Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Against Kirkuk, a city of nearly a million, Saddam had unleashed an indiscriminate barrage from tanks, helicopter gunships, heavy artillery, Katyusha rockets and ground-to-ground missiles. The Kurds reported raids by Sukhoi bombers as well -- despite the coalition ban on Iraq's use of fixed- wing aircraft. Kamal Kirkuki, a member of the Kurdish resistance, claimed that more than 100,000 women and children had been captured around the city. "If the Iraqis act true to form," he said, "they will all be butchered." One horror story was being passed from mouth to mouth: of Kurdish infants strapped...
...were the Kurds Saddam's only new victims. While civilians throughout Iraq struggled to replace shattered power plants and water lines -- not to mention scrounging for food -- the regime also threw its energy into smashing the Shi'ites in the south who want Saddam's secular Baathist regime replaced by Islamic rule. In the five weeks since the liberation of Kuwait, Baghdad has retaken every major rebel-held city and town, sometimes with terrifying vindictiveness...
...Saddam took aim first at the south, where he gathered the remnants of his defeated army and the armor that escaped the allies into a loyal force that rapidly overwhelmed the weak and ill-equipped Shi'ite insurgents. He dispatched two Republican Guard divisions that had been stationed around Baghdad to ensure the efficiency of the Iraqi troops that had failed so miserably against the allied coalition. This time it was the Shi'ite rebels who were doomed to failure. They lacked a joint command-and-communications system and were dependent largely on weapons and ammunition abandoned by Iraqi soldiers...
...joined the rebellion. Fighter Kamal Kirkuki repeated joyfully to all who would listen, "We Kurds are finally free." Jails were thrown open; prisoners set at liberty. Kurds spoke openly of their travails without fear of retribution from Baghdad's once omnipresent spies. Even the discovery of the horrors of Saddam's torture camps -- corpses studded with maggots, canisters of rotting human flesh stored at local outposts of the dreaded Estikhbarat (military intelligence), prisoners who had not seen the light of day for so many years that they thought they were still living in the 1970s -- seemed a catharsis before...
Less than 20 miles north of Erbil, commander in chief Barzani was granting confident interviews from his luxurious new headquarters -- the concrete villa of Saddam Hussein in the hill town of Salahuddin. "We realize that an independent Kurdistan is out of the question," he told TIME. "All we want is the right to till our land in peace, the right to local government, the right to speak our language and have it taught in our schools." The rebel leader's bodyguard lounged around in the pink-and-beige interior, staring out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the snowy mountains...