the campaign.

Prosecutors allege that there was scant evidence that any of the victims of the chemical weapons, which included sarin and mustard gases, were Iranians.

One document presented Wednesday described the case of a mentally disabled man who was shot to death and beheaded by Iraqi soldiers in a town struck by chemical weapons. He was later presented to Iraqi authorities as an Iranian agent.

Other papers showed that the military was obsessed with getting the most bang for its buck with the chemical weapons, often referred to as “special ammunition” in official records.

One set of documents, signed by former military intelligence chief and defendant Sabir Abdul Aziz Douri, provided detailed damage assessments of mustard gas, compared the advantages of artillery or aerial bombardment for delivering chemical weapons and gave advice on ideal weather conditions for chemical weapons attacks.

Douri and Jubouri protested that they were mere intelligence officers who provided information and had no role in the attacks.

“I have in no way participated in the actual Anfal,” Jubouri said.

But the prosecutor interjected several times that the two intelligence officers’ information-gathering and advisory roles were more than enough to make them accessories to the alleged crimes.

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daragahi@latimes.com