Operation Provide Comfort for the Kurds in Iraq

The ethnic and religious uprisings against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq were led by Shiite Arabs in the South and Kurds in the North, incentivized by the U.S.A. and its allies. The uprisings lasted from March to April 1991 directly after a ceasefire creating a halt to the Gulf War. In both the North and the South, Saddam Hussein responded with massacres which created an internal refugee population. At that time, the United States activated their own intended political and humanitarian concept, Operation Provide Comfort. This was a three-phase operation with the purpose of aiding Iraqi Kurds to return to their homeland in Northern Iraq, and later to create a no-fly zone. The present study makes use of unclassified information from the United States Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), such as documents, reports and memoirs. There is almost no attempt at assessment of the viewpoint of Kurdish reactions. Even the Peshmerga (Kurdish for “facing death”), guerilla organizations from the eighteenth century who at the time played a strong role in the North, seem to have been glossed over in the documentation. The conclusion of the present researcher(s) based on what is a one-sided documentation is a surprise and quite admirable!