The 1991 Iraqi uprisings were ethnic and religious uprisings against Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime that were mainly led by Shia and Kurdish rebels. The uprisings lasted from March to April 1991 after a ceasefire following the end of the Gulf War. The mostly uncoordinated insurgency was fueled by the perception that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had become vulnerable to regime change. This perception of weakness was largely the result of the outcome of the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War, both of which occurred within a single decade and devastated the population and economy of Iraq.
Within the first two weeks, most of Iraq's cities and provinces fell to rebel forces. Participants in the uprising were of diverse ethnic, religious and political affiliations, including military mutineers, Shia Islamists, Kurdish nationalists, Kurdish Islamists, and far-left groups. Following initial victories, the uprising was prevented from making further progress by internal divisions as well as a lack of anticipated American and Iranian support. Saddam's Sunni Arab-dominated Ba'ath Party regime managed to maintain control over the capital of Baghdad and soon largely suppressed the rebels in a brutal campaign conducted by loyalist forces spearheaded by the Iraqi Republican Guard.
Pursuing another Security Council resolution, the United States established the Iraqi no-fly zones and formed a Western coalition to aid Kurds who had fled to Turkey. The coalition ultimately pressured Saddam to withdraw from most of Iraqi Kurdistan (except Kirkuk), after which the autonomous Kurdistan Region was established. However, they fell into a civil war until a US-brokered ceasefire in September 1998. By contrast, Saddam viewed the Shia revolt in the south as "the most dangerous threat to his regime, and even to the continued existence of Iraq" as the Shia Arabs were the majority. The Iraqi government intensified a prior systematic forced relocation of Marsh Arabs and the draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes, and Saddam's suppression of the Shia revolt was considerably more brutal. The United States did not assist the Shia Arabs as it assisted the Kurds, leaving a legacy of mistrust among the Shia Arabs. Thousands of Iraqis detained during the suppression of the uprising remained unaccounted for. Iraqi government forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians through indiscriminate attacks, summary executions and helicopter attacks.
Earlier calls for uprising
During the Iran–Iraq War, Iran's supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, called on Iraqi Shias to overthrow the Ba'ath government and establish an Islamic state. Because of his incitement, many Shia Arabs were driven out of Iraq and some were recruited into armed militias backed by Iran, although the majority remained loyal to Iraq throughout the duration of the war.
U.S. radio broadcasts
On February 15, 1991, President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, made a speech targeting Iraqis via Voice of America radio. Hoping to incite a swift military coup to topple Saddam Hussein, Bush stated:
There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that 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 and then comply with the United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.
Bush made a similar appeal on March 1, a day after the end of the Gulf War:
In my own view...the Iraqi people should put [Saddam] aside, and that would facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist and certainly would facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations.
On the evening of February 24, four days before the Gulf War ceasefire was signed, the Voice of Free Iraq radio station, allegedly funded and operated by the CIA, broadcast a message to the Iraqi people telling them to rise up and overthrow Saddam. The speaker on the radio was Salah Omar al-Ali, an exiled former member of the Ba'ath Party and the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. Al-Ali's message urged the Iraqis to overthrow the "criminal tyrant of Iraq" and asserted that Saddam "will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq." He said:
Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoiding the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honorable Sons of the Tigris and Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.
Revolution
Southern uprisings
Many of the rebels in southern Iraq, where the uprisings began, were either demoralized soldiers of the Iraqi Army or members of anti-regime groups, in particular the Islamic Dawa Party and Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Iraqi armed forces were composed largely of Shia conscripts and contained substantial anti-regime elements, and thus many of the government's troops quickly switched sides and defected to the rebels.
The turmoil first began in the towns of Abu Al-Khaseeb and Az Zubayr, south of Basra, at the end of February. On March 1, 1991, one day after the Gulf War ceasefire, a T-72 tank gunner, returning home after Iraq's defeat in Kuwait, fired a shell into a gigantic portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging over Basra's main square and onlooking soldiers applauded. The revolt in Basra was led at first by Muhammad Ibrahim Wali, an army officer who gathered a force of military vehicles to attack the government buildings and prisons in the city; he was backed by a majority of the population. The uprising in Basra was entirely spontaneous and disorganised. The news of this event and Bush's radio broadcasts encouraged the Iraqi people to revolt against the regime in the other towns and cities. In Najaf, a demonstration near the city's great Imam Ali Shrine became a gun battle between army deserters and Saddam's security forces. The rebels seized the shrine as Ba'ath Party officials fled the city or were killed; prisoners were freed from jails. The uprising spread within days to all of the largest Shia cities in southern Iraq: Amarah, Diwaniya, Hilla, Karbala, Kut, Nasiriyah and Samawah. Smaller cities were swept up in the revolution as well.
Many exiled Iraqi dissidents, including thousands of Iran-based Badr Brigades militants of SCIRI, crossed the borders and joined the rebellion. SCIRI concentrated their efforts on the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, alienating many people who did not subscribe to their Shia Islamist agenda and pro-Iranian slogans, for which SCIRI was later criticized by the Dawa Party. Ranks of the rebels throughout the region included mutinous Sunni members of the military, leftists such as Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) factions, anti-Saddam Arab nationalists, and even disaffected Ba'athists. Disastrously for them, all the diverse revolutionary groups, militias, and parties were united only in their desire for regime change as they had no common political or military program, no integrated leadership, and there was very little coordination between them.
