There was another reason Saddam Hussein committed genocide
against the Kurds in the 1980s, and was generally brutal to them throughout his reign,
oil.
The northern city of Kirkuk is near one of Iraq's
richest oilfields. To get the Kurds out of the way, he systematically encouraged Arab
Iraqis to move there and expelled Kurds from their homes, this solidified his hold on
the city and the oil.
The Kurds have always wanted
independence, and so they had (have) their own armed militia to fight Saddam's army
with, called the PKK. Hussein also wanted to remove this threat to his control. It is
one of the reasons he used poison gas against the Kurds in repeated attacks during the
1980s, killing an estimated 180,000 of them.
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