AN "INCONVENIENT ATROCITY": THE CHEMICAL

WEAPONS ATTACK ON THE KURDS OF HALABJA, IRAQ

     
     

BY

SUSAN J. SCHUURMAN

BACHELOR OF ARTS
HISTORY AND SPANISH
CALVIN COLLEGE
1985

THESIS

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts
History

The University of New Mexico

Albuquerque, New Mexico

December, 2007
 ii

© 2007, Susan J. Schuurman

 iii

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to the victims of Halabja.

May the dead rest in peace and the living
receive the recognition and justice they deserve.

And to Luci and Dodi,

my most steadfast companions.
 iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the help of many people. Dr.
Denise Natali, University of Kurdistan-Hewler, Arbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, started
me on the right track with a brief but excellent reading list on the Kurds. My advisor and
chair of my thesis committee, Dr. Patricia Risso, was a cheerleader extraordinaire,
offering both academic and personal support. She, Dr. Noel Pugach and Dr. Enrique
Sanabria, my thesis committee, made substantial recommendations to improve the text.
Middle East analyst Joost Hiltermann provided professional encouragement at a crucial
juncture. Reagan Presidential Library archivist Lisa Jones efficiently supplied me with
photocopies of pertinent documents. Sophie Garvanian went out of her way to allow me
to scan photographs from a book in her possession. New Mexico Historical Review
(NMHR) colleagues Scott Meredith, Donna Schank Peterson, and Meg Frisbee provided
much-needed help with the images, and Sonia Dickey repeatedly motivated me to stop
researching and start writing already.
Louise Ladd supported my graduate work by providing me with a desktop
computer after hearing my sad tales of writing papers for our Middle East History class at
the library after work. She also gave me moral support and showed me by example that a
thesis could actually be brought from the theoretical realm to a tangible, loud thump-on-
the-table reality. Greg George gave me invaluable assistance in the selection of a laptop
that made writing the thesis much easier.
I would not be here if not for the help of many people during my recent breast
cancer treatment. I especially want to thank Dr. Ian Rabinowitz, my sister Kathy
Sikkema, my brother Wayne Schuurman, Anna Christina Peterpaul, Sarah Payne, Kristen
Bisson, Lorie Brau, Kristina Schauer, Spring Robbins, Kim Suina, Michele Brandwein,
Pat and Louise. Dr. Durwood Ball, Cindy Tyson and the NMHR crew have also been
there for me in so many ways. Both Durwood and my other employer, Field & Frame
owner Alan Fulford, gave me the flexibility I needed to get through my treatment. Their
support and that of others unnamed enabled me to recover sufficiently to tackle and
complete this project.
I’d also like to thank my family for their support, especially my mom, Nell
Schuurman, who asked for frequent updates on my progress, and my sister-in-law Lois
Schuurman, who in spite of her own current health challenges, found time to track my
growing page-counts. Thanks also to my Iranian Kurdish family, including my biological
father, Firouz “Phil” Sabri, who shared many colorful stories about the Kurds, sister and
brother-in-law Sabrina and Reza Ameripour, who helped me out at just the right time,
and Shahrzad Ameripour, who never failed to tell me how proud she was of my scholarly
pursuits.
Lastly I want to acknowledge the role model I had in attending graduate school in
the first place. Ann Peterpaul showed me by her example that graduate study in the
humanities was a worthwhile and achievable goal whether or not the degree could
confidently be linked to getting a specific job after graduation. For nudging me to go
back to school after a seventeen-year hiatus, I thank her.
 v

AN "INCONVENIENT ATROCITY":
THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACK ON THE KURDS OF
HALABJA, IRAQ
     

BY

SUSAN J. SCHUURMAN

ABSTRACT OF THESIS

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts
History

The University of New Mexico

Albuquerque, New Mexico

December 2007
 vi

AN “INCONVENIENT ATROCITY”:
THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACK ON THE KURDS OF HALABJA, IRAQ

by

Susan J. Schuurman

B.A., History and Spanish, Calvin College, 1985

M.A., History, University of New Mexico, 2007

ABSTRACT

On 16 March 1988, the Iraqi military attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with
chemical weapons, killing approximately five thousand civilians and injuring twice that
number. Taking place during the ethnic cleansing campaign called the Anfal (1987–
1988), the attack on Halabja was one of forty poison gas attacks against the Iraqi Kurds
but bears the dubious distinction of having the highest number of civilian casualties.
The English-language literature on the attack includes media coverage, human
rights reports, and an authoritative account by Middle East analyst Joost Hiltermann. I
briefly discuss the history of the Kurds, who are spread over Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria
and number approximately twenty-five million; the nature of the Ba‘athist government
under Saddam Hussein; and the wider Anfal campaign against the Kurds. The story of
March 16 is told from the point of view of survivors with emphasis on the experiences of
women and children. I then evaluate media coverage of the attack and the responses from
the U.S. government, the United Nations, and other actors. I conclude with an
examination of which persons and/or entities have been held accountable for the attack,
plus the long-term impacts on Kurdish survivors including how they memorialize the
Halabja attack today.
This study is based on English-language, written sources including reports by
Human Rights Watch, the UN, U.S. government documents from the Reagan Library and
Digital National Security Archive, and media reports. I argue that the Reagan
administration not only failed to hold Iraq accountable for the attack on Halabja but
actively worked to prevent others from sanctioning Saddam Hussein’s regime. The U.S.
allied with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) largely because it saw the Islamic
Republic of Iran as a greater threat to Persian Gulf oil. Citing numerous internal memos, I
argue that economic considerations outweighed human rights concerns when American
foreign policymakers calculated how to respond to the attack on Halabja. My research
differs from Hiltermann’s, which focused primarily on the military and political context,
for its emphasis on women and children and the role Western companies played in
supplying Iraq’s chemical weapons industry.
 vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................iv
Abstract..............................................................................................................................vii
Table of Contents...............................................................................................................vii

Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................................1
Methodology and Argument.....................................................................................4
Survey of the Literature...........................................................................................5

Chapter 2: Background to Halabja................................................................................12

A Brief History of the Kurds..................................................................................12
The Ba‘ath Party in Iraq and Saddam Hussein.....................................................19
The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds................................................................24

Chapter 3: Halabja: The Event......................................................................................37

Nasreen’s Story......................................................................................................37
Other Survivors’ Stories........................................................................................42
A Clinical Assessment............................................................................................45
The Military Context of Halabja............................................................................51

Chapter 4: Media and Official Reaction to Halabja.....................................................57

Media Coverage.....................................................................................................58
U.S. Government Reaction.....................................................................................67
United Nations Reaction........................................................................................83
Other Actors...........................................................................................................91

Chapter 5: Accountability...............................................................................................96
The Iraqi High Tribunal.........................................................................................96
The Companies That Supplied Iraq....................................................................101
Long-Term Impacts of Halabja on the Kurds......................................................110

Chapter 6: Conclusion...................................................................................................121

List of Appendices..........................................................................................................125
Appendix 1: Photographs of Omar Hama Saleh and Infant.................................126
Appendix 2: Map of Kurdistan.............................................................................127
Appendix 3: Photograph of Adela Khanum of Halabja.......................................128
Appendix 4: List of Articles from 11 March 1970 Peace Accord........................129
Appendix 5: List of Names of Civilian Victims...................................................130
Appendix 6: Photographs of Corpses in Halabja.................................................132
Appendix 7: List of U.S. Companies Supplying Arms to Iraq.............................133
Appendix 8: List of U.S. Companies Linked to Iraq’s CW Program..................134
Appendix 9: Photograph of Halabja Memorial....................................................135

Bibliography...................................................................................................................136
 1

Chapter 1: Introduction

As U.S. President George W. Bush rallied support for regime change in Baghdad

during the winter of 2003, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons

against Iraqi citizens in the 1980s began to crop up after a long hiatus and in a completely

different context. Bush justified an invasion of Iraq with several factors, including

disarming the dictator of his remaining alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction

(WMD), preventing such weapons from getting into the hands of terrorists (especially al

Qaida, in the post-September 11, 2001 attacks environment), and punishing the regime

for its past use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. In particular, Bush cited an

event in which the highest number of civilian casualties occurred: the attacks on Halabja,

an Iraqi town of 70,000, on 16 March 1988, when as many as 5,000 Kurdish children,

women and elderly men were killed and twice that number wounded.

President Bush was not the first to use the attacks on Halabja as justification for

the so-called Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq in 2003. In January the U.S. State

Department published a report, “Iraq: From Fear to Freedom,” in which Halabja looms

large. Calling the lessons of Halabja an “ominous warning,” it paints a sympathetic

picture of the suffering of the unprotected civilians.

Only after the first wave of air and artillery bombardments had driven the
inhabitants to underground shelters did the Iraqi helicopters and planes return to
unleash their lethal brew of mustard gas and nerve agents. ... The inhabitants …
had no preparation for the nightmare that descended upon them—and continues to
wreak havoc upon the survivors and their offspring today.1

1
Like many observers of the Halabja incident, the authors of this report mistakenly refer to this town of
approximately 70,000 people as a village. This distinction is important because the Anfal campaign (see
chapter 2) targeted rural Kurdistan; thus, the attacks on the town of Halabja were not by strict definition
part of the Anfal campaign. U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, Iraq: From
Fear to Freedom, 14 January 2003, 4. Although I accessed a hard copy, this report is also available at
http: //usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/iraq/.
 2

The poignancy of the Kurds’ plight is vividly recalled: “As the gas spread and

animals died and birds dropped out of trees, the panicked families, many blinded by the

chemical agents, gathered up hysterical, gasping children, tried to escape downwind.”2

While at the time, the report claims, it was assumed several hundred people died, further

investigation had revealed the body count was in the thousands. The Iraqis, for their part,

used the attack as a “testing ground.”3 Without citing their presumably still classified

sources, the authors reveal that after the attack, Iraqi soldiers in protective gear divided

the town into grids to study the effectiveness of the chemical weapons in terms of number

and location of the victims. The State Department concludes that Halabja is a deadly

portent of the future if Saddam Hussein is left in power.

Two weeks after the State Department’s report was published, Bush gave his oft-

cited State of the Union address to the American people on 28 January 2003. In it he laid

out the reasons Saddam Hussein was such a threat to the United States. Attention has

focused on one particular line that drew much scrutiny: “The British government has

learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from

Africa.”4 Without mentioning Halabja by name, Bush reminded Americans that

Hussein’s WMD were no idle threat and that he had actually employed chemical

weapons against his own people. “The dictator who is assembling the world’s most

dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages—leaving thousands of his

own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. … If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.”

2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 6.
4
This revelation became part of the investigation into the leaked identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife
of American ambassador and Bush Administration critic Joseph Wilson. Office of the Press Secretary,
“President Delivers ‘State of the Union,’” <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-
19.html> (accessed 27 August 2007).
 3

In March 2003, in a more specific reference, Bush used the occasion of the

fifteenth anniversary of the Halabja attacks to deliver a radio address consolidating the

considerable support his administration enjoyed for the imminent invasion only days

away:

This weekend marks a bitter anniversary for the people of Iraq. Fifteen years ago,
Saddam Hussein’s regime ordered a chemical weapons attack on a village [sic] in
Iraq called Halabja. With that single order, the regime killed thousands of Iraq’s
Kurdish citizens. Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and
mustard agents descending from the sky. Many who managed to survive still
suffer from cancer, blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth
defects among their children.

The chemical attack on Halabja—just one of 40 targeted at Iraq’s own people—

provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing to commit, and the
kind of threat he now presents to the entire world. He is among history’s cruelest
dictators, and he is arming himself with the world’s most terrible weapons.

Listeners must have felt a wave of compassion for these victims as well as fear,

perhaps, that such indiscriminate weapons could be targeted at Americans. The

September 11 attacks were painfully fresh in the American psyche, having jolted the

nation out of its false sense of protected isolation between two vast oceans just two years

earlier. Bush vowed to back his belligerent rhetoric with action:

Governments are now showing whether their stated commitments to liberty and
security are words alone—or convictions they’re prepared to act upon. And for
the government of the United States and the coalition we lead, there is no doubt:
we will confront a growing danger, to protect ourselves, to remove a patron and
protector of terror, and to keep the peace of the world. 5

Bush’s horrific interpretation of the Halabja attacks seems appropriate—a moral

response to an immoral act. But this compassionate perspective on the events of 16

March 1988 contrasts sharply with the reaction of the U.S. government at the time they

occurred. Just what took place on that fateful day in the Kurdistan region of Iraq? Who

5
Office of the Press Secretary, “President Discusses Iraq in Radio Address,” transcript of President’s Radio
Address, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030315.html (accessed 27 August 2007).
 4

are the Kurds, and what was their relationship with Baghdad, the Americans and the

United Nations before Halabja? How do those relationships and that context help us

understand the American and international reaction in 1988? What was the reaction of the

media, the U.S. government, Iraq’s Arab/Muslim neighbors, and the United Nations?

How did these actors justify their action or inaction? Who or what entities have been held

accountable for the attacks, and how do Halabja’s survivors memorialize March 16, if at

all?

Methodology and Argument

This thesis attempts to answer the above questions by examining English-

language, written sources. I rely primarily on reports published by human rights

organizations, archived U.S. government documents from the Digital National Security

Archive and the Reagan Library, Congressional committee reports, UN documents, and

media coverage. A more complete investigation (which was not feasible for this project)

would have included oral interviews with still living survivors and access to Kurdish-

language (Sorani) written documents located, among other places in the region, in the

archives of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan

(PUK), the two major Kurdish political parties in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

After consulting my sources, I argue the evidence shows that at least three

thousand Kurdish civilians, largely women and children, were killed as a result of

chemical weapons dropped on Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force on or near the date of 16

March 1988; that the muted if not silent reaction by the international community in

general and the Reagan administration in particular was an example of economic

 5

priorities trumping human rights; and that, further, the U.S. government’s inaction and at

times active steps to prevent a punitive response created an environment which fostered

further deadly attacks on civilians. Whether such a posture can be defined as complicity

in genocide is left for others to decide.

Survey of the Literature

Not surprisingly for such a relatively recent incident (the 1980s are likely seen by

most historians as “current events”), no historian has written a history of the chemical

weapons attacks on Halabja, Iraq, in March 1988. Middle East analyst Joost Hiltermann,

who currently serves as Deputy Program Director for the International Crisis Group,

recently published the most in-depth treatment of the Halabja attacks to date in A

Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (2007). Thoroughly

researched and well-balanced, Hiltermann’s work draws from his experience working for

Human Rights Watch in the 1990s. He in fact is the author and/or contributor of several

reports by either Human Rights Watch or its subsidiary, Middle East Watch, on the Iraqi

campaign against the Kurds. His research involved hundreds of interviews with PUK

guerrillas who participated in the battle for Halabja, Iraqi military officers, civilian

victims of the attacks, and officials in the U.S. government, some of whom remain

anonymous. Hiltermann uses Halabja primarily as a hook to talk about a larger picture:

the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqi regime in general and especially the U.S.

response over a five-year period beginning in 1983, when Saddam Hussein used chemical

weapons against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq War, to 1988, after the ceasefire. He

argues persuasively that the lack of a vigorous response by the U.S. government early on
 6

gave a green light to Baghdad to proceed with chemical weapons use, and that those who

were complicit with such use will never stand trial.6 Hiltermann expends a great deal of

ink dissecting the debate over whether Iran also used chemical weapons on Halabja and

proves convincingly that the evidence does not support this charge. He also goes into

much detail about military strategy involved in the Halabja attacks as well as the broader

topic of the Iran-Iraq War. His work privileges male voices in positions of authority,

whether political or military; my focus will spotlight the experiences of women and

children, where possible, and of unofficial actors rather than elites. I will also attempt to

put names of individual persons on the faceless, nameless, monolithic statistic of the

5,000 victims.

A source that I was unable to access but would prove illuminating on the broader

Anfal campaign is an unpublished study by Kurdish researcher Shorsh Resool, who was

last said to be working in London as an engineer.7 He meticulously compiled a list of

3,737 destroyed Kurdish villages and 16, 482 missing Iraqi Kurds based on interviews

with tens of thousands of Anfal survivors; his tally of the names of persons killed at

Halabja was at least 3,200.8 This study should be published and made widely available to

researchers, if not for history’s sake then for any efforts at compensating victims and

their families. Another work I was unable to access is a Kurdish-language publication

devoted to the Halabja attacks written by the late Shawqat Haji Mushir, who, according

6
Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 244.
7
Shorsh M. Resool, The Destruction of a Nation (London: Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, 1990),
unpublished report. Resool’s work is cited by Hiltermann, Meiselas, Power and others.
8
Cited in Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1993), 27n8.
 7

to Hiltermann, was killed by the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam in 2003.9 Mushir’s

work should be translated into English to broaden its audience.

