Shattered Mosaic. “The dead, Your honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstance of the simple dead” Xxxxxx Xxxxxx, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Iraqi Stories 3A: The Immediate and Near-Immediate Aftermath The plight of the Kurds in the North in the time following was the uprisings was relatively well documented. The United Nations and actors inside and outside of the Middle East had access to the area and we now have specific numerical information in regards to the aftermath of the uprisings in Kurdistan. In the South, because the area was virtually closed to outside observers, those reporting on the aftermath had to rely on the testimony of those who fled, which at times was unreliable. As such, specific statistics are hard to come by, but the many acts of retaliation the regime took against the Shia in the south have been documented. Additionally, as a Human Rights Watch report on the conflict puts it: “Many observers believe that attacks by Baghdad on the Kurdish-held zone have been restrained to some extent by Saddam's fear that they would provoke the intervention of Allied forces. Since April 1991, the U.S. has publicly warned Iraqi troops not to fly any aircraft, including helicopters, north of the 36th parallel, to keep security forces from entering the Allies' self- declared security zone, and to refrain from attacking Kurdish civilians.” Due to this protection, Kurdistan was spared some of the worst of the regime wrath.74 The immediate aftermath saw sweeping arrests made in the cities of Najaf and Karbala, two of the most central places for Shia identity in the world. The list of those arrested included the previously mentioned Grand Xxxxxxxxx Xxxxx Xxx xx-Xxxxxx xx-Xxxxx and 105 members of his family. The regime extended this tactic to other clergymen in the south. In a United Nations reports on the security situation in Iraq described the drastic reduction in Shia scholars in the area and, once the Uprisings had failed, nearly all of them had disappeared or were under arrest. This speaks to the Baathists seeking to destroy the Shia spirit by wiping out its ulema. 75 To further this point, under the guise of urban development entire buildings in the areas surrounding the holy shrines, in particular the shrines of Xxxxxxx and Abbas were leveled. A re...
