Archives of the Iraqi Ba’th regime and the Kurdish national movement between 1970 and 2003 show that both entities began to step up their attempts to gain international attention by using the language and bureaucracy of human rights in the 1990s, though only the Kurdish nationalist movement could claim undisputed success in garnering support for its goals. This chapter recounts how the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq struggled for years to publicize the atrocities being committed against the Kurdish population there and was repeatedly rebuffed or silenced by a postcolonial Iraq until after the Gulf War. The war was a major windfall that paved the way for their autonomy and gave human rights researchers access to the region, along with a trove of evidence of Iraqi crimes. Within the same period, Iraq under the Ba’th regime had become isolated and struggled to publicize the effects of harsh international sanctions, particularly against the nation’s children. Both parties tried to garner support for their goals in this way, though in the end only the Kurdish national movement achieved some level of success. This paper includes research in the Ba’th Archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Omar Sheikhmous archives at the University of Exeter, as well as United Nations archives and other material available online. It also includes some oral histories with members of the Kurdish diaspora in the U.S., U.K. and Sweden.