One journalist in particular researched the Halabja attacks: Jeffrey Goldberg

wrote a long article for the New Yorker magazine after traveling to the region and

interviewing survivors fourteen years after the event.10 His sympathetic account,

published in 2002, was quoted at length in the State Department’s 2003 report. He uses

Halabja, the long-term health affects experienced by survivors, the Anfal, and the alleged

al Qaeda connection to argue in favor of regime change. Despite his bias, the quotes from

dozens of Kurds add to the written record about Halabja and the Anfal campaign.

Several human rights reports include sections on Halabja but have not enjoyed a

wide audience. Especially pertinent is one by Human Rights Watch (HRW) titled Iraq’s

Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (1995). Based on hundreds

of interviews with Kurdish refugees, archeological evidence from mass grave

exhumations, and the translation and analysis of tons of captured Iraqi secret police

documents obtained after the 1991 Gulf War and Operation Provide Comfort when

Western observers had unprecedented access to Iraqi Kurdistan. Based on these

documents, HRW argues that “unequivocal evidence of Iraq’s repeated use of chemical

weapons against the Kurds” exists and that this evidence is “sufficiently strong to prove

[HRW’s] case against the Iraqi government as having the clear intent of committing

genocide—in keeping with the language of the Genocide Convention of 1951.”11 Dozens

9
Shawqat Haji Mushir, Karasati Kimiabarani Halabja bi Hari 1988 (The Sad Events of the Chemical
Bombing in Halabja in the Spring of 1988) (Suleimaniyeh: 1998).
10
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror: Saddam Hussein Against the Kurds,” The New Yorker, 25 March
2002.
11
Human Rights Watch/Middle East Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the
Kurds (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 232. My study will not dwell on the question of
whether or not the Iraqi regime was guilty of genocide, which is comprehensively covered by Samantha
Power in “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). The
 8

of the Iraqi secret police documents are featured in the original Arabic side-by-side with

their English translations. This report provides a wealth of useful testimonies and

background on the Ba‘athist regime framed around the objective of building a compelling

case for subsequent war crimes prosecution.

Other sources that refer to Halabja include Middle East analyst David

McDowall’s A Modern History of the Kurds (2005) which remains the single most

comprehensive history of the Kurds found in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the former

Soviet Union; foreign correspondent Jonathan C. Randal’s After Such Knowledge, What

Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (1997), which traces his journey to the

region in 1991; and former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Peter Galbraith’s

The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006) which

discusses Halabja based on interviews with survivors conducted three years after the

attacks took place.12

Writer/traveler Christiane Bird’s A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts:

Journeys in Kurdistan (2004) discusses Halabja with particular emphasis on the long-

term health effects on survivors, medical as well as psychological. Journalist Kevin

McKiernan, in The Kurds: A People in Search of their Homeland (2006), assesses the

lack of accountability for companies who sold the chemicals to Saddam Hussein’s regime

which were used on the Kurds. Photographer Susan Meiselas, who encountered the Kurds

for the first time when photographing skeletal remains at mass gravesite exhumations for

story of how the secret documents were obtained, written by then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee
staffer Peter Galbraith, is itself fascinating and dramatic. See U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations,
Saddam’s Documents: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1992).
12
David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd revised edition, (London: I. B. Taurus, 2005);
Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan, (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); and Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
 9

Middle East Watch in 1991, has attempted to create a virtual Kurdish archive in book

form and on the Web. Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), cowritten with social

anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen, features hundreds of photographs and excerpts

from primary source material on the Kurds presented in a collage format. (She has also

created a virtual Kurdish archive online.) Meiselas felt a special responsibility to acquire

and preserve photographs from the Kurdish diaspora after her particularly intimate

encounters with Kurds mourning their murdered relatives. One photograph (see

Appendix 1) portrays a scene that has become iconic for its depiction of a man, Omar

Hama Saleh, lying face down on the street, clasping an infant in his arms, both overcome

by the poison gas that rained down on 16 March 1988.13

Finally, three other sources reveal in their own distinctive ways aspects of the

Halabja attacks. The Iranian government’s War Information Headquarters produced a

graphic and emotional report of the attacks within weeks after they occurred, taking full

advantage of the incident’s propaganda value in the context of the waning months of their

brutal eight-year-long war with Iraq. Iran had been petitioning the United Nations

especially to take more vigorous action against Iraq for its repeated use of chemical

weapons against Iranian soldiers. While the report’s text is dubious (religious zeal is

attributed to the Kurds who welcomed the Iranian troops entering the town just prior to

the chemical weapons attack), the photographs are useful for preserving a record of the

hundreds of corpses lying in the street and the journalists who videotaped and

photographed them in their frozen state.14

13
Christiane Bird, A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (New York: Random
House, 2004); Kevin McKiernan, The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2006); and Susan Meiselas and Martin van Bruinessen, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of
History (New York: Random House, 1997).
14
Islamic Republic of Iran, Supreme Defense Council, Bloody Friday: Chemical Massacre of the People of
Halabja by the Iraqi Regime. (Tehran, Iran: War Information Headquarters, 1988). See Appendix 6 for two
 10

Writer Mike Tucker, a retired Marine infantryman with a special operations

background, advocates openly for an independent Kurdistan and interviewed dozens of

Kurdish guerrillas known as peshmerga (“those who face death”) in Hell Is Over: Voices

of the Kurds after Saddam. Their recollections preserve more of a collective memory,

since they did not actually witness the attacks on Halabja itself. Kanan Makiya, author of

Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (1989), published under the

pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, wrote an article on the Anfal which focused on the

eyewitnesses of the atrocities at Goptapa in May 1988 two months after Halabja. An Iraqi

Arab whose family left Iraq in 1972 because his father’s name appeared on a Ba‘athist

Party list, Makiya has seen the captured secret police documents and listened to the

audiotapes of Ali Hassan al-Majid (Secretary General of the Ba‘ath Party’s Northern

Bureau, dubbed “Chemical Ali” by the Kurds). Makiya questions why so much attention

has focused on the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed during the creation of the

state of Israel while so little scrutiny has fallen on the thousands of Kurdish villages

destroyed by an Arab regime during the Anfal.15

There are sporadic mentions of Halabja in other works, but only in passing. In

time, as the Kurdish question of autonomy versus independence becomes more pressing,

more book-length historical works will certainly appear, written by Americans who are

gradually becoming more familiar with the Kurds, and by Kurds themselves, as their

society experiences the benefits of economic development and as literacy rates continue

to rise.

photographs from this report.

15
Mike Tucker, Hell Is Over: Voices of the Kurds after Saddam (Guilford, Conn.: The Lyons Press, 2004);
Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989);
Kanan Makiya, “The Anfal: Uncovering an Iraqi Campaign to Exterminate the Kurds,” Harper’s
Magazine, May, 1992, vol. 284, no. 1704; and Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny,
Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993).
 11

The story of Halabja begins in chapter two with a brief history of the Kurds

paying particular attention to their contentious relationship with Baghdad and on-

again/off-again relationship with the Americans. I also detail the nature of the Ba‘athist

regime under Saddam Hussein as well as Iraq’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds. In

chapter three the story of the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja is told with emphasis

on the experiences of Kurdish civilians, especially women and children, for whom the

label “dissident” or “insurgent” seems most inappropriate. Chapter four covers the

reaction by the media, the U.S. government, and the United Nations, as well as a brief

mention of the response from officials within the Arab/Islamic world and other actors.

Chapter five investigates issues of accountability: what international laws were violated,

what companies sold Iraq chemical weapons or the means to make them, who or what

entities have thus far been held accountable, and finally, what long-term impacts have

Kurdish survivors experienced and how do they recall the Halabja attacks today. Finally,

my conclusion, in chapter six, discusses implications for international law and human

rights that can be drawn from the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja on 16 March

1988 and the world’s reaction to them.

 12

Chapter 2: Background to Halabja

“Let no one say that the Kurds are dead;

the Kurds are still alive;
never shall our flag be lowered!”
— from the poem “Ey Raqib!”
and the refrain to the national
anthem of Iraqi and Iranian Kurds.16

Who are the Kurds? And why would Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘athist Iraqi

government target them with such brutality? What is the Anfal campaign, and were the

chemical weapons attacks on Halabja in 1988 part of it? This chapter will address these

questions by looking at a short history of the Kurds, the nature of the Ba‘athist regime,

and a description of the Anfal in order to place Halabja into its proper context.

A Brief History of the Kurds

Kurds are often defined in the negative. They are not Arab, Turks or Persians—

their neighbors who outnumber them. They do not have their own nation-state and are

frequently called the world’s largest group of people without a homeland. They number

approximately 25 million in the Middle East, but that is not a precise number because the

countries in which they live have no interest in gauging an accurate population census of

their defiant and sometimes rebellious minority.17

Geography and language play key roles in assessing an ethnic group’s

distinctiveness. The Kurds are currently divided among four countries: approximately

16
Quoted in Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 374. Raqib is Kurdish for enemies.
17
This brief history of the Kurds relies largely on three sources: Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and
State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1992); McDowall, A Modern
History of the Kurds; and Denise Natali, The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq,
Turkey, and Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005). For a feminist analysis of the Kurds,
see Shahrzad Mojab, ed., Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers,
2001). For an ethnographic study of Kurdish women in the 1960s, see Henny Harald Hansen, The Kurdish
Woman’s Life: Field Research in a Muslim Society, Iraq, Ethnografiske Kaekke no. 7 (Copenhagen:
Nationalmuseet, 1961.)
 13

half of all Kurds, 13 million, live in Turkey (comprising approximately 23 percent of

Turkey’s population but, with double the Turks’ reproductive rate, a number that will

certainly increase); about 5 million live in Iran; another 4 million reside in Iraq; and 1

million are in Syria. Half a million live in the former Soviet republics of Armenia and

Azerbaijan and another half million live in Europe, mostly in Germany. Kurdistan (land

of the Kurds), an imagined community if ever there was one, straddles these four West

Asian nation-states. The name is not officially on maps but is a powerful image in the

hearts and minds of Kurds (for a map of Kurdistan, see Appendix 2).

The Kurds speak Kurdish, a language that is further divided into two groups:

Kurds residing in Turkey (sometimes referred to as northern Kurdistan), Syria and the

former Soviet republics generally speak Kurmanji, while Kurds residing in Iraq and Iran

speak Sorani. In addition to these two overall language groups are dozens of dialects;

furthermore, Kurds use three different scripts (Latin in Turkey, Arabic in Iraq and Iran,

and Cyrillic in the former Soviet republics). Hence, one factor that would facilitate a

nationalist movement—a people sharing one language—is somewhat more complicated

in the case of the Kurds.

Kurdish identity is also splintered because of the divisive nature of their tribal

tradition. While the tribes’ influence on Kurdish society has diminished over the

twentieth century due to state policies and economic changes over time, tribal leaders

continue to hold a measure of authority especially in the context of village life. Identity is

closely linked to the land and in particular the mountains, even among town-dwelling

Kurds (the majority of Iraqi Kurds). A common saying is that the Kurds have “no friends

but the mountains;” in fact, the remote and rugged ranges have provided many a safe
 14

haven for the peshmerga. These mountains separated the Kurds from their more powerful

neighbors—making assimilation, control, and tax collection difficult for ruling empires—

and fostered the development of a distinct culture.

Origin myths are another window into a people’s identity, and the Kurds tell

several. One says the Kurds are descended from children who hid in the mountains to

escape the child-eating monster Zahhak; another depicts them as offspring of King

Solomon’s slave girls, fathered by the demon Jasad, who also fled to the mountains to

escape from the angry king. A third claims that the prophet Abraham’s wife Sarah was a

Kurd.18 The majority of Kurds are probably descended from Indo-European tribes that

migrated westward across Iran during the second millennium BCE. The first recorded

mention of the Kurds, as “Cyrtii,” occurred in the second century BCE and referred to

mercenary fighters from the Zagros mountains.19

Traditionally semi-nomadic for centuries, Kurds in rural areas were known to

change their residence twice a year, oscillating back and forth between the mountain

pastures during summer and the plains during winter, their lifestyle dictated by the needs

of the sheep and goats they tended. Farmers raised crops such as grains, cotton and

tobacco but frequently did not own the land they tilled. In terms of religion, the majority

of Kurds are Sunni Muslim; a small minority are Shi‘a Muslim, Christians and Jews.

Before the Islamic conquest many Kurds were Zoroastrians; a small segment called the

Yezidis remain today whose religion combines elements of the monotheistic faiths with

Zoroastrian rituals.

18
McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 4. Another story of the origins of the Kurds claims they are
the offspring of Alexander the Great’s soldiers who intermarried the local population on their way to India
in the fourth century BCE. Interview, Firouz “Phil” Sabri, August 2002, Portland, Ore.
19
Ibid., 9.
 15

One of the most famous Kurds and a celebrated hero for the Kurdish people was

the twelfth-century victor over Richard the Lionhearted during the Crusades: Salah al Din

(Saladin), who identified more as a fighter for Islam and founder of the Ayubbid dynasty

than as Kurdish. Other luminaries from Kurdish history include the seventeenth-century

poet Ahmad-i Khani whose poem Mem-u-Zin (Mem and Zin, often called the Kurdish

Romeo and Juliet) celebrated for the first time the Kurds as a distinct group; he called

them a “formidable yet oppressed people” cursed by their location between strong

empires.20 Another is Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, author of the first history of the Kurds, the

Sharafname, written in the late sixteenth century. His book tells the story of the rulers of

Kurdistan from the perspective of a member of the elite.21

Kurds who have achieved legendary status more recently include a woman who

lived in Halabja. We know details of the life of Adela Khanum, or Lady Adela, largely

because of the writings of British traveler and political administrator Ely Bannister

Soane.22 Adela Khanum (d. 1924) was born into an aristocratic Kurdish family in the

principality of Ardalan, the major center of Kurdish culture in Iranian Kurdistan. She

married Osman Pasha, head of the Jaf tribe in Halabja and set up her household in the

Persian style with mansions and gardens around the turn of the century. After her

husband died, she continued to lead, building a prison and instituting a court of justice of

which she was president. She hired Soane as her scribe; probably due to his influence,

20
Ibid., 5.
21
Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, Sharaf-name: Tarikh-e Mofassal-e Kordestan (Extensive History of Kurdistan), ed.
Mohammed ‘Abbasi (Tehran: Ilmi Press, 1964). Cited in “The Making of Kurdish Identity: Pre-20th
Century Historical and Literary Sources,” by Amir Hassanpour, in Abbas Vali, Essays on the Origins of
Kurdish Nationalism, Kurdish Studies Series no. 4 (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2003).
22
See Ely B. Soane, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise (London: John Murray, 1912).
 16

Adela sided with the British during Shaikh Mahmud’s rebellion in 1919 (for a

photograph of Lady Adela taken by Soane’s wife, see Appendix 3).23

Two other heralded Kurds are from a more recent time period. Margaret George,

the most famous female peshmerga, fought alongside her father during the 1960s.

Perhaps her religious status as an Assyrian Christian permitted her more freedom than

Muslim women. Many male peshmerga carried a photograph of this “symbol of women’s

participation in the Kurdish struggle” in their wallets. In the 1990s, Leyla Zana became a

prominent figure and one of the most famous Turkish Kurds. Born in the Diyarbakir

region of Turkey, Leyla married at age 14 Mehdi Zana, the local mayor, who was later

imprisoned for political reasons. While he was in jail, Leyla, who could not read or write

Turkish, taught herself enough to become the first Kurdish woman elected to the Turkish

parliament in 1991. She and other deputies were charged with separatism after speaking

publicly in the Kurdish language, a crime for which she received a sentence of 15 years

in prison. In 1996 she received the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize. She was

released in 2004 after ten years.24

In terms of their political history, the Kurds have consistently rebelled against

strong central authority ever since Kurdistan was divided up by the Great Powers after

World War I. This defiance played a critical role in Saddam Hussein’s treatment of Iraqi

Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s. A discussion of the contexts for these rebellions helps to

explain the contentious relationships the Kurds have experienced with the nation-states

that have governed them.

