A History of Kurdish Insurgency in Iraq
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Kurds have a history of insurgency that is as old as the British Mandate of Iraq. It didn't start with Saddam. It also started long before Arabization policies even took place either. They rebelled against the British and the mandate in the early 1920s, demanding autonomy. They made a rebellion in 1931, which was defeated by the Iraqi army, and another in 1943-1945.

Iraqi General Abdul Kareem Qassim overthrew the king in 1958 and made many concessions to Kurds, and pushed Iraqi nationalism as made up of two nations: Arabs and Kurds. (Note that Qassim himself was half-Kurdish.) However, the Kurds had none of it and started a massive rebellion in 1961 that would last until 1970. And what happened in the 60s? Qassim, becoming increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, was overthrown and executed. After 5 years of rule by the Arif brothers, the Baath came to power in 1968. Finally, in 1970, Saddam saw a diplomatic option to ending the Kurdish rebellion - he gave them autonomy.
(Worth noting they were backed by Iran and Israel in their 9 year-long insurgency.)

This autonomy was not independence, but it gave them many autonomous rights and preservation of their culture and language that did not exist for Kurds in Syria, Turkey, and Iran.  While there were Kurds in various parts of Iraq, those in the Kurdistan region in the north were given some very large concessions.
How did they repay this? 4 years later, with Iranian backing (as well as CIA and Mossad), they made another insurgency. This was ended both through military might and Saddam's calculated diplomacy with Iraq’s enemy at the time Shah Pahlavi in the Algiers Accord, through which Iran agreed to stop supporting insurgent groups within Iraq.

This didn't last long as the Shah was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by a very zealous religious extremist in Khomeini, who committed border raids against Iraq and tried to rile up the local populations to overthrow Saddam and export his revolution across the border. When war broke out between the two countries, the Kurds in Kurdistan were exempted from the draft. They didn't even have to fight in the war. How did they repay this? By fighting on the side of Iran against Iraq!

There were many still loyal Kurds in the Kurdish paramilitary group called the National Defense Battalions (who the insurgent Kurds called "ja7sh", or donkey's foal), and with the help of volunteers and conscripts in the Iraqi army these forces fought against the insurgent Kurds. The Kurdish insurgent cooperation with Iran was so clear, that even in the infamous Halabja chemical attack there were dead Iranian soldiers easily found among the corpses along with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and other victims. But today you'll only see the same two photos of civilians, who at the time were part of a society in a state of total war against the regime as a Kurdish existence.

Following the Gulf War, yet again, Kurds were fighting against Iraq. When the US came in to enforce no-fly zones and got involved with Kurds and had the rest of Iraq under full embargo, the traditionally ethno-nationalistic anti-Iraq Kurdish parties, KDP and PUK, started a civil war between themselves, in which Masoud Barzani asked for Saddam's help, ironically enough.

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Overall, it was a relationship of Saddam making concessions to the Kurds, and the Kurds retaliating with violence and war, which Saddam responded with fighting back and Arabization/stability policies. I do concede Saddam did push the Arabization agenda, although it would have been a natural consequence anyway as part of Iraq's rising development as a state (due to education, integration, etc.) Also keep in mind that Kurds made a huge insurgency against the half-Kurdish guy trying to make tons of concessions to Kurds, Abdul Kareem Qassim.

In this manner, Saddam wasn't any different from his predecessors, aside from being a lot more diplomatic with the Kurds. The biggest difference was he had a very strong military to make them regret ever thinking about fighting against Iraq and killing Iraqis. Nothing really started with Saddam. Saddam just had the competency and military might to make them regret opposing him.

The cognitive dissonance is also astounding. Kurdish ethno-nationalists will complain about how "Saddam killed his own people", but these same ethno-nationalists don't even consider themselves to be Iraqi.

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Now, there are many more details I can go into and whatnot, but I think the point is clear. You can condemn Saddam for using chemical weapons on Halabja or for the astonishing force of his response against terrorism and insurgency, but you can't condemn him for doing what any rational administration in the world has and would have done, and which every Iraqi administration has done, and that is fighting against and suppressing insurgency and terrorism.

The reason why groups considered "infidel" such as the Christian Assyrians, Armenians, as well as pagans accused of Satan-worship like the Yazidis, thrived in pre-2003 Iraq is because they functioned as normal Iraqi citizens who did not engage in aggressive tribalism, violent ethno-nationalism, and religious radicalism. There was simply no reason for Saddam or anyone to go after them. Christian groups prospered economically and socially, and preachers were not only allowed but protected. Meanwhile the Kurds were Saddam's and his predecessors own co-religionists: Sunni Muslims.

Sunni Kurds in northern Iraq were the most commonly insurgent, and those are the ones who are known today as the "victims." And as much as they talk about independence, they don't go for it, even when Iraq was under embargo and the Kurdistan region had free reign. Barzani uses independence like a carrot on a stick to rally the Kurdish tribes to support him, nothing more. And they've fallen for it since his father's time. Of course independence never comes, and the greatest irony is that despite how destitute and destroyed the rest of Iraq is, KRG still depends a lot on the Baghdad govt seeing as how they're not financially self sustainable by themselves.

But then you get these ridiculous ethno-nationalistic extremists in Iraq and you get these Americans who heard what a Kurd was 2 months ago and start worshipping them as superhuman demigods, or you have these ridiculously fanatical western-born guys who maybe had a mother or grandmother who was Kurdish, and it becomes very annoying. Saddam was too Iraqi. Lots of pride and inability to submit. Not unlike the insurgents he battled.