Goptapa Villiage

By: Sarbaz Karim

On May 3rd, 1988, the Baath regime's planes bombed the villages of Goptapa and Askar with chemical weapons as part of the fourth campaign of the Anfal operations, which resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of innocent civilians.

The death toll in Goptapa from chemical weapons was only exceeded by that of Halabja, which had been gassed seven weeks earlier and killed over 5000 women, children, and elderly people. The beginning of this campaign was the bombing of the Goptapa area with chemical weapons, on May 3, 1988, when the warplanes of the regime bombed them with napalm bombs and chemical gases, causing the death and injury of dozens of innocent citizens, and at the same time, the warplanes bombed the Askar area with eight Napalm bombs. 

Dozens of villagers were killed and the residents of the area were forced to evacuate due to chemical weapons and sought refuge in caves of the surrounding mountains. On May 4, 1988, the Saddam army began a ground attack on the area, destroyed the Goptapa area, and buried the remains of the martyrs in mass graves. The regime then raised the level of the Little Zab River to prevent the people from escaping. 

The number of missing and disappeared persons after this brutal crime was 1,680 after which the Saddam army destroyed dozens of other villages in the region. The Anfal campaign carried out by the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish civilian population began on February 22, 1988, and continued until September 6 of the same year, and is considered one of the most dangerous pages of government mass killing in the history of Baathist rule in Iraq. 

The army and regular forces directly, including (the First Corps, which was based in Kirkuk, the Fifth Corps, which was based in Erbil), the Air Force, the Special Forces, the Republican Guard, the Commando Forces, the security and intelligence services, military intelligence, the chemical and biological weapons departments, in addition to all service departments that have been put in the service of carrying out these operations.