23
Meiselas and van Bruinessen, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 378.
24
Ibid., 378, 381.
 17

Under the Ottoman system, from the sixteenth century to mid-nineteenth century,

the Kurds were permitted a significant measure of autonomy; in Persia, under the Safavid

rulers, the Kurds also experienced a period of political stability compared to earlier more

chaotic times (e.g., the Mongol invasions). This relative independence vanished with the

end of the Ottoman Empire. Ironically, the closest the Kurds have come to forming their

own nation-state occurred during this unstable period, and an American played a major

role in that situation.

In January 1918, while the Europeans anticipating victory were trying to figure

out how to redraw the maps of the vanquished Ottoman lands among themselves, U.S.

President Woodrow Wilson issued his famous Fourteen Points; the twelfth point is well-

known by most Kurds today: “The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire

should be assured a secure sovereignty, but other nationalities which are now under

Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely

unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”25 This promise of autonomy, never

fulfilled, has not been forgotten by the Kurds. Another key document in Kurdish history

is the Treaty of Sèvres signed on 10 August 1920 between the Allies (largely Britain and

France) and the virtual puppet government they installed in Istanbul while Mustafa

Kemal (Ataturk, or father of the Turks) waited in the wings. Articles 62 and 64 of this

treaty promised the formation of an autonomous Kurdish region which would have the

right to vote for independence within one year if the League of Nations thought the Kurds

were “capable of such independence” and further stipulated that the newly formed state

would include the Mosul vilayet (present-day northern Iraq).26 But this treaty did not

25
Quoted in McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 115.
26
Ibid., 136-7. To read the complete text of the Treaty of Sèvres, articles 62 and 64, see pp. 464-65.
 18

reflect the facts on the ground. Turkey regrouped under Kemal’s military leadership

during its war of independence, and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923

trumped the promises made at Sèvres, dashing all realistic hopes for an independent

Kurdistan for decades.

Each decade since has seen armed Kurdish rebellion of some sort.27 Shaikh

Mahmud Barzinji and his army rebelled against occupying British forces off and on

between 1919 and 1931 in the Sulaimaniya region of Iraq. There were three rebellions in

Turkey within a thirteen-year period. The first rebellion in the newly formed republic

took place in 1925 under the leadership of a charismatic sufi, Shaikh Said. The Mount

Ararat rebellion followed from 1928–30. In 1937 and 1938, the Turks crushed a rebellion

at Dersim by burning villages, killing thousands, and deporting most survivors to western

Turkey. After this pacification, Syria became the center for Kurdish nationalists from

Turkey. In 1932, the British, in an attempt to crush another rebellion, ordered the RAF to

bombard the “eccentric” religious leader Shaikh Ahmad of Barzan (Iraq), forcing him

and his men to flee to the mountains. His younger brother, Mulla Mustafa, surrendered

after hiding out for a year, and was exiled. Mulla Mustafa Barzani rebelled again from

1943–1945 and then fled to Iran, where he supported another Kurdish rebellion before

being exiled to the Soviet Union. Iranian Kurds formed the short-lived Mahabad

Republic in 1946, a Soviet-supported experiment for which the leaders were summarily

hanged when Russian protection disappeared.28

27
For more on these rebellions, see Meiselas and van Bruinessen, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 64,
118, 192, 240.
28
The Mahabad Republic was declared by Qazi Muhammad on 22 January 1946 and fell on 15 December
1946. He was hanged on 31 March 1947. Iranian government forces also responded to the secession by
closing down the Kurdish printing press, banning the teaching of Kurdish, and burning all the Kurdish-
language books they could get their hands on. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 241-45. The first
history of the Mahabad independence movement was written by U.S. ambassador William Eagleton, who
served as American consul in Tabriz, Iran, from 1959-1961, and later retired to Taos, New Mexico. See
 19

Mulla Mustafa Barzani then formed the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), an

alliance between urban nationalists and tribal chieftains, although his leadership was

largely symbolic due to his Soviet exile until he returned to Iraq in 1958. This was a

watershed year for Iraq, when a military coup led by Col. Abdul Karim Qassem (prime

minister from 1958–1963) and the Free Officers overthrew the Iraqi monarchy and

established a military dictatorship (labeled a republic in name only, as elections were not

held).29 The Kurdish Revolt of 1961–1963 followed shortly after, led by Mulla Mustafa

Barzani, although clashes continued between peshmerga and government forces until

1970. It was into this context of perennial rebellion that the Ba‘ath Party took control in

Iraq.30

The Ba‘ath Party in Iraq and Saddam Hussein

The 1960s were turbulent in Iraq in terms of central government. Qassem was

overthrown in 1963 and succeeded by the Arab nationalist Ba‘ath Party government,

which in turn was overthrown within less than a year. Abdussalam Arif assumed the

presidency until 1966; another coup put the Ba‘ath back into power in 1968.31

William Eagleton, The Kurdish Republic of 1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
29
William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 2nd ed., (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
2000, 318.
30
While the rest of the story privileges the history of Iraqi Kurds, two other figures ought to be mentioned
in the context of twentieth-century Kurdish rebellions. In Turkey, the Partiya Karkari Kurdistan or
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fought a rebellion against the Turkish government from 1984-1999 led by
the now imprisoned Abd Allah (“Apo”) Ocalan. In Iran, the autonomy-seeking Kurdistan Democratic Party
of Iran (KDPI) was led by Western-educated Abd al Rahman Qasimlu until his assassination by Iranian
agents in Vienna in 1989.
31
For the general history of Iraq, see Phoebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 2nd ed., (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 2004); Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
and Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: from Revolution to Dictatorship (London:
KPI Limited, 1987). For works focusing on the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime, see Makiya,
[al-Khalil], Republic of Fear; and Makiya, Cruelty and Silence.
 20

The Ba‘ath Party had changed in the five years it had been out of power. Ahmad

Hasan al-Bakr (Iraqi president from 1968–1979) dominated the leadership. In 1964 he

had appointed a young relative, Saddam Hussein, as secretary to the Regional Command,

and tasked him with reconstructing the party. That same year, yet another coup attempt

put Saddam and al-Bakr in prison, the former for two years. When they resumed power,

one aspect of Iraqi politics remained the same: the Iraqi people continued to be denied

representation in government.32

The Ba‘ath Party ideology was a combination of Arab nationalism and its version

of socialism (what van Bruinessen calls statism).33 Most of the members of the regime

were army officers with a disproportionate percentage being Sunni Arab. The emergence

of a “dictatorship demanding obedience and using violence on a scale unmatched in

Iraq’s history” was not a radical break with the past but a continuation of prior methods

and values but to a greater extreme.34 Saddam Hussein headed up a militia that controlled

the streets of Baghdad; the civil service and officer corps were purged; and public

hangings created a sense of intimidation and crisis.

The new regime at first reached out to the Kurds. Saddam Hussein himself, an

unlikely ambassador for peace, traveled to Kurdistan and thrust several sheets of blank

paper in front of Mulla Mustafa Barzani and asked him to write down his demands,

saying he would not leave until they had signed a mutually acceptable agreement. The

Peace Accord was issued on 11 March 1970, but within less than a year the agreement

collapsed, and the Ba‘ath attempted to assassinate Mulla Mustafa’s son Idris.35 Four years

later, Baghdad extended another seeming olive branch by creating the Kurdish
32
Tripp, A History of Iraq, 189, 192.
33
Meiselas and van Bruinessen, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 240.
34
Tripp, A History of Iraq, 194.
35
For a list of the demands, see Appendix 4.
 21

Autonomous Region in northern Iraq; however, the Autonomy Law of 1974 was

sabotaged over a failure to come to terms over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, whose

population is mixed between Kurds, Turkomanis, and Arabs.

During this time, Mulla Mustafa began to find alliances outside of Iraq, among

the Iranians, the Mossad (the Israeli secret intelligence service), and the CIA. This

reliance on stronger but unreliable sources of support is a recurring theme in Kurdish

history and one to which they are particularly vulnerable. American support via the Shah

of Iran vanished, however, when Tehran and Baghdad signed the Algiers Agreement in

1975. In exchange for suspending all support for the Iraqi Kurds, Iran gained territorial

concessions in the strategic Shatt al-Arab waterway. U.S. Secretary of State Henry

Kissinger, who had met with Mulla Mustafa Barzani in Tehran, later told critics that

“covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”36 The suspension of U.S.

aid to the Kurds is considered a moment of historic betrayal by many Kurds, added to the

unfulfilled promises conveyed in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Within weeks, more than

100,000 Kurds, fighters and their families fled from encroaching Iraqi forces, crossed

into Iran and joined another 100,000 refugees that were already there.37 The Kurdish

alliance with Iran would reemerge as a thorn in Baghdad’s side during the Iran-Iraq War

(1980–1988).

Saddam Hussein, who was born in the village of Tikrit, took over from al-Bakr in

1979 in characteristic strongman fashion. Two weeks after assuming the presidency, he

announced the discovery of a plot against him and ordered the executions of twenty-two

36
This quote was made public when the Pike Report was leaked by Daniel Schorr to the Village Voice in
1975. U.S. President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were accused of abandoning
the Kurds and refusing to provide humanitarian aid, a charge to which Kissinger made his famous reply.
Quoted in Meiselas and van Bruinessen, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 279.
37
McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 338.
 22

senior officials, five of whom were members of the Revolutionary Command Council.38

Up to 500 senior members of the party were executed soon after. Hussein proceeded to

surround himself largely with provincial kinsmen from the Tikrit region.39

Thus, the Kurds were not the only segment of the Iraqi population to suffer under

the Ba‘ath. Human rights reports, based on interviews and the writings of Iraqi exiles

including Kanan Makiya, paint a chilling picture of life under Saddam Hussein. “Both the

rule of the party and the cult of the leader [were] enforced by various secret police

agencies, which instill[ed] the fear required to sustain the regime’s authority.”40 Those

who refused to join the Party were reportedly banned from teaching or attending

university and sometimes imprisoned. Members were forced to become secret informers.

In 1979, all teachers who refused to join the Party were fired. 41 In 1986 a law was passed

that made insulting the government or leader punishable with life imprisonment; if the

insult was blatant, then the sentence was the death penalty. According to the U.S. State

Department, currency exchanges were restricted and considered national security

offenses with severe penalties.42 The government routinely used disappearances, torture

and arbitrary arrest, detention, and exile to suppress dissent, whether it be from Kurds, or

Sunni or Shi‘a Arabs. The State Department called Iraq’s human rights record “abysmal”

in 1989, in reference to the preceding year.43

Iraq conducted secret courts, carried out collective punishments, and took out

retribution against relatives. The death penalty was specified for “any person who

38
Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 50.
39
Tripp, A History of Iraq, 222–24.
40
Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, 9.
41
Ibid., 11.
42
U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1988: Reports submitted to
the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, and Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of
Representatives by the Department of State (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1989), 1361.
43
Ibid., 1355.
 23

propogates Zionist or Masonic principles or who joins or advocates membership of

Zionist or Masonic institutions.”44 Freedom of the press was nonexistent. Few Western

journalists had regular, unencumbered access to Iraq for nearly twenty years; the most

talented writers and artists were co-opted by the state to produce propaganda and given

housing and money in return. Freedom of movement was also severely restricted; not

only was emigration banned but travel outside the country not permitted except for a

favored few.

Saddam Hussein liquidated senior officials within the regime and his major

opponents: the Communists, the Shi‘a and the Kurds. Many Iraqi professionals, such as

writers, journalists, teachers and doctors, were members of the Communist Party;

according to exiles, the party was essentially wiped out between 1978–1980, as the Iraqi

regime executed members in the thousands.45

One story conveys the regime’s extraordinary brutality to non-Kurds. A

prominent Shi‘a family, the al-Hakim, was noted for its contributions in theology, law,

medicine and science. Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, who had fled Iraq to Iran, made

regular radio broadcasts from Tehran calling for Iraqi Shi‘i to rise up against the regime

in Baghdad. In May 1983, between eighty to ninety male members of the al-Hakim

family, aged 9 to 80, were arrested and executed in front of Mohammed Hussein al-

Hakim, who was then sent to Tehran to warn if the activities did not cease, the other

family members would be executed as well. He was then told to return to Baghdad or his

three sons would be killed. He went insane and died in Tehran. The Iraqi government

killed his three sons and seven others on 5 March 1985.46

44
Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, 28.
45
Ibid., 52.
46
Middle East Watch, Human Rights in Iraq, 52-53.
 24

It was within such a repressive context that the Anfal campaign was launched

against the Kurds from 1987–1988. The United States would not come to their aid for

fear of undermining NATO ally Turkey, which was faced with its own Kurdish

insurgency in the form of the Partiya Karkari Kurdistan or Kurdistan Workers Party

(PKK). The United Nations was not a realistic forum for Kurdish pleas, as Kurdistan is

not a sovereign nation-state. Iraqi Kurds, perversely, were represented at the UN by the

Iraqi (Arab) ambassador, who could hardly be expected to advocate on their behalf. The

Kurds were on their own.

The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds47

The rebellious nature of Iraqi Kurdish leaders and peshmerga played a critical

role during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. The war began when Iraq invaded Iran in

September 1980, right after abrogating the Algiers Agreement and claiming the Shatt al-

Arab waterway between the two countries as entirely under Iraqi sovereignty.48 KDP and

Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) peshmerga, under the leadership of Masud Barzani

(Mulla Mustafa’s son) and Jalal Talabani, respectively, allied with Iranian forces off and

on during the eight-year war, drawing Iraqi military forces away from the key front in the

south near Basra. In 1983, for example, KDP units aided Iranian troops in the capture of

the border town of Haj Omran. Saddam Hussein’s retribution came in the form of the

abduction of between 5,000 and 8,000 Barzani males aged 12 and over; they have never

been seen again and are believed to have been transported to the south of the country,
47
The most authoritative source on the Anfal and prelude to Anfal are the reports by Middle East Watch,
which were based on over three hundred interviews with survivors and analysis of 14 tons of Iraqi
documents brought to the United States under the auspices of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
1992. This short synopsis on the Anfal relies on Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal
Campaign Against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993).
48
Tripp, A History of Iraq, 233.
 25

executed, and buried in mass graves. In 1986 the PUK made a formal political agreement

with Tehran after negotiations with Saddam collapsed.

In March of 1987, Saddam Hussein granted his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the

secretary general of the Northern Bureau of the Ba‘ath Party, special powers to deal with

the Kurds. To quote al-Majid, or “Chemical Ali” as he is known to the Kurds, his

objective was to “solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs.”49 The Iraqi

regime employed dozens of euphemisms in its written documentation; saboteurs was the

term for Kurdish guerrillas (peshmerga) and civilian sympathizers, although, as we shall

see, even young children, obviously unable to express a political point of view, were

lumped together with dissidents under this term. Al-Majid spent two years, 1987-1989,

focused on this task. The Anfal campaign was just the final operation during this period.

The broader campaign against the Kurds, which Middle East Watch and other

observers, including the Iraqi High Tribunal (see chapter 5), have called genocide,

included the following human rights violations:

• mass summary disappearances and executions of between 50,000 and 100,000

non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children and sometimes entire

populations of villages

• widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent

GB or Sarin, against more than 40 Kurdish villages, killing thousands of civilians,

especially women and children

• the destruction (using bulldozers and teams of engineers who painstakingly

dismantled electrical wiring and other infrastructure to erase any hint a community had

prior existed) of more than 2,000 villages and at least a dozen towns in Iraqi Kurdistan,
49
Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 4.
 26

referred to in Iraqi documents as having been “burned,” “destroyed,” “demolished” and

most chillingly, “purified”

• the systematic destruction of civilian structures by Army engineers, including all

schools, mosques, wells, and electricity substations in targeted villages

• looting of civilian property and livestock on a vast scale by Army troops and

pro-government militia

• arbitrary arrest of all persons found in the designated “prohibited areas”

(manateq al-mahdoureh), despite the fact they were on their own land

• arbitrary jailing and warehousing, under conditions of extreme deprivation (little

food, water, shelter, or clothing), of tens of thousands of women, children, and the

elderly, without charge or cause other than their presumed sympathies for the Kurdish

opposition, many of whom died of malnutrition and disease

• forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers who were trucked to

government settlements without provision for housing, clothing or food, and forbidden to

return to where their villages stood under penalty of death.50

This two-year effort by al-Majid included “shoot-on-sight” orders to kill any

human being or animal found in the “prohibited areas,” an expansive swath of Iraqi

Kurdistan.51 In essence he emptied the Kurdish countryside and ethnically cleansed rural

Kurdistan in addition to targeting some Kurdish towns. His reign of terror culminated in

the six-month long Anfal campaign, which took place between 23 February 1988 and 6

September 1988.

