Since the end of World War I, the people of the Middle East have lived – from Turkey to Iraq – in a world created by Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. From the outset, the victorious powers of the War, especially Wilson, paid lip service to the principle of self-determination in addressing various nationalities, but they soon realized this great principle can be a double-edged sword whose use could cost them dearly – in casualties as well as capital. Western and regional powers resolved this dilemma by installing a system of states in the Middle East, in the name of self-determination, which was in fact appallingly unfair and feeble. Implementation of this policy in the face of multi-ethnic milieus and complexities, where the dominant group constituted no more than 50 percent of the population, had disastrous consequences and fractured the social landscape of the region into distinct camps of winners and losers.

On April 4th, 1980, Saddam Hussein's government initiated a mass deportation of Iraqi citizens to Iran. In total, an estimated one million people were deported between 1980 and 1990. At the same time, thousands of the relatives of these deportees were detained as hostages, an estimated 4,000 of whom are still missing. This is considered the first Anfal operation undertaken by the Baʿthist regime against the Kurds.

In the twentieth century, totalitarianism emerged as a new phenomenon, with powerful new regimes sweeping to power on the backs of the ideologies of National Socialism, Bolshevism, and Baʿthism. Armed with these ideologies, and in their names, such regimes committed murder at a mass scale previously unknown to world history. Among the victims of this historical process were the Kurds in Iraq, who were subjected to genocide at the hands of the Baʿthist regime. This article addresses the relationship between totalitarianism and genocide, and specifically how the Baʿthist regime justified genocide against the Kurds. It argues that three elements in Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism –ideology, terror, and total domination – explain why every totalitarian regime in history has wound up resorting to genocidal programs. Using the 1980s Anfal campaign by the Baʿthist regime against the Kurds as a case study, this article elucidates the relationship between totalitarianism and genocide. This analysis will lead to a better understanding of the justifications, features, and motivations of the Baʿthist regime's genocide against Kurds.

“Transitional justice” refers to a set of strategies for promoting reconciliation in societies that have been ravaged by conflict and human rights abuses in the recent past. In some cases, however, the political leaders of post-conflict societies choose not to pursue transitional justice, instead preferring to keep the status-quo peace. This essay explores the situation in the Kurdistan region of Iraq after the genocidal Anfal campaign of the late 1980s. The Kurdish political authorities at the time did not use any transitional justice measure against the Kurds who collaborated in the persecution and killing of their fellow Kurds. Instead, they declared a unilateral amnesty for all collaborators, without the consent of the victims’ families. This paper argues that this grant of “blanket amnesty,” which protected the accused from legal liability at the expense of victims’ right to justice, brought neither justice nor peace. Conversely, it negatively affected the process of democratization, rule of law, and social reconciliation in the region. The paper concludes that justice and lasting peace will not be realized in the region if the abuses of the past are left unaddressed.

Under the leadership of the Baʿthists, in 1983, the Iraqi state arrested some 5,000-8,000 members, all male, of the Barzani tribe of Kurds and subsequently killed them. The mothers, wives, and children of these men were put into compounds controlled by Iraqi security forces. As a result, thousands of children were left without their fathers and hundreds of wives were suddenly left widowed. In a society where patriarchy dominates the homelife, single mothers were left with the challenges of taking up the role of their male partners. The very definition of motherhood transformed as they rose to meet the incredible tasks ahead of them, and indeed, the experience dismantled stereotypical images of motherhood, but not without untold pain and suffering. In this study, an attempt is made to shed light on the experiences of these lonely Barzani mothers and how they were affected by their altered gender roles.

This article investigates the collective memory that occurred as a result of the chemical attack on Halabja, on March 16, 1988. In light of discussions that deal with memory and reconciliation in post-genocide societies, we look at how collective memory and “postmemory” are formed among the survivors and their descendants. The merit of the article is that it brings together the victim's accounts and creates a bottom-up perspective that challenges the official accounts created by Kurdish and non-Kurdish elites as part of top-down narratives on what happened that day in Halabja and how it should be commemorated. The interviewee narratives illustrate that people of Halabja consider the memory of the chemical attack as an enduring trauma that creates a shared rendering of the past and continues to shape their collective identity. While each generation transfers this collective memory to the next, they also seek justice via shared commemoration practices outside official discourses. In their narratives, reprobation is not directed solely toward the Saddam Hussein regime, but also toward the current rulers of the Kurdistan Region as well.

