U.S. Restitution of the Iraq Secret Police Files from Saddam Hussein’s Regime Regarding the Kurds in Iraq

Abstract

More than twenty years after Kurdish forces captured mass quantities of Iraqi secret police files chronicling the Anfal genocide and other events in their March 1991 uprising, a digital copy of these documents has been repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the military transport of the documents to the U.S. and their scanning by the Defense Intelligence Agency, both a copy of these digital documents and the original files were acquired by the Archives at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder) in 1997. The files were thereafter made available to researchers and investigators from around the world searching for evidence to bring Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership to justice for grave violations of international humanitarian law. In 2012, Prof. Ferdinand Hennerbichler, an Austrian historian and former diplomat, and Prof. Bruce P Montgomery, director of the CU-Boulder Archives, commenced nearly two years of negotiations with the aim of restoring this archive of atrocity to the Iraqi Kurdish people. On September 30, 2014, in a formal high-level ceremony at CU-Boulder, a copy of the digital Iraqi secret police files was handed over to a visiting Kurdish delegation representing the Zheen Archive Center in Sulaimaniyah, which assumed custody of the files, and the regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan. The repatriated archive will be used to further reconciliation and democratization of the Kurdistan region and Iraq as a whole.