50
Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 4–5.
51
Middle East Watch, Bureacracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1994), 68–69.
 27

“Anfal” was the code word used by the Iraqi military for a specific series of

military actions during 1988. Before the Iraqi government used the term in this twisted

way, Muslims knew “Al Anfal” as the name of the eighth sura (chapter) of the Qur’an,

meaning “the spoils of war.” Verse one reads:

They ask you (O Muhammad) about (things taken as) spoils of war. Say: “(Such)
spoils (of war) are for Allah and the Messenger (Muhammad): So fear Allah, and
settle the differences between yourselves (with fairness): Obey Allah and His
Prophet (Muhammad), if you do believe.”52

One interpretation of this passage says that “booty taken in battle should never be our aim

in war” and that no soldier has an inherent right to it. Further, booty belongs to God, or

the community or the cause, and there should be no disputes about its division, as they

interfere with “internal discipline and harmony.”53 The passage is meant to promote good

relations among the Muslim community and to reduce friction based on greed for

material possessions. The application of a traditionally religious concept to the ethnic

cleansing of Iraqi Kurds and genocidal campaign against unarmed civilians and seeing

human beings as mere booty to be divided up among the vastly better armed Iraqi armed

forces, is seen as particularly perverse and an abuse of the Qur’an to many observers.

The Anfal campaign had eight stages. The First Anfal (23 February 1988 to 19

March 1988) targeted the Jafati valley (named after the Jaf tribe) near the Dukan Lake

dam northwest of Suleimaniyeh, and included the siege of Sergalou (“upper valley” in

Sorani Kurdish) and Bergalou (“lower valley”). Iraqi Defense Ministry orders from 23

February refer to a Revolutionary Command Council decree to begin “village

52
Interpretation of the Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: A Simplified Translation for Young People, trans.
Dr. Syed Vickar Ahamed, (Elhurst, N.Y.: Tahrike Tarsile Qur’an Inc., 2003), 153.
53
A. Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary (Brentwood, Md.: Amana Corp.,
1983), 414.
 28

purification.” PUK peshmerga were in the area, but both guerrillas and civilian villagers

were targeted with chemical weapons. One PUK fighter recalled,

There were thousands of people, many living in tents. I myself was injured, my
face became black and my skin was painful. I had trouble breathing. But these
were mild symptoms; others who were closer to the point of impact had severe
blisters. Some men suffered from swollen testicles.

The number of casualties is unclear; a PUK commander estimates that 28 people were

killed and 300 wounded.54

The Second Anfal took place between 22 March 1988 and 1 April 1988, a mere

three days after the First Anfal terminated. This stage targeted the nahya (district) of Qara

Dagh, a thin line of jagged mountains flanked by lowlands south of Suleimaniya. Qara

Dagh was fertile country; small farms grew winter wheat, barley, tobacco, rice, okra,

peas, green beans, tomatoes, melons and grapes. But the beauty and bounty of the land

did not protect the Kurds who lived and farmed there. Chemical weapons were fired from

rajima (truck-mounted artillery), herding the fleeing villagers and peshmerga into the

arms of troops as well as jahsh. Literally translated as “donkey foal,” jahsh was the term

used by Kurds for members of the pro-government Kurdish militia whom the Iraqis

called the fursan. These troops oscillated between collaboration and defiance—

sometimes following orders and implementing anti-Kurdish measures in exchange for the

license to loot and other opportunities for material gain, and other times coming to the aid

of their fellow Kurds.55

This second stage saw the first use of mass disappearance of people who were

captured or surrendered. A pattern began to emerge of the disappearance of teenage boys

and adult men; this stage also included the disappearance, especially from Germian, of

54
Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 97, 99.
55
Ibid., 162.
 29

women and children, including nursing infants. Eighty villages across Qara Dagh lost

hundreds of people. An eighteen-year-old young man named Akram, from Omer Qala,

was suspicious of the promises made by the army to his fellow villagers that nothing

would happen to those who surrendered. He hid in a barrel and watched; the five hundred

who gave themselves up were taken away and never seen again. Akram survived.56

Germian (“warm country”) was the focus of the Third Anfal, from 7 April 1988 to

20 April 1988 (only six days after the second stage). It is a large plain in the southern part

of Iraqi Kurdistan, close to Iraq’s Arab heartland. Captured cables, in a folder called “The

File on the Third Anfal Operation (Qader Karam sector), April 9, 1988,” describe 120

villages “stormed and demolished” or “burned and destroyed.” The intention was to

“wipe out all vestiges of human settlement,” according to Middle East Watch.57

Aisha, a pregnant 20-year-old woman from a village called Sheikh Hamid,

recognized that chemical weapons had been used when she saw “a lot of dead goats and

cows and birds.” Unable to find her husband, Aisha fled to the hills with her children.

She hid with others in a cave; that night she gave birth but had no covering for the

newborn. She stayed there, without food, for three days before venturing out, leaving the

baby behind. She was quickly spotted and captured by the jahsh. 58

Fleeing civilians like Aisha were channeled by Iraqi army troops toward

designated collection points by blocking all other means of escape. Others surrendered,

believing announcements they heard over loudspeakers that males who turned themselves

56
Ibid., 123–24.
57
Captured Iraqi documents reveal an array of euphemisms used during the Anfal. Chemical weapons were
referred to as “special ammunition” or “special measures.” Other stock phrases whose meaning was clear to
all include “prohibited areas” which meant areas under rebel control, and “agents of Iran,” which meant
PUK guerrillas. Ibid., 132, 246.
58
Unlike many others from her area, Aisha survived Anfal and was even reunited with her newborn. She
lost her husband, three brothers and twelve other members of her family in the Anfal. Ibid., 135–36.
 30

in would only be required to serve in the jahsh for one year. Men and women were

separated and taken by trucks to collection centers. Thousands were taken to Qoratu, the

notorious fort where prisoners were kept on starvation diets. Another destination was

Chamchamal, where residents watching fellow Kurds being herded off trucks staged a

spontaneous revolt to liberate the detainees. Townspeople threw stones at the trucks and

smashed the windows. Several dozen people escaped; however, the Amn (security police)

tracked many of them down, executed them publicly, and made family members pay for

the cost of the bullets before they could recover the bodies for burial. Middle East Watch

estimates that at least 200 villages were destroyed and 10,000 Kurds disappeared from

this area alone.

The Fourth Anfal, from 3 May 1988 to 8 May 1988, focused on the Lesser Zab

river valley (Nahr al-Zab-al-Saghir) southeast of Erbil (increasingly known as Hawler,

the city’s original Kurdish name). Iraqi troops were in high spirits, as a major battle of the

Iran-Iraq war in the south on April 17–18 had enabled Iraq to recapture the strategic Fao

peninsula from the Iranians (a victory clinched by the extensive use of chemical

weapons).59 Iraqi Air Force MIG fighters dropped chemical bombs on Askar and

Goktapa, killing 300 Kurds at the latter village. Nasrin, the 40-year-old daughter-in-law

of Goktapa’s leader, Abd-al-Qader Abdullah Askari, remembered what peshmerga had

told her in case of a chemical attack: head for the river and cover your face with a wet

cloth. She ran to the Lesser Zab river with seven of her eight children (her eldest

daughter, who ran in a different direction, was arrested and disappeared). With towels to
59
Up to 10,000 Iranian troops died in this offensive alone, making it the deadliest of the war. For a first-
hand perspective on the aftermath of this battle, see Rick Francona, Ally to Adversary: An Eyewitness
Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1999). For references to the
decisive role gas played in this battle, see Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 138; Francona, Ally to
Adversary, 23; and Robert S. Greenberger, “Iraq Opened Dangerous Pandora’s Box by Using Chemicals in
War With Iran,” Wall Street Journal, 1 August 1988.
 31

their faces, they saw one bomb land in the water and dead fish rise to the surface; they

survived.

One document from the Army’s First Corps, a daily field report dated 6 May

1988, gives an indication of how many of those captured were women and children: 37

were “saboteurs,” presumably peshmerga, while the civilians included 60 men, 129

women and 396 children.

As villagers were rounded up and and their money and identity documents

confiscated, one jahsh protested loudly. In response, “[a]n angry military officer … told

him, ‘These people are heading toward death, they cannot take money or gold with them.

The law of the state says they are going to die.’”60 Not all were captured. Fifty villagers

from Darmanaw hid for twelve days in a cave, eating wild grasses. Hunger drove them to

the town of Taqtaq, where they were helped by locals and huddled in the chicken sheds

of a poultry farm. The army never found them.

Some of those captured in this stage were taken temporarily to a livestock pen or

corral. As a convoy of trucks arrived, one jahsh whispered to an eleven-year-old boy

named Osman and his sister, “‘Take a chance, there are no soldiers here, run away. If

anyone asks you where you are from, tell them Taqtaq.’” Anfal, after all, targeted rural

Kurdistan, so being from a town would, according to strict “bureaucratic logic,” offer one

immunity.61 The siblings escaped with the help of another jahsh but lost their parents, two

brothers and three sisters, the youngest only three years old.

The Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Anfals, consisting of an assault and two follow-up

maneuvers over the same areas, occurred from 15 May 1988 to 26 August 1988.

60
Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 180.
61
Ibid., 189.
 32

Described as akin to a car’s windshield wiper motion, moving back and forth, Iraqi troops

“purified” the countryside between and including Rawanduz and Shaqlawa in the Balisan

valley northeast of Erbil (Hawler). These “clean-up” operations yielded much lower

numbers of people captured, as the population by that time had dramatically thinned. One

man from Hartal recalled walking through the nearby village of Wara just after the May

15 chemical weapons attack:

As soon as we arrived we saw four or five people in the orchard on the hillside.
They were obviously dying. … When we reached the center of the village, we
saw that the place was a mess. Food was still on the stoves. There were animals
lying all around, dead or dying, and we could hear their screams.62

In the early afternoon of May 23, waves of aircraft dropped chemical bombs on

the Balisan and Hiran valleys. By this time, the attacks were so frequent that the

peshmerga lost count of them. As survivors were taken into custody, the bureaucratic and

methodical nature of the Anfal is evident from another handwritten Amn field report

which stated, “On the night of June 2–3, thirty families from the village of Lower Bileh

were received by the military command of FQ 45. They were counted and surveyed by

us. We will presently send you lists of their names, addresses and birth dates.” No one

was to be “anfalized” until his or her personal data had been recorded.63

One progress report from the Suleimaniyah governate to the regional security

director at Kirkuk refers to the processing of Kurds which reached an industrial level at

the two-square-mile large army base called Topzawa.

Nine criminal subversives executed, along with eighteen members of their

families, as ordered by Ali Hassan al-Majid’s office; another nineteen people
executed for being found in prohibited areas, in violation of directive no. 4008 of
June 20, 1987; another forty-seven subversives sentenced to death by the
Revolutionary Court; and 2,532 individuals and 1,869 families totaling 9,030

62
Ibid., 196.
63
Ibid., 199–200.
 33

persons, who were among those arrested during the heroic Anfal operations, were
sent [to Topzawa].64

Other elements of the Iraqi army, meanwhile, were busy destroying all signs that

villages had once stood where now there was only rubble. Refugees who returned in 1991

saw that “everything had been destroyed, exploded by dynamite; even the pipes were

taken that brought the water from the spring.”65 All signs of life, including the beehives,

had vanished. The poplar trees, which had been used for roofing, had been cut down. The

cemetery was dug up and corpses removed, recalled one relative.

The Sixth and Seventh Anfal experienced some delays, perhaps due to the visit to

Washington, D.C., of PUK leader Jalal Talabani, who met with mid-level State

Department personnel.66 Saddam Hussein himself ordered that these campaigns resume

with “high momentum.”67 In July, the peshmerga were alarmed by reports that Iran was

considering accepting the ceasefire presented by UN Security Council Resolution 598.

This unilateral decision to end the fighting was a breach of the PUK’s agreement with

Tehran and threatened to leave the Kurds even more vulnerable, as Iraq could devote

more troops and resources to the campaigns in the Kurdistan region.

On August 8 the Iranians accepted Saddam Hussein’s terms for the ceasefire, and

hardly a day went by for the next several weeks without more chemical weapons attacks

in the Balisan Valley. Preparations were in the works, under al-Majid’s direction, for the

so-called Final Anfal. Two dates were selected: August 25 to “soften up” their targets

with chemical weapons, followed on August 28 to follow up with ground troops.

64
Ibid., 210.
65
Ibid., 202.
66
Ibid., 203; and Elaine Sciolino, “Kurdish Chief Gains Support In U.S. Visit,” New York Times, 22 June
1988, A3.
67
Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, 205.
 34

Whereas the first seven stages of the Anfal targeted peshmerga and civilians who

lived in PUK-controlled areas, the eighth and Final Anfal, from 25 August 1988 to 6

September 1988, was aimed at Masud Barzani’s KDP-controlled areas in northwest

Kurdistan bordering on Turkey called Badinan. 68 Refugees fleeing the chemical weapons

attacks crossed into Turkey and attracted international attention for the first time during

the Anfal (other than a brief period following the Halabja attack on 16 March 1988).

Many contemporary observers believed the campaign against the Kurds commenced after

the August 8 Iran-Iraq ceasefire, but the operations in Badinan were merely the last act of

a brutal play that had started in February, six months earlier. Three Iraqi army divisions

were redeployed from the southern front around Fao and Basra to Iraqi Kurdistan for the

final push.

The KDP leadership did not predict a massive chemical attack. One regional

commander said, “After Halabja, we thought the international community would stop

Saddam Hussein.”69 He was mistaken. Forty-nine villages were hit with mustard gas and

nerve agents. Many Kurds, fleeing to the border, died not from the chemicals directly but

from exposure, hunger, malnutrition, and disease acquired in the refugee camps. One

particularly poignant episode concerns the bridge at Baluka over the fast-flowing Greater

Zab river, only four miles from the Turkish border. Hundreds of villagers and their farm

animals had converged on the bridge, fleeing the encroaching army in all directions.

Warplanes appeared at 1 p.m. on August 25, dropping two chemical bombs on Baluka

and several more over the river. A green cloud descended on the bridge, and piles of dead

people and their livestock made the bridge impassable. Ground troops and jahsh (called

68
The captured Iraqi army documents refer to Masud Barzani, son of Mulla Mustafa Barzani, as “the
offspring of treason.” Ibid., 262.
69
Ibid., 268.
 35

chatta or “bandits” in this Kurmanji-speaking area) occupied the abandoned villages as

tens of thousands of refugees headed for Turkey. The Iraqi Army tried but failed to close

off access to the border, and approximately 70,000 made it across. Many who did not

make it, especially males, were executed by firing squads at the point of capture.

Fifth Corps commander Brigadier General Yunis Zareb proudly reported on the

success of the Final Anfal to his superiors by listing his tally of the “saboteurs” taken into

custody: “Saboteurs surrendered: 803; saboteurs captured: 771; men: 1,489; women:

3,368; and children: 6,964.”70

Although Kurdish leaders estimate that 182,000 people were killed during the

Anfal, based on an extrapolation of the number of villages destroyed, al-Majid claimed

famously that the number was no higher than 100,000, as if he did not want to take undue

credit for exploits not actually achieved.71 Another often-quoted gem from the so-called

Chemical Ali tapes reveals his dishearteningly accurate picture of the effectiveness of

international law and institutions in terms of preventing genocidal campaigns like Anfal.

I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The
international community? Fuck them! The international community and those
who listen to them.72

By the end of the Anfal campaign, the Kurdish countryside had effectively been

pacified and emptied of nearly all life. And no one had stopped Saddam Hussein from

achieving this objective. But since it was a town, the worst single attack on Kurdish

civilians at Halabja, which chronologically occurred during the first stage, was not

70
Zareb also listed the “plunder” obtained by jahsh: cattle, goats, rugs, mattresses and blankets, watches,
cash and pieces of gold, picture albums, eating utensils, packets of powered milk and toothpaste.” He
complimented the jahsh for their “good physical fitness, especially for mountain-climbing.” Ibid., 289.
71
Kurdish officials present at a meeting with al-Majid in 1991 report that, when they brought up the
number killed during the Anfal as approximately 182,000, al-Majid jumped to his feet in rage, saying,
“What is this exaggerated figure of 182,000? It couldn’t have been more than 100,000.” Ibid., 345.
72
Ibid., 349.
 36

technically part of Anfal. Survivors of Halabja, for example, who were caught up in the

Anfal dragnet were treated differently than other rural Kurds and often released by guards

if they were discovered to be from Halabja. Many observers have speculated that, if the

international community had intervened after Halabja in March, many of the victims of

the subsequent stages of Anfal, from April to September, could have been spared.73

73
See Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 244, for one such example.
 37

Chapter 3: Halabja: The Event

What happened on 16 March 1988 at Halabja, during the first stage of the Anfal?