Northern uprisings
Another wave of insurgency broke out shortly afterwards in the Kurdish populated northern Iraq. Unlike the spontaneous rebellion in the South, the uprising in the North was organized by two rival Kurdish party-based militias: primarily the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and to a lesser extent the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Additionally, the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) served as the principal Assyrian opposition group, although the group was more active in the 1980s. The ADM reported that the government displaced thousands of Assyrians in Kirkuk, as there were around 30,000 in the city prior to 1991. In the north, the defection of the government-recruited Kurdish home guard militias, known as jash, gave a considerable force to the rebellion.
The rebellion in the north (Iraqi Kurdistan) erupted on March 5 in the town of Rania. Within 10 days, the Kurdish nationalist (Peshmerga), Islamist (Islamic Movement of Kurdistan), and communist (from the ICP and the Communist Party of Kurdistan; the Kurdistan Workers' Party was also active to some extent) rebels, joined by tens of thousands of defecting militiamen and army deserters (reportedly, there were more than 50,000 of them throughout the region), took control of every city in the north except Kirkuk (which eventually fell to them on March 20) and Mosul. Entire units surrendered without much or any resistance, including the whole 24th Division which did not fire a single bullet. In Sulaymaniyah, the rebels besieged and captured the regional headquarters of the dreaded Directorate of General Security secret police (years later, the building, known as Amna Suraka or "Red Security" in Kurdish, became a museum to the crimes of Saddam's regime). In a bloody revenge, they killed several hundred of captured Ba'athist officials and security officers without a trial; reportedly, over 900 security officers were killed at Sulaymaniyah. They also captured enormous quantities of government documents related to the notorious Al-Anfal Campaign in which the government forces had systematically killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and members of other ethnic minorities three years earlier in 1988; 14 tons of these documents were obtained by Human Rights Watch.
Unlike in the south, the Kurdish rebellion was preceded by demonstrations with clear political slogans: democracy for Iraq and autonomy for Kurdistan. After Mosul was taken, Jalal Talabani proposed to march on the capital Baghdad.
Loyalist offensive
On March 7, in an effort to quiet the uprisings, Saddam Hussein offered the Shia and Kurd leaders shares in the central government in exchange for loyalty, but the opposing groups rejected the proposal. At the height of the revolution, the government lost effective control over 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. However, the people of Baghdad remained largely passive, as the Dawa Party, the Communist Party, and the pro-Syrian Ba'ath splinter party had all failed to build underground structures in the capital. There was only limited unrest in the Shia-populated vast slum of Saddam City while the rest of Baghdad remained calm.
Soon, regime loyalists regrouped and went on an offensive to reclaim the cities. They were helped by the fact that about half the tanks of the elite and politically reliable Republican Guard managed to escape from the Saddam-proclaimed "mother of all battles" in Kuwait and that the Guard headquarters units also survived the war. In addition, the Gulf War ceasefire agreement of March 3 prohibited the Iraqi military's use of fixed-wing aircraft over the country, but allowed them to fly helicopters because most bridges had been destroyed. This was because General Norman Schwarzkopf accepted the request of an Iraqi general to fly helicopters, including armed gunships, to transport government officials because of destroyed transport infrastructure, acting without Pentagon or White House instructions; almost immediately, the Iraqis began using the helicopters as gunships to put down the uprisings. The outgunned rebels had few heavy weapons and few surface-to-air missiles, which made them almost defenseless against helicopter gunships and indiscriminate artillery barrages when the Ba'athists responded to the uprisings with crushing force. According to Human Rights Watch, "in their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of anyone who opposes them whether a rebel or a civilian by firing indiscriminately into the opposing areas; executing them on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them with or without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack those who try to flee the cities."
There were several reports of chemical warfare attacks, including of a nerve agent being used during the assault on Basra. Following an investigation, the United Nations (UN) found that there was no evidence that Iraq used chemical weapons to repress the uprisings, but did not rule out the possibility that Iraq could have used phosgene gas which would not have been detectable after the attack. According to the U.S. government's Iraq Survey Group, Iraqi military did in fact use the nerve agent sarin, as well as non-lethal CS gas, on a massive scale when "dozens" of improvised helicopter bombing sorties were flown against rebels in Karbala and the surrounding areas in March 1991; evidence of apparent mustard gas attacks has also been reported in the areas of Najaf and Karbala by the U.S. forces that have been stationed there at the time.
In the south, Saddam's forces quelled all but a scattering of the resistance by the end of March. On March 29, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim conceded that Shia rebels withdrew from the cities and that fighting was limited to rural areas. The Kurdish uprising in the north of the country collapsed even more quickly than it began. After ousting the Peshmerga from Kirkuk on March 29, the government tanks rolled into Dahuk and Irbil on March 30, Zakho on April 1, and Sulaymaniyah, the last important town held by the rebels, on April 3. The advance of government forces was halted at Kore, a narrow valley near the ruins of Qaladiza, where a successful defense was held by the Kurds led by Massoud Barzani.
In a 1999 letter, Hoshyar Zebari, head of International Relations of the Kurdish Democratic Party, stated that the "KDP as a major Kurdish political party had led and participated in the Kudish spring uprisings of 1991 in Iraqi Kurdistan. The uprising caused the collapse of Iraqi government military, security and administrative structure in the region... When the Iraqi troops counter-attacked and regained control of Kirkut and other major cities there were rumors of Mujahedin units assisting iraqi troops... However... these rumors happen to be untrue... The KDP can confirm that the Mujahedin were not involved in suppressing the Kurdish people neither during the uprising nor its aftermath." Sources also say the Mujahedin supported the Kurdish rebellion in Iran.