The phenomenon of “political Islam” has been explored in several social theories. These accounts have mainly concentrated on the forms of violence that Islamists have instigated, but the racist drive that is often embedded within political Islam has remined overlooked and unexplored, that is, at least until recently when the brutal crimes by ISIS against Yazidis and Christians in northern Iraq were widely documented and broadcasted. Even so, this tendency has only been attributed to ISIS and extreme Jihadi groups, while states infused with Islamist ideology have remained relatively untouched by such critical analyses.

This article argues that most extant theoretical frameworks on political Islam do not adequately explain the often-latent racist trend in Islamist political ideology. By building off of Foucault's theory of biopolitics and genealogy of racism, it takes the Islamic Republic of Iran's policy against the Kurds as a case study to demonstrate how power shifts in favor of Islamist factions in early-1980s Iran legitimized a racist policy toward minorities in general and the Kurds in particular.

This article explores the ideological motivations for ISIS's prejudice against the Kurds. From the group's inception, ISIS has rejected any kind of understanding of Islam but its own. However, its animosity toward Kurds has its own purpose and foundations, separate from its religious dogmas. The aim of this article is to study the reasons behind its fundamental aversion toward the Kurds. An analysis of the literature of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and particularly their interpretation of the Qurʾan and of Islamic prophetic traditions and history, demonstrates such a clear prejudice toward the Kurds, that no honest researcher can deny the vehemence of the group's hatred of the Kurds and their nationalist ideology. This animus explains, at least in part, why ISIS promulgated such a virulent anti-Kurdish ideology and recruited fighters to invade Kurdish lands. This study examines the ideological motives behind the group's behavior toward the Kurds. The article's hypothesis is that the Arab extremists that filled the ranks of ISIS, whether they came from secular nationalist, jihadist, or even moderate Islamist backgrounds, shared an antipathy against the Kurdish people that was deeply rooted in pro-Arab nationalistic sentiment. Below, the article looks at the deadly combination of Baʿthist ideology, which had previously led to genocidal campaigns against Kurds under Saddam Hussein, with the religious extremism of ISIS. A qualitative research method of discourse analysis is used to shed light on the ideological roots of ISIS's antagonism against Kurds. Kurdish-studies researchers will benefit from this study, as well as security, counter-terrorism, and Middle Eastern researchers and students.

When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged from the ashes of unsolved political, religious, and sectarian conflicts in the Middle East, it became one of the greatest threats to global order in recent years. It invaded and occupied a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, leaving a trail of bloodshed in its wake. ISIS fighters carried out a deliberate campaign of annihilation against the religious Yazidi community, which is officially recognized as a protected group under the UN Genocide Convention. ISIS identified them as an “unbeliever community” and proceeded to embark on an eliminationist campaign against the group, including deliberate killing, destruction of the conditions of their life, and the capture and transference of Yazidi children.

This essay is concerned with a contemporary art intervention in Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art, in the context of the Mshatta Façade's move. Sketching out Mshatta's relocation history, the essay highlights how the dynamic of connection and disconnection plays out in a museum setting and is embedded in epistemic concepts mobilized in knowledge-making about objects. Specifically, it focuses on an installation entitled “Goodbye Mschatta. Ich bin ein Fremder. Zweifach Fremder” (“Goodbye Mshatta. I Am a Stranger: Twofold a Stranger”), by a Syrian-born German visual artist who was commissioned to bid farewell to the Façade in its most recent location before it moves to the Pergamon Museum's north wing. Entering into a dialogue with Mshatta, his sculptural intervention pivoted around the themes of incompleteness, mélange, and in-betweenness. It revealed multiple connections and disconnections with regard to the Façade’s biography, while ostensibly disengaging from the debate on historical justice and imperial legacies.

The use of script as an aesthetic device is longstanding in Islamic art. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of Islamic art are terracotta oil lamps with text inscribed on their surface.2 These inscriptions are not merely decorative but also reference the light emitted from the lamps as a metaphor for revelation. As I will show, the use of script in Islamic art is not only meant to delight the eye; it is, moreover, a cognitively faceted aesthetic device. Following an overview of script as an aesthetic device in Islamic art, I survey its legacy in the contemporary art world of the Middle East.