How did it differ from other chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds? This chapter uses

the stories of survivors to answer these questions. It mines clinical reports for short-term

impacts on survivors and briefly explores the military context of the attack as well.

Civilians bore the brunt of the attacks, since most of Halabja’s inhabitants were

non-combatants (the peshmerga were outside the city). Residents were unprepared for a

chemical assault and had little or no access to gas masks and/or atropine injections.

Halabja also boasts the unwanted distinction of having the highest number of civilian

fatalities (between 3,000-5,000 dead) and injuries (approximately 5,000 to 10,000

wounded) from chemical weapons in history. (World War I poison gas casualties were

inflicted on the battlefield, and the 8,000 Iranian troops fatally gassed at the Fao

Peninsula were also combatants.) But statistics only tell one part of the story. Individuals

tend to get lost in the sea of numbers that is Halabja and Anfal. This chapter attempts to

put names and personal experiences behind the numbing quantities that become difficult

to comprehend after repeated telling.74

Nasreen’s Story

“At about ten o’clock, maybe closer to ten-thirty, I saw the helicopter.”

Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad, a 16-year-old girl from Halabja, was outside

preparing food for her family on the morning of 16 March 1988. “It was not attacking,

though. There were men inside it, taking pictures. One had a regular camera, and the

74
For a list of the names and ages of civilian victims of the Halabja attacks compiled from UN and media
sources, see Appendix 5.
 38

other held what looked like a video camera. They were coming very close. Then they

went away.”75

Nasreen had been married off by her father to her 30-year-old cousin, a local

physician’s assistant named Bakhtiar Abdul Aziz, several months earlier. That morning

she and her 15-year-old sister, Rangeen, were busy preparing food for the thirty or forty

relatives who were sheltering in the cellar. They and other residents of Halabja were

expecting an Iraqi counterattack at any moment on the city of approximately 70,000

people. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard (pasdaran) and peshmerga had attacked Iraqi

positions just outside Halabja in the past couple of days, forcing Iraqi soldiers to retreat.

The pasdaran had entered the city, celebrating their substantial territorial gains.

Residents hid in cellars to seek protection from the artillery shells they were expecting.

Although she thought the videotaping was strange, Nasreen was preoccupied with

making lunch. The bombardment started around 11 a.m., and Nasreen rushed to the

cellar. At 2 p.m. the bombing eased, and she went upstairs to get the food. “At the end of

the bombing,” she said, “the sound changed. It wasn’t so loud. It was like pieces of metal

just dropping without exploding. We didn’t know why it was so quiet.”

She noticed a strange smell. “At first, it smelled bad, like garbage. And then it

was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs.” She checked on the family’s pet

partridge in its cage. “The bird was dying. It was on its side.” As she looked out the

window, she saw more evidence of some invisible killer. “It was very quiet, but the

animals were dying. The sheep and goats were dying.” She went back to the cellar, where

she told the people something was “wrong with the air.”
75
Eyewitness accounts in this chapter are drawn from media, United Nations documents, and Middle East
Watch reports. Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad’s story was obtained by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg
nearly fourteen years after these events took place. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror: Saddam Hussein
Against the Kurds,” New Yorker, 25 March 2002.
 39

The people began to panic. They didn’t want to leave the shelter, but they knew

they were getting sick. Nasreen felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her eyes. Rangeen looked

closely at her eyes and said they were very red. Then children began vomiting

continuously. “They were in so much pain, and crying so much. … My mother was

crying. Then the old people started throwing up.” The poison gas, heavier than air, had

clung to the ground and seeped down into the cellar, transforming the shelter into a gas

chamber.

Nasreen’s uncle said they should go outside. “We were getting red eyes, and some

of us had liquid coming out of them. We decided to run.” She and some of her relatives

tentatively emerged from their shelter. The first thing they saw was their cow, lying on its

side and breathing heavily. “The leaves were falling off the trees, even though it was

spring.” She saw the lingering killer. “There were smoke clouds around, clinging to the

ground. … It was finding the wells and going down the wells.”

They checked which way the wind was blowing and headed in the opposite

direction. The children were too exhausted to walk after relentless vomiting episodes.

“We carried them in our arms.” The family members were thirsty and wanted to wash

their faces and those of the children but couldn’t decide whether the water was safe. “The

children were crying for water. There was powder on the ground, white. … Some people

drank the water from the well they were so thirsty.”

Nasreen and her relatives ran in a panic toward Anab (a collective settlement to

which the Iraqi Army had forced Kurds to relocate after destroying villages surrounding

the city of Halabja in an earlier campaign against the Kurds). The Iraqi Air Force
 40

continued to bomb the city while they were running. “People were showing different

symptoms. One person touched some of the powder, and her skin started bubbling.”

A truck driven by a neighbor pulled up alongside Nasreen and her relatives, and

they piled into the back. “We saw people lying frozen on the ground. There was a small

baby on the ground, away from her mother. I thought they were both sleeping. But she

had dropped the baby and then died. And I think the baby tried to crawl away, but it died,

too. It looked like everyone was sleeping.”76 Nasreen thought the truck would ensure an

escape to higher ground and their survival. But suddenly, the truck driver pulled over and

abandoned the vehicle and all the people on it, including his wife. “The driver said he

couldn’t go on, and he wandered away. … He told us to flee if we could. The chemicals

affected his brain, because why else would someone abandon his family?”

Nasreen and the children who could walk continued up the road on foot. She

wondered if her husband had survived the chemical bombardment. The scene on the road

to Anab was one of chaos and confusion. She saw other children running for the hills and

screaming that they were going blind. “The children were crying, ‘We can’t see! My eyes

are bleeding!’” In the disoriented mass of people, the family became separated. Nasreen

lost her mother and father and then, under the mind-altering affects from the poison gas,

she inadvertently led her cousins and siblings in a circle, back into the city. Someone led

them back out again up a hill to a small mosque where they sheltered, exhausted and

hungry. “But we didn’t stay in the mosque, because we thought it would be a target.”

They found a small house nearby and huddled there. Nasreen scrambled to find water and

something to eat for herself and the children. It was night, and they were all exhausted.

76
For photographs of corpses lining the streets of Halabja taken by Iranian journalists days after the attacks,
see Appendix 6.
 41

Meanwhile, Nasreen’s husband, Bakhtiar, was frantically searching for his wife.

“My plan was to bury her,” he said, fully expecting to find her dead. “At least I should

bury my new wife.” He had scavenged two syringes of atropine, a drug that helps to

counter the effects of nerve agents, from a local clinic. He injected himself with one and

went looking for Nasreen. After hours of fruitless searching, some neighbors told him

they had seen her and the children headed for the mosque on the hill. “I called out the

name Nasreen,” Bakhtiar recalled. “I heard crying, and I went inside the house. When I

got there, I found that Nasreen was alive but blind. Everybody was blind.”

Nasreen had lost her sight an hour or so before Bakhtiar found her. She was

searching for food for the children when she became blind. “I found some milk and I felt

my way to them and then I found their mouths and gave them milk,” she said.

Bakhtiar tried to wash the chemicals off the children. “I wanted to bring them to

the well. I washed their heads. I took them two by two and washed their heads.” But this

simple task was difficult, as the chemicals had affected the children’s motor skills. “Some

of them couldn’t come. They couldn’t control their muscles.”

Having one syringe left of atropine, Bakhtiar decided to give it to the person who

was most heavily overcome by chemicals, one of his neighbors. “There was a woman

named Asme. … She was not able to breathe. She was yelling and she was running into a

wall, crashing her head into a wall. I gave the atropine to this woman.” But Asme died

soon thereafter, and Bakhtiar wonders if he made the right choice. “I could have used it

for Nasreen.”

After the bombardment, Iranian troops reentered the city from the border eleven

miles away to occupy the area and provide humanitarian aid to the Iraqi Kurds, their
 42

intermittent allies in the Iraq-Iran War. They buried thousands of deceased victims and

evacuated survivors to hospitals and clinics in Iran. Nasreen and other members of her

family were treated at a hospital in Tehran.

Other Survivors’ Stories

In the Julakan neighborhood of Halabja, or Jewish quarter, a middle-aged man

named Muhammad came up from his cellar and saw something unusual.77 “A helicopter

had come back to the town, and the soldiers were throwing white pieces of paper out the

side.” Later, he realized they were measuring wind speed and direction so the chemical

bombardment would more accurately hit its targets. 78

In the northern part of town, Nouri Hama Ali, like Nasreen, decided to lead his

family to Anab. “On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to die,” he

remembered. “The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could see

them.” Children who could not continue were abandoned by hysterical parents too afraid

to stay behind. “Many children were left on the ground, by the side of the road. Old

people as well. They were running, then they would stop breathing and die,” he said.

Near the Julakan neighborhood, a twenty-year-old young man named Awat Omer

was overwhelmed by the smell of garlic and apples. He and his family were trapped in

their cellar as clouds of gas smothered the city. His brother began to laugh

uncontrollably, took off all his clothes and died soon after. As night fell, the children

became too sick to move.

77
Halabja’s Jewish community emigrated to Israel in the mid-1950s.
78
The stories of Muhammad, Nouri Hama Ali, Awat Omer and Muhammad Ahmed Fattah, told to a
journalist fourteen years later, are drawn from Goldberg, “The Great Terror.”
 43

Muhammad Ahmed Fattah, another 20-year-old in a different neighborhood, was

overwhelmed by an oddly sweet odor of sulfur. His family’s cellar was packed with 160

people. “I saw the bomb drop,” he recalled. “It was about thirty meters from the house. I

shut the door to the cellar. There was shouting and crying in the cellar, and then people

became short of breath.” His brother Salah’s eyes were pink, and something was oozing

out of them. “He was so thirsty he was demanding water.” Others began to shake with

tremors.

March 16 was supposed to have been Muhammad’s wedding day. His fiancée,

Bahar Jamal, was one of the first in the cellar to succumb to the gas. “She was crying

very hard. I tried to calm her down. I told her it was just the usual artillery shells, but it

didn’t smell the usual way weapons smelled.” Bahar knew she was dying. “She was

smart, she knew what was happening. She died on the stairs. Her father tried to help her,

but it was too late.”

In the same cellar, Hamida Mahmoud tried to save her two-year-old daughter

Dashneh by allowing her to nurse. She thought the child might not breathe in the gas if

she were breastfeeding. Hamida died with Dashneh still at her breast. By the time

Muhammad went outside, most of the people in the cellar were unconscious; his mother

and father and three of his siblings were already dead.

Jamila Abdullah, a 28-year-old elementary school teacher, said, “It was half past

six in the afternoon and the Iraqis had already left the town. I was at home when I heard

the explosion and then smelt the bad smell.”79 She placed a wet scarf over her face. Abdul

Rahman, a sixty-year-old mosque employee, was found wandering about the deathly

79
Jamila Abdullah was interviewed by a journalist in a clinic in Bakhtaran, Iran, less than a week after the
event. Nicholas Beeston, “Gas Victims Frozen in the Agony of Death,” The Times (London), 22 March
1988.
 44

quiet streets of Halabja some five days after the attacks. “I do not know where my

children are,” he lamented.80

Soman Mohammed, a 14-year-old boy, said he saw black jet fighters drop bombs

which smelled like “weed killer.” He said he was in the center of town when the attacks

came in the middle of the afternoon.81

Haj Ali Rasa, 50 years old, survived by hiding in his root cellar beneath his house.

“There was no army here, just people,” he told a journalist. “The white clouds came from

the Iraqi planes.”82

Mohamed Mahmoud Bharam, 35, said a “sudden harsh smell” made him fly out

of his house and up into the hills as the chemical attacks began. Mustard gas penetrated

through his clothes, burning all over like “scalding water.” He lost consciousness and was

later taken to an Iranian hospital.83

Aras Abed was in the hospital when the attacks took place. His parents and twelve

brothers and sisters all died when warplanes dropped chemical bombs on Halabja. He

found their bodies the day after the attack in an underground shelter. “I screamed,” he

remembered, “but there was no one left to hear me.”84

Testimonials from survivors like those above help to flesh out the personal impact

the attacks had on individual people. In addition, they form a record for potential

subsequent prosecution and compensation, as well as fodder for historical analysis and

the assessment of international law and institutions.

80
Ibid.
81
Paul Koring, “High Civilian Toll in Iraqi Attack on City: Poison-Gas Victims Recall Bomb Horror,” The
Globe and Mail (Canada), 22 March 1988.
82
Paul Koring, “Poison-Gas Attack Leaves City of Dead: At Least 4,000 Killed in Halabja,” The Globe
and Mail (Canada), 24 March 1988.
83
John Bierman, “A Terrible Survival,” Maclean’s, 11 April 1988.
84
Caroline Hawley, “Halabja Survivors Seek Justice,” BBC News, 19 October 2005.
 45

A Clinical Assessment

Some of the survivors from the Halabja attacks were evacuated by Iranian troops

to one of three hospitals in Tehran (Labbafi-Nejad Hospital, Baghiat Ullah Hospital, and

Loghman-al-Doleh Hospital), the Mofatteh Convalescence Centre near Tehran, and the

clinic at the Bakhtaran Reception and Monitoring Centre. Just over a week after the

attacks, Dr. Manual Dominguez, under the auspices of the UN, examined seventy patients

at these medical facilities and documented his findings in a report prepared for Secretary

General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. The report’s appendix, “Summary Report on Patients

Examined by the Medical Specialist with Relevant Clinical Data,” includes brief

descriptions of the circumstances of the injuries as told by the patients and physical

symptoms exhibited by them.85

Several patterns emerge from an analysis of Dominguez’s case notes. Some

victims were very young—infants—making the labels “dissident” and/or “rebel,” which

were often later applied to them, appear inaccurate and inappropriate. Several of the

women were pregnant at the time of the attacks yet somehow managed to deliver healthy

babies while convalescing. Out of 37 civilians examined, 21 were children, an indication

of the indiscriminate nature of chemical weaponry. While some patients were in

85
United Nations, “Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to Investigate Allegations
of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Conflict Between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq,” 25 April
1988, UN document no. S/19823/Add. 1.
A colonel in the Spanish Army Medical Corps, Dominguez had been sent to Iran on four previous
occasions (in 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987) by the UN Secretary General in order to investigate claims that
Iraq had used chemical weapons. UN, “Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to
Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Conflict Between the Islamic Republic of
Iran and Iraq,” 10 May 1988, UN document no. S/19823, pp. 2, 6.
Dominguez examined soldiers as well as civilians; my focus will remain on his civilian patients.
For an extensive and thorough analysis of the military nature of the Halabja attacks, from the Iraqi,
Kurdish, and Iranian combatants’ points of view, see Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq,
and the Gassing of Halabja, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
 46

relatively good condition, exhibiting symptoms that did not appear to be life-threatening,

others were struggling to breathe or were unconscious. The litany of horrific symptoms

includes frequent reference to discoloration, inflammation and ulceration of the genitalia.

The symptoms most commonly cited by Dominguez include: conjunctivitis (eye

infection), bronchitis, laryngitis, scabs on lips, second-degree burn-like lesions,

ulcerations, black-colored skin pigmentation, photophobia (light sensitivity), palpebral

oedema (severe swelling of the eyelids), erythema (redness/inflammation of the skin) and

leukopenia (low white blood cell count). Some examples from his case notes follow.

The youngest victim examined by Dominguez (case no. A-57) was the unnamed,

two-month-old son of another patient, Sabihe Ali. The report brusquely states: “On both

buttocks there are lesions resembling second-degree burns. Genitalia slightly swollen

without any abnormal pigmentation. Moderate tracheobronchitis.”86 The next youngest

victim, a six-month-old female, was categorized as “unidentified child” and described as:

“General condition good. Moderate conjunctivitis. On the right cheek there are remnants

of a vesicle that has scabbed over. Surface of thorax up to 5 cm above navel exhibits

brownish pigmentation.”87

In addition to these two infants were several toddlers. Two-year-old Taban

Madhi’s case notes include one paragraph about the circumstances of the injuries (using

language that is repeated throughout the report nearly verbatim) and another on her

symptoms.

