And the U.S. stood by when Saddam Hussein crushed the rebellion. What did happen in 1991? It’s a sad story of false hopes and serious miscalculations. After the U.S. evicted Iraqi forces from Kuwait, George Herbert Walker Bush had no intention of marching the U.S. Army to Baghdad to topple Saddam. He had promised the Arabs in the war coalition that he would push Saddam’s army back into Iraq–that’s all.
That didn’t mean Bush Sr. wanted Saddam to remain in power. Pentagon planners were prepared to finish him off with Air Force bombing or special-ops commandos if they could find him. And if U.S. forces could not get to him, Bush had made it no secret that he would be more than happy if others did the job.
As Lev Grossman reported in 2003, On February 15, 1991, as the Desert Storm air campaign blasted Iraqi defenses in Kuwait, Bush flew to Andover, Mass., for a rally at the Raytheon plant, which manufactured the Patriot Air Defense System.
In the middle of a rousing speech, he noted, almost as an aside, “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop, and this is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”
This was a notion trumpeted by other Administration officials as well, but what they and Bush had in mind was encouraging senior leaders of the Iraqi army or Baath Party to revolt.
“We didn’t expect a general public uprising,” says a former Bush aide. It was the Shi'ites in southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north–both of whom had long been subjugated by Saddam–who took Bush’s words to heart.
They began their revolt on March 1, just one day after Bush halted the war. But Saddam’s battered Republican Guard divisions in the south quickly refashioned themselves and attacked Shi'ite guerrillas. Meanwhile, in the north, several Iraqi divisions moved to crush the Kurdish rebellion.
The U.S. inadvertently helped Saddam annihilate the rebels by agreeing in the cease-fire deal negotiated by General Norman Schwarzkopf to allow Iraqi generals to continue flying their helicopters–a mistake because Saddam then used them to strafe rebels on the ground.
Desperate Shi'ite and Kurdish leaders begged the U.S. military for help. But Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wanted U.S. troops safely home, not mired in what might become a messy civil war. Secretary of State James Baker feared the “Lebanonization of Iraq.”
His nightmare: Iraqi Shi'ites, aligned with Iran’s fundamentalist Shi'ites, would carve out the south; Sunni Muslims would hold the center; and Kurds, who long craved an independent state, would capture the north, upsetting Turkey, which feared revolt from its own Kurdish population.
American pilots flying over southern Iraq held their fire as the Republican Guard massacred Shi'ites on the ground. Bush refrained from aiding Kurdish rebels in the north, although he finally sent troops and relief supplies to protect hundreds of thousands of fleeing Kurds who were in danger of freezing or starving to death.
Aodeh al-Tamimi’s memories of the “spontaneous” uprisings by discontented Iraqis soon after Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi occupation in 1991 are filled with grisly scenes and betrayal.
“A scene I don’t forget until now is when [late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s] jets were striking [rebels] while U.S. planes were hovering on top,” the 65-year-old said when recalling the uprising in his home province of Dhi Qar, southern Iraq.
On Feb. 15, 1991, then-U.S. President George H W Bush urged the Iraqi military and people to rise up and “matters into their own hands.” On March 1, he said: “The Iraqi people should put [Saddam] aside.”
However, Washington refused to support the popular rebellions, which started in southern Iraq on March 1 and then spread to the northern Kurdish areas, because of suspicions that it would become a replica of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
Forces loyal to Saddam “killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches,” Human Rights Watch reported.
As Dina al-Shibeeb reported in 2006: The death toll of the 1991 uprisings, which ended on April 5, is estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000.
“The government didn’t allow burial of people for three to four days, and dogs were ravaging corpses of dead rebels,” Tamimi said. “It was a real massacre in Nasiriya,” capital of Dhi Qar.
Tamimi, now a naturalized Canadian citizen, described the uprisings as “leaderless and spontaneous” after “the army collapsed [and] security men disappeared.” Iraqis “had accumulated more than enough hatred toward the regime… [They] were fed up.”
Tamimi, who later worked with opposition media in the Saudi city of Jeddah, said participants in the southern uprising represented all walks of life.
“We had people who came from Iran through [Iraq’s] marshes, and right away waving pictures of… the Iranian leadership,” he said, adding that he personally did not encounter any Iranians.
Many exiled Iraqi dissidents, including thousands of Iran-based militants, crossed the border and joined the rebellion, especially in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
Sheikh Hadi al-Okayshi of the Albu Okash tribe reported different undertones when the rebellion started in his home province of Najaf, roughly 60 kilometers south of Baghdad.
Tamimi said those rising up also included Sunni members of the military, leftists and communists, Arab nationalists and disaffected Baathists.“There were nationalists who waved their nationalist slogans,” he said, citing the story of famous communist Mohammed Sahar.
“He stood in front of the army’s tanks fearless until he died on the street,” Tamimi said. “His heroism is well known in Souq al-Shiyoukh district. He stayed fighting and had only a Kalashnikov. Rationally he should’ve withdrawn, but he stayed facing the tanks.”
When the rebellion started on March 3 in Najaf city, home to the Imam Ali shrine that brings millions of Shiite pilgrims yearly, Okayshi: “Rebellious fighters took to the streets everywhere, chanting slogans of an Islamic revolution. They attacked headquarters and security places belonging to the Baath party. They released all those detained.”
Head of the Shiite religious authority at the time, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Abul Qasim al-Musawi al-Khoei declared the rebels’ cause as just.
While Okayshi also described the uprising as “spontaneous,” he said: “The religious authority at the time had a vital role in mobilizing the masses,” and “appointed central committees in cities, districts and suburbs to be supervised after the fall of the provinces.”
With slogans similar to Iran’s Islamic revolution such as “not Eastern, nor Western - Islamic Republican” - referring to the Soviet Union and the United States - Okayshi said Washington “gave the green light to the criminal Saddam to quell the uprising in all of Iraq. The regime was bloody. There were a lot of executions and arrests.”
But before the U.S. gave the green light to Saddam to quell the rebellion, Khoei “rejected an offer from the U.S. and Iranians to interfere, saying it was a popular revolt,” the esteemed tribal figure said, adding that he had insider information of what was happening at the time.
Khoei’s rejection of the offer led to his arrest, said the sheikh. Khoei was later forced to make public appearances with Saddam, and when the religious leader was allowed to return to Najaf, he was placed under house arrest until he died in 1992.
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