Kurdish villages were razed by the Ba'athist Iraqi government during its "Arabization campaign" of areas excluded from Kurdistan under the Iraqi–Kurdish Autonomy Agreement of 1970.
[3] In 1977–78, in response to the 1975 Algiers Agreement, Iraq began clearing swaths of land along its northern border with Iran.
[4] In the spring of 1987, Ali Hassan al-Majid instructed that "no house was to be left standing" in the Kurdish villages of the Erbil plain.
[5] On October 17, 1987 a population census was conducted, in which respondents could only choose "Arab" or "Kurdish" as their nationality; anyone who refused to identify as "Arab" (including minorities such as Assyrians, Turkmens and Yazidis) was labeled "Kurdish" regardless of ethnicity, and when the Al-Anfal Campaign was officially launched several months later, all non-Arabs were targeted.
[7] In late 1991, the international community launched a large-scale project to reconstruct housing in 1,500 of the 4,000 destroyed villages of northern Iraq.