While outside her home, she was exposed to the effects of a chemical agent from
an aerial bomb. First symptom she complained about was a burning sensation
over entire body.
86
UN, “Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to Investigate Allegations of the Use of
Chemical Weapons in the Conflict Between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq,” 25 April 1988, UN
document no. S/19823/Add. 1, case nos. A-56, A-57, p. 29.
87
Ibid., case no. A-51, p. 26.
 47

No perceptible conjunctivitis. Scabby lesions on face. Thorax shows darkening

which becomes much deeper at the level of armpits and from the navel up to the
upper third of thorax. From the naval down to the upper third of legs there are
extensive ulcerations.88

Three-year-old Mahnaz Mohammad, a little girl, was in much worse shape, suffering

from raw, exposed areas and a lung infection.

General condition feeble. Slight conjunctivitis. Black scabs on face. Neck

ulcerated. Right side of thorax and abdomen show brownish raw blotches. On side
of left foot there is a deep ulcerous lesion. Genitalia not affected. Laryngitis.
Aphonia [loss of voice]. Non-productive, continuous coughing. X-ray shows
bilateral pneumonia.89

Four-year-old Ardalan (no last name listed), a small boy, had experienced “acute

respiratory distress” requiring a tracheotomy.90 Conna Mohammed, a four-and-a-half-

year-old girl whose mother was “not affected” because she was on “the upper floor of

their dwelling,” was faring somewhat better. While her general condition was described

as “good,” she displayed darkened patches of skin across her chest, and her legs were red

and covered with “scattered lesions resembling second-degree burns.”91 Injuries of others

must have been quite extensive if Conna’s symptoms qualified her as being in “good”

condition. Another unidentified child, aged four, was listed in good condition but with

dark pigmented areas and lesions, one as large as 15 cm. His future was particularly

uncertain, because Dominguez noted “his parents have died or are missing.”92

Three of the females examined were pregnant; one cannot help but notice how

young many of these girls were and how many children they already had at such a tender

88
Ibid., case no. A-26, p. 14.
89
Ibid., case no. A-10, p. 6.
90
Ibid., case no. A-52, p. 27.
91
Ibid., case no. A-48, p. 25.
92
Ibid., case no. A-31, p. 16.
 48

age.93 One patient, 22-year-old Khadijeh Abdolrahim, is listed as having five children

“whose whereabouts she does not know.”94 Marayam Mohammad Amin, aged 15, was

four months pregnant when the attacks occurred and had four children, one of whom died

“as a result of attack with chemical weapons.” The report continues to describe her

plight:

She does not know what has become of the other three [children]. When the air
attack occurred, she went down to the basement of her home and came back up
when she thought the danger was over. The first symptom she noticed was ocular
irritation.

She exhibited scabby lesions around her mouth and lower lip, had a fever for four days

and suffered from leukopenia. The back of her hands were black, and her ankles were

ulcerated. She had a moderate cough, aphonia and pruritus (itchiness) on both legs.95 A

patient like Amin must have been in deep psychological shock from not knowing the

location and condition of her family as well as obvious physical distress.

Twenty-one-year-old Shamsi Mohamad experienced the loss of one child and the

birth of another. “While inside her home, she was exposed to contents of bombs dropped

by aircraft. She realized she had been affected when she started vomiting.” Dominguez

dryly summarizes the emotional roller-coaster ride this woman must have been

experiencing:

This patient picked up one of her children (a two-year-old boy) and held him in
her arms during the attack. The child has since died. She has given birth to a
healthy infant at the Convalescence Centre.

One wonders how this child and others in utero during the attacks fared later in terms of

healthy childhood development. Mohamad, meanwhile, was in good condition after the

93
A combination of factors undoubtedly contributed to such a practice, including cultural traditions, low
levels of education, and minimal access to reproductive health care.
94
Ibid., case no. A-17, p. 9.
95
Ibid., case no. A-8, p. 5.
 49

delivery but exhibited lesions resembling second-degree burns with dark patches over her

thorax, lesions and ulcerations on her toes, laryngitis and aphonia.96 Nasrin Mohammad,

age 25, also delivered a healthy infant while at the centre; her only lingering symptoms

after initial eye problems were an inflamed larynx and loss of voice.97

The tendency for chemical weapons to affect the genitalia is quite evident. A

sixty-year-old man named Mohammad Karim Rascool displayed the following

symptoms:

Moderate conjunctivitis. Face and neck exhibit moderately black pigmentation.

On back of right thigh and in bend of knee there are ulcerations resembling
second-degree burns. Legs show darkening with ulcerations 5 cm wide and 7 cm
long; there is another ulceration measuring 6 cm in diameter on left leg and
another one measuring 4.5 cm on right leg. Scrotum is hugely swollen. Skin on
penis has turned black. Swollen genitalia.98

As most of Dominguez’s observations are restrained, the occasional superlative

practically leaps off the page. In other words, the inflammation must have been severe.

Experiencing pain in and the indignity of examination of such intimate areas surely

compounded other more disabling injuries. Davood Karim, a 52-year-old male civilian,

was described as being in “very bad” condition, with severe conjunctivitis, photophobia,

and very black pigmentation on his face, neck, chest and back. His armpits were

ulcerated, his abdomen had lesions resembling second-degree burns, and his arms were

covered with a striped pattern of lesions. “Scrotum and skin of penis are black and

swollen.” He was inside his home at the time of the attacks.99 The genitalia of females as

well as males were affected. Kochar Ali, a 22-year-old woman, was in generally

satisfactory condition according to the case notes, but her left armpit and arm were

96
Ibid., case no. A-21, p. 11.
97
Ibid., case no. A-22, p. 12.
98
Ibid., case no. A-45, p. 23.
99
Ibid., case no. A-46, p. 24.
 50

covered with an “enormous lesion resembling [a] second-degree burn and stopping at the

level of the wrist. … Genital region is severely ulcerated. Dyspnea [shortness of breath]

but no acute respiratory insufficiency. No leukopenia.”100

Finally, two other patients’ case notes comprise examples of how gravely some of

the Kurds were injured. Thirty-year-old Ayeshe Rashid’s general condition, Dominguez

noted, was “very bad.” She was unconscious, had blepharitis (swollen eyelids) and

palpebral oedema so extensive the corneas could not be examined; her face was black,

and her trunk covered in burn-like lesions. “Legs show remnants of vesicles which have

left exposed surface raw.” Her genitalia were severely affected, the report continues, and

she was in such respiratory distress she required a tracheotomy as well as nasogastric

intubation. Her lab work revealed pancytopenia—low red and white blood cell and

platelet counts.101 An unidentified child, guessed to be about five years of age, was in

poor condition. “She is in pain. … Face ulcerated and with scabs in some areas.” She had

swollen, infected eyes, a black and ulcerated neck, and second-degree burns across her

chest. Her left ankle was ulcerated as well; she had tracheolaryngitis with frequent

coughing.102

Taken together, the case notes recorded by the UN medical specialist indicate a

consistent pattern of symptoms, which he concluded comprised evidence of a chemical

weapons attack. The question remains, however, if there were 10,000 people injured in

the Halabja attacks, why there weren’t larger numbers of patients at the hospitals

Dominguez visited? Perhaps some remained in Iraq and sought medical attention there

rather than evacuating across the border to Iran; patients may have been distributed

100
Ibid., case no. A-16, p. 9.
101
Ibid., case no. A-18, p. 10.
102
Ibid., case no. A-25, p. 13.
 51

among dozens of Iranian hospitals, of which the UN team only visited a handful; and

some of the injured could have considered their injuries not sufficiently serious to

warrant professional medical treatment. The reason is unclear at the moment. Perhaps

documents that can shed light on this question will be made public in the future.

The Military Context of Halabja

By March of 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was in its eighth year of duration. Iraq had

begun to increase the number of missile strikes against Tehran in the “War of the Cities”

campaign. Military analysts state that as many as 182 scud-B missiles with an extended

range capable of reaching the Iranian capital some 340 miles from the Iraqi border were

launched from the end of February to mid-April.103 The Iraqis were apparently trying to

lure the Iranians into organizing an attack in order to improve the Iraqi position at the

negotiating table. The Iranians took the bait.

Tehran launched three different offensives in quick succession, each in the north.

The first, called Zafar 7, took place on March 13 and consisted of joint operations

between the Revolutionary Guard (pasdaran) and the PUK peshmerga. The second

attack, called Bait al-Maqdis 4, occurred on March 14, and enabled Iranian forces to

come within twelve miles of Suleimaniyeh. The third, a much larger and more significant

offensive codenamed Val-Fajr 10, was announced on Tehran radio on March 16.104 Val-

Fajr 10 was the operation that triggered the attacks on Halabja. Tehran claimed it had

103
Richard Jupa and Jim Dingeman, cited in Middle East Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, 326 n18. This
brief discussion of the military context, dealt with in-depth by Hiltermann in A Poisonous Affair, is drawn
from these two sources.
104
Previous Val-Fajr designations had included such major campaigns as Val-Fajr 1, Iran’s first land assault
on Iraq in February 1983, and Val-Fajr 8 and 9 in February 1986, which consisted of the simultaneous
capture of the Fao Peninsula and areas within artillery range of Suleimaniya. Middle East Watch, Iraq’s
Crime of Genocides, 69, 326 n23.
 52

advanced as far into Iraqi territory as the eastern shores of Darbandikhan Lake and, more

importantly, that it had “liberated” the town of Halabja.

During the battle in the areas surrounding Halabja, the pasdaran managed to

capture more than a thousand Iraqi troops, including some officers. Versions of the

operations are contradictory and imprecise in terms of dates (whether they occupied the

city on the 13th, 14th, or 15th of March)105. The PUK claim a large role in the taking of

Halabja; Iranian troops downplay the contributions of the peshmerga.

But Baghdad did not send ground troop reinforcements. Instead, as Middle East

Watch puts it, “it had an entirely different strategy in mind.”106 On the 15th of March,

pasdaran were celebrating in the streets of Halabja, shouting “God is great! Khomeini is

our leader!” Some asked where the Shi‘a holy cities of Karbala and Najaf were, under the

mistaken belief that they were close by. But the vast majority of the townspeople were

apprehensive, expecting retaliation.

From the point of view of Baghdad, Halabja was strategically important for two

reasons: its location and the questionable loyalty of the local population during Kurdish

rebellions and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Halabja is situated only seven miles away

from Darbandikhan Lake, and its dam controls a significant portion of Baghdad’s water

supply. In terms of allegiance, local residents’ previous support for PUK guerrillas had

led the Iraqi government to retaliate against the townspeople back in May 1987. Two

neighborhoods, Kani Ashqan and Mordana, were bulldozed and their inhabitants were

forcibly moved to camps on the edge of town.107 The lack of resistance by the local

townspeople in March 1988, after PUK peshmerga and Iranian Revolutionary Guard
105
Hiltermann covers the various versions given by participants he interviewed. Hiltermann, A Poisonous
Affair, 107–20.
106
Ibid., 70.
107
Ibid., 69.
 53

troops entered Halabja, triggered another incidence of collective punishment by the Iraqi

government, this time with much more deadly effect.

The Iraqi counterattack began on 16 March with conventional weapons, air strikes

and artillery from the nearby town of Sayed Sadeq. The first strikes reportedly contained

napalm or phosphorous. One witness told Middle East Watch that “there was a huge

sound, a huge flame, and it had very destructive ability. If you touched one part of your

body that had been burned, your hand burned also. It caused things to catch fire.” The air

raids continued for hours. “Six planes would finish and another six would come.” 108 The

people could see clearly the bombardment came from Iraqi aircraft. Around 3 p.m. on 16

March, people in shelters began to smell what they described most often as sweet apples,

perfume, or cucumbers. The chemical weapons attack concentrated in the north of the

city, far from the now-abandoned military bases.

When the people emerged from their shelters, it was dark. The electricity had

been knocked out the day before by artillery fire. They saw dead bodies of humans and

animals littering the streets, sprawled in doorways, slumped over their car steering wheels

and survivors stumbling about, laughing hysterically, then collapsing. Pasdaran were

also about, wearing gas masks. Those who could ran toward the Iranian border, many

barefoot. There had been a freezing rain which turned the ground into mud. Symptoms

worsened as the night wore on, and many succumbed on the side of the road. 109

At dawn, Iraqi planes hovered overhead, watching the exodus. Refugees, fearing

more attacks, avoided the roads and walked through mountains in spite of the danger of

land-mines. Six thousand people are estimated to have sought refuge in the earlier

108
Ibid.
109
Ibid., 71.
 54

destroyed villages of Lima and Pega, and another thousand at the former village of

Daratfeh.110

The Iranians would occupy Halabja until July; before relinquishing control they

looted the town’s offices and homes of anything that moved (office equipment, books,

carpets), blew up two bridges, and captured security agency files which they later used

against their own Kurdish opposition who often sought sanctuary in Iraqi Kurdistan (e.g.,

members of KDPI).111 When the Iraqis reoccupied Halabja in July, they finished the job

of the city’s destruction by leveling virtually every structure with dynamite and

bulldozers.112

Meanwhile, Iranian helicopters ferried survivors to hospitals across the border

after doctors administered atropine injections. Some survivors spent two weeks in a

converted schoolhouse in Hersin; others were later moved to two refugee camps—

Sanghour, near Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, and Kamiaran in Kermanshah

province—where they stayed until the Anfal was over.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz was quoted in a Jordanian newspaper as saying,

“The loss of Halabja is a regrettable thing. Members of Jalal al-Talabani’s group are in

the area, and these traitors collaborate with the Iranian enemy.”113 The chemical attacks

on Halabja dealt a crushing psychological blow to the peshmerga and the civilians who

supported them. By March 18, PUK headquarters were stormed by Iraqi forces and

caused heavy losses.

110
Ibid.
111
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 122.
112
Middle East Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, 71.
113
Sawt al-Sha’b, translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), cited in Middle East
Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide, 327 n32.
 55

As for Nasreen’s fate, she and some family members were taken to a hospital in

Tehran. She was blind for twenty days. She said she lay in bed thinking, “Where is my

family? But I was blind. I couldn’t do anything. I asked my husband about my mother,

but he said he didn’t know anything. … He was avoiding the question.” The Iranian Red

Crescent Society had begun compiling books of photographs of the dead from Halabja in

order to facilitate informing next-of-kin. “The Red Crescent has an album of the people

who were buried in Iran,” she said, “and we found my mother in one of the albums.”114

Her father was alive but permanently blind. Her sister Rangeen and four other siblings

were dead. Like many other women, she began menstruating profusely while in the

hospital, received drugs that stopped the bleeding and was told she could not have

children.

After staying in Iran for several months, Nasreen and her husband returned to

Iraqi Kurdistan. In 1991 she gave birth to a boy who they named Arazoo (Kurdish for

hope). “He was healthy at first, but he had a hole in his heart. He died at the age of three

months.” By the time she spoke with a Western journalist in 2002, she was 30 and living

in Erbil (Howler), the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. She didn’t want pity, she said, but

did request that a doctor help her with a cough she’d had for fourteen years.115

114
Goldberg, “The Great Terror.”
115
Ibid. For more on long-term health affects from the Halabja attacks, see chapter 5.
 56

Chapter 4: Media and Official Reaction to Halabja

Back in the spring of 1988, overall reaction to the Halabja attacks was muted. In

fact, Saddam Hussein was not encumbered in any way from continuing to use chemical

weapons against Kurdish civilians for the next six months. Later, much greater attention

focused on chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds after images of fleeing refugees

stranded on the Iraqi/Turkish border in August 1988 flooded television screens and, as

discussed further below, crucially, after the eight-year Iran-Iraq War had ended. In

general, though, the media covered the Halabja story frequently and in depth once the

story filtered down from Iraqi Kurdistan to Western journalists. The lack of a vigorous

and effectual response could not be attributed to officials not knowing about the attacks,

thanks largely to good reporting. Official reaction within the U.S. government varied;

while Congress pushed for sanctions, the Reagan administration and especially the State

Department effectively blocked penalties against Iraq, claiming Iran had also used

chemical weapons on Halabja, and continued to provide Saddam Hussein with military

intelligence and economic assistance. The United Nations, after sending a team to

investigate charges of chemical weapons use, condemned both Iran and Iraq for using

these weapons and appears in hindsight to have been powerless to prevent and/or punish

violations of the Geneva conventions as seen at Halabja. Officials from other countries

rhetorically condemned the attacks but took no action. Iran used the event for propaganda

purposes, and the Arab/Islamic countries opted not to criticize Iraq at a conference held

soon after. The United Kingdom and Canada fell in line behind the U.S. in terms of

doling out blame to both Iraq and Iran. Finally, various NGOs (nongovernmental
 57

organizations) investigated the attacks and appealed for an international response that

never came.

Media Coverage

When were the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja first reported in the media?

