The goal of this paper is to anatomize the everyday resistance of Kurdish citizens of Iraq against state repression in the decades before the genocidal Anfal campaign, to lay the foundations for a clearer understanding of later relations between the central government of Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdistan region, as well as the development of ethnonationalism. The violence perpetrated against the Kurdish population of Iraq by the Ba’th regime under Saddam Hussein and the subsequent U.S.-backed emergence of autonomy for the Kurdistan region have received widespread attention both in the media and in historical research. However, the intricacies of state repression and everyday Kurdish resistance under Ba’ath Party rule, and the complex web of cross-border and overseas alliances the Kurds developed during the Cold War years to bolster such resistance, remain less well-documented. Through archival research in the North Iraq Data Set of the Ba’th Party collection at the Hoover Institution, newspaper and political party collections at the Zheen Archive Center in Suleimaniyah, and oral history interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan, this paper seeks to understand how state policies were experienced and resisted by Kurds on an everyday basis. How was the Iraqi state shaped by the institutionalization of repression and violence against ethnic and religious minorities, and what role did that play in the construction of national identity? When did ethnonationalism take hold among the Kurdish population during this period and does state repression account for its growing intensity, as some scholars have argued? On a more universal level, this paper will question what patterns of state repression and appeasement on the one hand, and Kurdish collaboration and resistance on the other, reveal about the dynamics between a nation and its minorities. Placing these processes and relationships within the context of decolonization, nationalism, Cold War politics, and the Human Rights revolution fit this story into a wider global history of minority politics in the twentieth century.