Government forces in Iraq have stepped up a campaign to empty wide sections of the country’s southern marshlands. The campaign has included what some witnesses describe as chemical-weapons attacks against opposition Shiite Muslims.
Residents and Shiite guerrillas say Iraqi engineers have diverted water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, drying up more than half the vast wetlands and pushing thousands of people deeper into the marshes and into Iran.
The operation also has forced an unknown number to surrender to Iraqi troops, who have interned families in barren detention centers in Basra, Nasiriya and Amara, residents said.
Although the draining began in August 1992, guerrillas say the crackdown has been stepped up. The government’s campaign also has included shelling and burning of villages and summary executions.
The diversion of the water has enabled Iraq to send infantry and armored personnel carriers over the dried marsh bed to attack and gut scores of southern villages in recent weeks, the residents and guerrillas say.
And six people interviewed along the border with Iran said they had witnessed a chemical-weapons attack by Iraqi forces. A copy of what appeared to be Iraqi military documents buttressed their account.
UN investigators arrived on Nov. 14 in Tehran, Iran, to investigate allegations of chemical-weapons attacks.
The Iraqi government, whose leadership is predominantly Sunni Muslim, maintains it is only hunting down deserters and criminals, and that its extensive diversion of water is aimed at reclaiming 150 million acres of land for agricultural use.
The Iranian government says 60,000 Iraqis have fled to Iran since 1991, when uprisings by the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shiites in the south were crushed by President Saddam Hussein.