How prominent was the story’s placement, and what other stories were competing for

attention at the time? How accurate were the initial reports, and how did journalists and

columnists characterize the attacks?

The story of the chemical attack on Halabja was widely covered, although it took

a few days for news of the attacks to reach the West (the news cycle was relatively longer

before Internet use became pervasive). No one at the time can credibly claim they took no

action against Saddam Hussein because they did not know the attacks occurred. On 18

March the first brief reports from Western correspondents based in Cyprus told of Iran

capturing the town of Halabja despite heavy chemical weapons use but made no mention

of civilian casualties.116 No additional reporting on Halabja appeared until four days later.

The story finally acquired the spotlight on 22 March. Americans saw on the

evening news grisly videotape of corpses which ABC news anchor Peter Jennings warned

would be “jarring.” Reporter Mike Lee observed, from Tehran, “Here in the war between

Iran and Iraq Kurdish women and children have in effect been punished for being in the

way.”117 The iconic number of 5,000 first appeared in the press as well, quoting the

Iranian delegate to the UN, Mohammed Mahallati, who accused Iraq of injuring 5,000

more and that seventy percent of the victims were civilians.118 Another story, appearing

116
“Iraq and Iran Raid Cities,” New York Times, 18 March 1988, A2; and “Iran Says Iraq Used Chemical
Weapons,” Christian Science Monitor, 18 March 1988, 2.
117
ABC News transcript, “World News Tonight,” 22 March 1988.
118
“Protest at U.N. on Chemical Arms,” New York Times, 22 March 1988, A11. Note the story’s placement,
far from the front pages.
 58

on the front page of the New York Times, mentioned Iran’s accusation of Iraqi chemical

weapons’ use in the context of the Tanker War, an aspect of the Iran-Iraq war which

received more attention due to its connection to oil, a resource considered vital to the

U.S. economy.119

Tehran quickly saw the attack’s propaganda value. More than a dozen Western

journalists were flown by Iranian government officials via helicopter to the front lines of

Halabja on 21 March. David Hirst, reporting for The Guardian, described the scene he

witnessed:

No wounds, no blood, no traces of explosions can be found on the bodies—scores

of men, women, children, livestock and pet animals—that litter the flat-topped
dwellings and crude earthen streets in this remote and neglected Kurdish town in
Iranian-occupied Iraq. … The skin of the bodies is strangely discoloured, with
their eyes open and staring where they have not disappeared into their sockets, a
grayish slime oozing from their mouths and their fingers still grotesquely twisted.
Death seemingly caught them almost unawares in the midst of their household
chores. … Here a mother seems to clasp her children in a last embrace, there an
old man shields an infant from he cannot have known what.120

Nicholas Beeston, writing for The Times (London), compared the victims of Halabja to

“figures unearthed at Pompeii … in suspended animation.” His sympathetic portrayal of

the Kurds continued: “A family of five who had been sitting in their garden eating lunch

were cut down—the killer gas not even sparing the family cat [or] the birds in the tree,

which littered the well-kept lawn.”121 Paul Koring, writing from Tehran, noted the sixty-

seven civilians being treated at Lebafi-Negaed hospital among the 140 Kurds who had

been admitted over the weekend. He interviewed a U.S.-trained physician, Dr. Hamid

119
Alan Cowell, “54 Feared Dead on 2 Oil Tankers In Iraqi Attack on Iran Terminal,” New York Times, 22
March 1988, A1.
120
David Hirst, “Iran Puts Dead on Show After Gas Raid: The Kurdish Victims Caught Unaware by
Cyanide,” The Guardian (London), 22 March 1988.
121
Nicholas Beeston, “Gas Victims Frozen in the Agony of Death,” The Times (London), 22 March 1988.
In general, an examination of media coverage of the Kurds reveals more comprehensive treatment by the
Brits than the Americans. Perhaps this greater interest in the region—at least during the 1980s— is a legacy
of the British occupation of Iraq after World War I.
 59

Sonrabpour, who said the “difficulty of treating a large number of civilian casualties had

been compounded because none of the hospital staff spoke Kurdish and none of the

patients understood Farsi.” The language barrier surely exasperated the plight of the Iraqi

Kurdish patients. “Dr. Sonrabpour said the pathetic group of burned and coughing

figures, especially the children, had ‘really touched my heart because they were helpless

civilians.’”122 A Reuters story with a Tehran dateline took a more measured approach,

emphasizing the story’s propaganda value for the Iranians. “Iranian officials displayed

injured Iraqi civilians yesterday to back up their charges that Baghdad is using chemical

weapons on its own territories.” But the unnamed reporter did refer to the injuries visible

on civilians: “Women and children were among several dozen hospital patients suffering

peeling skin, raw pinkish blotches and labored breathing that doctors said appeared to

have been caused by mustard gas, and possibly phosgene and other chemicals.”123

The story still had legs the next day, as television newscasts covered the Iraqi

government’s denial of chemical weapons use at Halabja and its brazen charge that Iran

had launched the attack. One broadcast reported, “The Iranians say that 3,500 people

were killed in the Halabja region,” an example of how the number of fatalities shifted

from one account to another. American media sources tended to carefully attribute the

sources of such claims, rather than stating absolutely that civilians were killed often seen

in British and Canadian reporting.124 Viewers also saw swift condemnation of the attacks

by the Reagan administration. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called the attack

“horrible, outrageous and disgusting.” State Department spokesman Charles Redman’s

key soundbite, which would set the tone for any potential international response, was also
122
Paul Koring, “High Civilian Toll in Iraqi Attack on City: Poison-Gas Victims Recall Bomb Horror,” The
Globe and Mail (Canada), 22 March 1988.
123
Reuter-AP, The Toronto Star, 22 March 1988, A3.
124
ABC News transcript, “World News Tonight,” 23 March 1988.
 60

aired: “There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this

fighting.” Reporter Bob Zelnick uncannily predicted the absence of punitive action:

“There appears little likelihood of any effort to penalize Iraq despite what’s widely

regarded as an atrocity. Western diplomats concede their outrage is outweighed by a

continuing desire to see Iraq survive in its war against Iran.”125

In contrast to the often tempered language of members of the American press, UK

reporters Andrew Gowers and Richard Johns, after visiting Halabja, pulled no punches by

describing the attacks as revealing “unplumbed depths of savagery.” Two Kurds were

cited in this story; KDP central committee member Hushyar Zebari and PUK leader Jalal

Talabani. Zebari said, “Surely President Saddam Hussein is the first ruler in the world to

use chemical weapons against his own people,” language that was later echoed by U.S.

President George W. Bush during the buildup to war in 2003. And Talabani was said to

have called the use of chemical weapons, the razing of Kurdish villages and mass

deportation of Kurds to camps on the other side of the country “genocide.” Gowers and

Johns concluded that the world’s reaction had been grossly insufficient. “The

international community’s response to the Kurds’ mounting cries of alarm has so far been

a deafening silence.”126

Despite the extensive coverage, during the ten days immediately following the

attacks, the Halabja story never made the front page of the New York Times, one of the

most influential American newspapers known for in-depth international coverage derived

from dozens of overseas bureaus. Seeing which stories were getting more attention helps

create a fuller picture of the context in which the Halabja attacks occurred.

125
Ibid.
126
Andrew Gowers and Richard Johns, “Iraq Uses Chemical Bombs on its Own Citizens,” The Financial
Times (London), 23 March 1988, 4.
 61

A perusal of the front pages for the weeks following 16 March reveals the

dominant themes of the times: The Cold War was not yet over (observers were unaware

that the Berlin Wall would fall the following year); the Soviets still occupied

Afghanistan, although talks were underway for troop withdrawals; and Latin America

appeared repeatedly in the headlines.127 Domestically, the 1988 presidential election

campaign was underway. President Reagan was completing his second term and could

not run again. Vice President George H. W. Bush was trouncing Sen. Bob Dole in the

Republican primaries, while Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was leading the

Democrats. Polls had Bush and Dukakis virtually tied at this point in the campaign, but

Bush would pull out a substantial lead by November.

Congress had blocked Reagan’s attempt to arm the contras in Nicaragua, the

rebels who were fighting the leftist Sandinista government, but the president tried to get

around those legalities in what was to be known as the Iran/Contra affair. On 17 March,

capping a fourteen-month investigation, Lieut. Col. Oliver North and Rear Adm. John

Poindexter were indicted for their roles, as National Security Advisor staff, in the

diversion of millions of dollars from the sale of arms to Iran to the Nicaraguan contras.

This domestic story overshadowed an atrocity happening to a people most Americans had

never heard of (the Kurds) in a casualty-laden war which many perceived as a stalemate

grinding on into its eighth year.

Other stories included Reagan’s dispatch of 3,000 American G.I.s to Honduras

(after Nicaraguan troops allegedly crossed into Honduran territory) and the state of

“urgency” declared in Panama after its military ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, was charged

in a Florida court with drug trafficking and racketeering. Reagan was also preparing for
127
See New York Times, 16–26 March 1988, A1.
 62

another summit with Mikhail Gorbachev—the first visit in fourteen years of an American

president to the Soviet Union. Nuclear disarmament talks were stalled over Reagan’s

“Star Wars” initiative, a controversial space-based missile-defense system.

The Cold War comprised the proverbial elephant in the living room and the

glasses through which U.S. government officials largely saw foreign policy for more than

a generation (1945–1989). This mindset influenced the way in which the U.S. responded

to Halabja, but I argue that other economic and energy-related factors played a larger role

(issues discussed further below).

Media coverage of Halabja was adequate: reporters in the field did their job,

although editors back at their desks arguably dropped the ball in terms of the story’s

placement. Was the coverage accurate as well? In hindsight, journalists appeared for the

most part to take Iraqi denials of culpability for Halabja with a healthy grain of salt. For

months the Iraqi government consistently denied using chemical weapons on Kurdish

civilians; later, however, they admitted using chemical weapons but claimed that Iran had

used them first, sounding more like school-yard bullies than heads of state. Newspaper

reporters often repeated without qualification, by and large, the U.S. government line that

Iran as well as Iraq had used chemical weapons on Halabja, although the Americans

never produced—then or now—any proof of Iranian chemical weapons’ use.

Some observers have concluded that this evidence has never been produced

because it does not exist and that U.S. officials used outright deception to publicly charge

Iran with complicity in the Halabja attacks in order to deflect criticism of their ally

Iraq.128 Reporters failed to push U.S. government spokesmen to produce the evidence of

Iran’s use of chemical weapons on Halabja. Perhaps this lack of media independence was
128
One example of such a perspective is Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 205.
 63

due to the tendency to accept official versions of events without question; another factor

may have been the relative popularity of the Reagan presidency with the American

people. Corporate-owned media keep a close eye on ratings; being seen as unfairly

attacking a popular president could affect the bottom line. Finally, profound feelings

against Iran in the United States, lingering after the overthrow of U.S.-backed Shah Reza

Pahlavi and the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, also contributed to

an atmosphere in which appearing to sympathize with the Iranians would have been a

risky position.

In addition to giving government officials a pass, journalists handled statistics

loosely. During the Iran-Iraq war, when the U.S. was officially neutral but tilted towards

Iraq, the number of victims cited in some articles tended to be low-balled, claiming that

merely “hundreds” rather than thousands of victims were killed at Halabja.129 After the

July 20th ceasefire, when it was safer to criticize Saddam Hussein’s regime without fear

of harming Iraq’s chances of defeating (or not being defeated by) Iran, the number of

Halabja victims in some accounts jumped to the thousands without explanation and the

pervasive use of “allegedly” and “reportedly” dropped to the wayside.130 If a writer or

publication’s bias is to deflect attention from the atrocity of an ally, then a lower figure

will do; if the intent is to persuade readers of a regime’s threat to regional and global

stability, then higher numbers are appropriate. The absence of precise, agreed-upon

statistics regarding the number of fatalities at Halabja created the perfect conditions for

their manipulation.
129
David B. Ottaway, “U.S. Decries Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons: ‘Grave Violation’ of International
Law Cited,” Washington Post, 24 March 1988, A37; and “Poison Gas: Iraq’s Crime,” New York Times, 26
March 1988, A30.
130
Robert S. Greenberger, “Iraq Opened Dangerous Pandora’s Box by Using Chemicals in War with Iran,”
Wall Street Journal, 1 August 1988, 1; and “So What If It’s Gas?” Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1988,
1.
 64

Views expressed in editorials, Op-Eds, and columns varied as well. One of the

strongest editorials, published by the New York Times, called the Halabja attacks a “war

crime” and urged Washington and Moscow to “get an urgent message to Baghdad now:

Stop using these weapons or forfeit support.” This editorial stance, though principled,

was ignored by the powerbrokers in Washington. Columnist Martin Peretz was also

unequivocal in his criticism of the attacks and the West’s weak response to them:

There is something breathtaking in the way the policy elites of the West have
simply shrugged off what may be the single most enormous massacre of civilians
in one place at one time since the Nazis. Last month the Iraqi air force dropped
poison gas on the town of Halabja, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of
civilians. The inconvenient atrocity was treated in the media like a human interest
story. … This is not the first time that Iraq’s very weak regime has proved the
world community powerless (or just unwilling) to enforce the simplest constraint
on the conduct of war.131

In a column for the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland asked rhetorically, “Is the world

really prepared to look the other way and do nothing in the most ghastly case of the use

of poison gas since the Nazi death camps of World War II?” He urged Reagan not to veto

the pending sanctions bill in Congress and not “become a party to the refusal to confront

evil.”132

In contrast, some writers took issue with the term “genocide” and wanted to see

more evidence before passing judgment on Iraq. Patrick Tyler wrote a piece for the

“Insight” section of the Washington Post in which he argued that, while it was “horrible,”

genocide was “not an accurate term” for what was happening to the Kurds. After touring

the region by helicopter, he stated that “the vast majority of Iraq’s Kurds are safe in their

homes, perhaps safer” than when the peshmerga controlled the north. Tyler claimed that,

since “major towns and cities of Kurdistan are still standing, unscathed and populated”

131
Martin Peretz, “Cambridge Diarist: Neighborhood Bullies,” The New Republic, 25 April 1988, 43.
132
Jim Hoagland, “A ‘Furlough’ for Iraq,” Washington Post, 12 October 1988, A19.
 65

the term did not apply. “Life is going on,” he opined, “but it is not as pretty as the life the

Kurds used to live with their flocks in the high valley—a sort of noble Hobbit land of

mud-roof houses covered with spring grass.” Tyler sanitized the ethnic cleansing of Iraqi

Kurdistan, calling it a “relocation program.”133

Columnist Milton Viorst, writing in opposition to the pending sanctions

legislation in Congress against Iraq, asserted that Saddam Hussein’s regime was about to

be punished “for a particular crime which, according to some authorities, may never have

taken place.” After his tour by helicopter, Viorst concluded that, “if lethal gas was used,

it was not used genocidally—i.e. for mass killing. … If there had been large-scale killing,

it is likely they [the Kurds] would know and tell the world about it. But neither I nor any

Westerner I encountered heard such allegations.” He naively deduced that, since he

attended a Kurdish wedding in Baghdad and saw eating, drinking and dancing, that the

community was not in any danger. Viorst seemed unaware that due to the repressive

nature of the Ba‘athist regime, it was unlikely a Kurd would feel safe confiding to a

visiting Westerner escorted by Iraqi government officials.134

And finally, a column in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs saw the

threat of sanctions against Iraq as “Arab bashing.” The author said there was no “real

proof” the Iraqis had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and cautioned against a

“rush to judgment until after we meet some victims with seared lungs.” Evidently the

numerous reports compiled by UN investigators were not sufficient for this observer.135

133
Patrick E. Tyler, “The Kurds: It’s Not Genocide, But Iraq’s Policy of Repression and Relocation Is Still
Horrific,” Washington Post, 25 September 1988, C5.
134
Milton Viorst, “Poison Gas and ‘Genocide’: The Shaky Case Against Iraq,” Washington Post, 5 October
1988, A25.
135
Richard Curtiss, “Iraq & Iran: Rush to Judgment,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 31
October 1988, 51.
 66

In general, though, the media informed the public about the attacks on Halabja

such that officials could not later use ignorance to explain their inaction.

U.S. Government Reaction

Reagan administration officials responded to the attacks on Halabja by

rhetorically condemning the use of chemical weapons but failing to back their words with

action. In fact, not only did the administration fail to penalize Iraq for chemical weapons

use on civilians, it actively blocked efforts by others to hold Saddam Hussein and his

regime accountable. The administration blamed Iran as well as Iraq for the attacks on

Halabja, without ever producing evidence of Iranian involvement, a strategy that diffused

international outrage; it tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent the UN from investigating the

Halabja attacks; and it successfully stopped a tough Congressional bill—that would have

hit Iraq with harsh sanctions for chemical weapons use—from becoming law. The

administration put economic and energy-related interests above human rights when

formulating official policy on Iraq, and evidence of these priorities appears frequently in

memos and cables.

The U.S. government, however, was not in lock step concerning Iraq and

chemical weapons use. Some members of Congress argued passionately on the floor of

the Senate and House to penalize Baghdad; the State Department was not unanimous in

its objective to maintain good relations with Iraq, putting Secretary of State George

Shultz in the position of having to decide which of his staffers’ policy positions to

approve.136
136
For one example of differing views regarding Iraqi policy among State Department staffers, in this case
whether to extend Export-Import Bank credits, see Action Memorandum, “Export-Import Financing for
Iraq,” Alan P. Larson, Richard W. Murphy, and Richard Schifter to George P. Shultz, 29 December 1988,
Digital National Security Archive, document no. IG00739. The Digital National Security Archive
 67

The lack of a vigorous response in 1988 by the Reagan administration to reports

of Iraqi CW use was not without precedent. As early as 1983 the U.S. government knew

Iraq was using chemical weapons and in effect turned a blind eye (other than a rhetorical

condemnation) to this violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 banning the use in war of

chemical weapons. A memo from the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military

Affairs to Secretary Shultz in November 1983 clearly indicates U.S. government

knowledge of Iraqi chemical weapons use against Iranian troops, stating bluntly: “We

have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical

weapons.” The State Department knew the National Security Council was considering

assisting Iraq in its war with Iran and suggested they might have some leverage to

persuade Baghdad to halt chemical weapons use.

If the NSC decides measures are to be undertaken to assist Iraq, our best present
chance of influencing cessation of CW use may be in the context of informing
Iraq of these measures. It is important, however, that we approach Iraq very soon
in order to maintain the credibility of U.S. policy on CW, as well as to reduce or
halt what now appears to be Iraq’s almost daily use of CW.137

Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Kurdish guerrillas was also known to U.S.

officials. A heavily redacted cable from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to the Defense

Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1987 reveals the U.S. military knew Al-Majid had

“flattened” hundreds of villages and was using chemical weapons (CWs) against the

peshmerga. “Despite the ruthless repression, which also includes the use of chemical

[emphasis in original] agents, and the reinforcement of the armed forces by several

[hereafter DNSA] publishes online U.S. government policy documents made available through FOIA
(Freedom of Information Act) requests. The “IG” designation refers to the Iraq-Gate Collection.
http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com.
137
Information Memorandum, “Iraq Use of Chemical Weapons,” Jonathan T. Howe to George P. Shultz, 1
November 1983, DNSA, doc. no. IG00145.
 68

brigades of the Presidential Guard, Iraqi security operations, coordinated by Ali Hassan

al-Majid, have failed to stifle the Kurd insurgence so far.”138

The first mention of Halabja in available U.S. government documents is dated 22

March, six days after the attacks and the same day the story hit American news

broadcasts. In another heavily blacked-out cable from JCS to DIA, classified intelligence

sources refer to Iranian claims of twenty bombardments of cyanide, mustard and nerve

gas on the Halabja area and reveal the nonchalant attitude of at least one member of the

American intelligence community: “Iraqi use of cluster and chemical munitions is not an

unusual way for them to deal with these situations.”139

Although President Ronald Reagan did not comment publicly on Halabja, White

House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called the attacks “horrible, outrageous and

disgusting.” But that same day State Department spokesman Charles Redman cryptically

claimed, “There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in

this fighting.”140 The Reagan administration had apparently determined that muddying up

the waters a bit would be the best way to deflect criticism from their unofficial ally Iraq.

While official U.S. policy during the Iran-Iraq war was neutrality, the American so-called

“tilt” towards Iraq was clear by the end of the war and especially visible with American

escorts of Persian Gulf shipping. This brief statement implying Iranian as well as Iraqi

culpability for Halabja was repeated for years in the media and had a profound effect on

the world’s drive to hold the perpetrators accountable, effectively diffusing responsibility

138
Cable, “IIR [Excised] the Internal Situation in Iraq,” U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency, 4 August 1987, DNSA, doc. no. IG00453.
139
Cable, “[Excised] Val-Fajr 10 Offensive,” Joint Chiefs of Staff to Defense Intelligence Agency, 22
March 1988, DNSA, doc. no. IG00533.
140
ABC News transcript, “World News Tonight,” 23 March 1988.
 69

for the attacks. But no evidence of Iranian CW use on Halabja has ever been made

public.141

Members of Congress also expressed their horror over Halabja. The first reference

on Capitol Hill to the attacks occurred on 24 March. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Cal.), a

Holocaust survivor, said Americans had not been so shocked by graphic television

images of dead corpses since the mass suicides at Jonestown. He reminded his colleagues

that the U.S. Navy was protecting Iraq and called on the Reagan administration to “use its

leverage with the regime in Baghdad to convince them that mass poisoning of its own

civilian population is unacceptable in the eyes of civilized nations.”142 Five days later, the

effect of the State Department position of dual culpability is apparent in the remarks of

Rep. Chester G. Atkins (D-Mass.), which likened the attacks to a passage from the

Biblical book of Revelations. “It looked as if the fourth horseman of the apocalypse had

ridden through the town, and left a swath of death in his wake. Chemical weapons are

horrible. … Yet it is believed that both Iran and Iraq have used these terrible weapons in

the gulf war.”143

But the U.S. government took no action in response to Halabja and the deaths of

as many as 5,000 Kurdish civilians. The different stages of Iraq’s Anfal campaign were

put into operation without any interference from either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. We

know that the Reagan administration was aware of the Anfal, although officials may not

have known the Iraqi code name for it. In April, as Anfal stage 3 was coming to an end, a

JCS cable to the DIA neatly summarized in four bullet points the “information on Iraqi
141
For an extensive discussion on Iran’s fledgling chemical weapons capacity and an authoritative
refutation of Iranian responsibility for CWs on Halabja, see Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair.
142
Congressional Record, 24 March 1988, House of Representatives, p. 5111, cited in The Kurdish
Question in U.S. Foreign Policy: A Documentary Sourcebook by Lokman I. Meho (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2004), 36.
143
Congressional Record, 29 March 1988, House, p. 5556, cited in Meho, 36.
 70

measures against the Kurdish population”: 1.5 million Kurds resettled in camps, 700-

1000 villages and residential areas targeted for resettlement, large numbers of Kurds

placed in “‘cowcentration’ [sic] camps,” and severe restrictions placed on the local

population “throughout the north.”144 While the statistics on villages turned out to be an

undercount, the cable confirms the Reagan administration was cognizant of the

tremendous scope of the campaign against the Kurds.

In June, PUK leader Jalal Talabani came to the United States to raise charges of

genocide against Saddam Hussein to the UN, Capitol Hill, the State Department, and the

press, and his visit reveals how the administration attempted to avoid a confrontation with

Baghdad. President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz refused to meet with Talabani;

a meeting between the peshmerga leader and a mid-level State Department official

caused a diplomatic furor.145 Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz responded by canceling a

long-scheduled meeting with Shultz. A National Security Council memo reveals staffers’

sensitivity to Iraqi and Turkish reaction to the Talabani meeting. “We were aware that the

Iraqis would react badly to his entry into the U.S. and his reception in the department,

even at the office director level; however, we underestimated the depth of the Iraqi

reaction.”146 Reagan administration officials frequently appear tentative and cautious in

their dealings with the Iraqi regime, as if they were afraid their actions or rhetoric would

upset Saddam Hussein and jeopardize the U.S.-Iraqi relationship.

For example, a secret talking points memo detailing Reagan administration policy

towards Iraq includes a reference to “our commitment to a strong relationship with Iraq,
144
Cable, “[Excised] Baghdad’s Represive [sic] Measures Against the Kurds,” JCS to DIA, 19 April 1988,
DNSA doc. no. IG00555.
145
Elaine Sciolino, “Kurdish Chief Gains Support In U.S. Visit,” New York Times, 22 June 1988, A3.
146
Cable, “Information Memo Re Talabani,” National Security Council, Bureau of Near East Affairs,
Edward P. Djerejian, to Secretary of State George Shultz, 20 June 1988, folder “Iraq [1987-1988],” box
91849, William J. Burns Files, Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, Calif [hereafter Burns Files].
 71

based upon support for Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and non-interference in

Iraq’s internal affairs.” In other words, the U.S. had no plans to block Baghdad’s

counterinsurgency measures. It also alludes to an attempt to distance the White House

from Congressional support for Talabani, listing “further points on Talabani, including

emphasis that SFRC [Senate Foreign Relations Committee] action on Kurds was taken

independent of Executive Branch.” And in a perversely chilling assessment of Saddam

Hussein’s chemical weapons-enhanced progress on the battlefield, the memo declares

that “Iraq’s continued military success is impressive.”147

Although Congress did not take any action on the attacks immediately after

Halabja, by the summer they at least moved to put their displeasure with Iraq on the

record. On 24 June the Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution (S. Res. 408)

condemning Iraq for CW use (91-0). Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), speaking in favor

of its passage, cited 2,000 deaths at Halabja and reiterated that “Iran has reportedly used

chemical weapons, including at Halabja, in retaliation for Iraqi attacks.” Sen. Mark

Hatfield (R-Ore.) reminded his colleagues that Iran used “children to sweep minefields”

during the still ongoing Iran-Iraq war. He also criticized Congress for giving “the green

light to production of an entirely new generation of nerve gas weapons just last year” in

spite of former President Richard M. Nixon’s moratorium on U.S. nerve gas production

in 1969. Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-RI), a consistent supporter of Kurdish aspirations on the

Senate floor over many years, asserted that Halabja claimed 5,000 victims and that

“tragically, poison gas has become a standard part of the Iraqi arsenal.” Oddly, the

147
Secret Memo, “Additional Talking Points for Assistant Secretary Murphy,” n.d., folder “Iraq [1987-
1988],” box 91849, Burns Files.
 72

language in the resolution itself only cited that “hundreds” were killed at Halabja, in yet

another example of the variability of the number of Halabja victims.148

After Iran indicated it would accept a ceasefire on 20 July, footage of Kurds

fleeing the final stages of Anfal and stranded on the Turkish border began to flood

American television screens, and Congress finally took action that had some teeth. The

sight of so many vulnerable refugees spurred Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer

Peter Galbraith to quickly draft a bill which was sponsored by Senator Pell, the SFRC

chair. Senate bill 2763, the “Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988,” called for tough

sanctions against Iraq; on 9 September, within twenty-four hours of its introduction, the

bill passed on a voice-vote. The bill asserted that “Iraq’s campaign against the Kurdish

people appears to constitute an act of genocide, a crime abhorred by civilized people

everywhere and banned under international law.”149

Some have argued that including genocide in the sanctions bill doomed its

chances of passing. For example, Hiltermann argues that information available at the time

did not support the charge of genocide, and that evidence revealing the full picture of

Iraqi repression against the Kurds did not emerge until 1991.150 However, a weaker

version of the sanctions bill, passed by the House, removed the “genocide” language and

still failed to become law, so other factors must have been obstacles to its passage.

But in September 1988, Senate bill 2763 called for a ban on U.S. exports, credits,

and credit guarantees to Iraq, for the U.S. to oppose loans to Baghdad from international

148
Congressional Record, Senate, 24 June 1988, pp. 15918-21, cited in Meho, pp. 37–42.
149
U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Chemical Weapons Use in Kurdistan: Iraq’s Final
Offensive. A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1992). For a thorough discussion of Galbraith’s drafting of the bill, and the story of its failure to
become law, see Power, A Problem from Hell.
150
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 213. See also Power, A Problem from Hell and Galbraith, The End of
Iraq.
 73

financial institutions, and prohibited American oil imports from Iraq.151 At the time, U.S.

credits and credit guarantees to Iraq totaled $800 million per year, so the proposed ban

would have had a significant impact.

Arguing in favor of the bill, Senator Pell compared the gassing of the Kurds to the

Holocaust and speculated as to why there was not a greater outcry on their behalf. He

also placed a measure of responsibility on those who were not speaking out.

While a people are gassed, the world is largely silent. There are reasons for this:
Iraq’s great oil wealth, its military strength, a desire not to upset the delicate
negotiations seeking an end to the Iran-Iraq war. Silence, however, is complicity.
A half century ago the world was also silent as Hitler began a campaign that
culminated in the near extermination of Europe’s Jews. We cannot be silent to
genocide again.152

Pell acknowledged the sacrifice American business would have to make, but justified it

by saying “this is a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands … a moral issue of

the greatest magnitude.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused Iraq of conducting a “genocidal campaign”

against the Kurds and wondered “if they were not Kurds whether we would not be a lot

more exercised than we are at this time.”153 Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) also evoked the

Holocaust, saying Iraq “may right now be in the midst of trying to impose a final solution

on its Kurdish population. … For governments to have knowledge of such events, and not

to cry out, is to become complicit with them.”154 Gore, playing the devil’s advocate, listed

economic concerns as major reasons why Iraq might not be held accountable.

Iraq expects to get away with it [chemical weapons use against the Kurds].
Because that country has oil money. Because there is big business to be done in
provisioning its economy, reconstructing war damage, and equipping its armed
forces. Because it has used chemical weapons before without penalty; indeed
151
Ibid.
152
Congressional Record, Senate, 8 September 1988, p. 22877, cited in Meho, 42–43.
153
Congressional Record, Senate, 9 September 1988, pp. 23139-41, cited in Meho, 52-53.
154
Congressional Record, Senate, 12 September 1988, p. 23423, cited in Meho, 57.
 74

because it used them successfully, to break the morale of Iran’s army and civilian
population.155

The Senate’s relatively quick action alarmed the Reagan administration. Members

of the State Department met with House Foreign Affairs Committee members to pressure

them into killing or weakening the sanctions legislation. Within a couple of weeks they

successfully persuaded the House of Representatives to pass a watered-down version of

the bill (HR 5337), on 27 September. The sanctions debates, however, were moot, since

the legislation died in October after it was attached to an anti-terrorism bill that never

came to a vote. But the behind-the-scenes flurry of correspondence between officials

during the month of September 1988 reveals why the Reagan administration opposed

sanctions against Iraq.

One secret internal State Department paper on Iraq policy spells out the

marginalization of human rights and the paramount place of economic opportunities that

should not be squandered. “Human rights and chemical weapons aside,” it states frankly,

“in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.” It

described the “enormous projects for oilfield development, irrigation, power generation

and other major infrastructure projects.” Within the context of a discussion of what the

U.S. could do to influence Iraq, the paper declares:

If [our objective] is to prevent the further use of chemical weapons in Kurdistan in

the immediate future, this may no longer be an issue. We have been told in
Baghdad that the campaign against the Kurds is coming to an end, and as a
practical matter, there will be little or no need for continued Iraqi use of chemical
weapons once the Kurdish insurgency has been suppressed.

In other words, prevention is a moot point, since the goal of CW use had already

been achieved, a rationale in which ethical concerns are conspicuously absent. The State

155
Congressional Record, Senate, 7 October 1988, p. 29361, cited in Meho, 62.
 75

Department also weighed the option of placing Iraq on the terrorism list again, since “its

use of chemical weapons against the Kurds amounts to state terrorism,” but this action

was advised against because it would “have a sharp negative impact on our ability to

influence the Iraqi regime.”156

A confidential National Security Council memo from William Burns, Assistant

Secretary for Near East and South Asian Affairs, to NSC staffer John Negroponte bluntly

explained the administration’s opposition to sanctioning Iraq: “This legislation could

unravel US/Iraqi relations and jeopardize potential multi-billion dollar commercial

opportunities.”157 Such economic priorities clearly outweighed the administration’s

human rights goals in the region.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was asked by the White House Policy

Review Group to assess the impact of potential sanctions. The agency concluded that it

would be minimal because “other suppliers … will be eager to fill in for the US and

capitalize on the post-war reconstruction,” a reference to European trade partners. The

CIA also warned that “continued Iraqi servicing of its $2.5 million debt guaranteed by the

USG will be at risk” if the Prevention of Genocide Act was passed.158 The lack of a

coordinated campaign among Western nations to confront Iraqi CW use created a

competitive environment which fostered economics-based policymaking versus the

promotion of human rights.

156
Secret Internal Paper, “Overview of U.S.-Iraqi Relations and Potential Pressure Points,” Department of
State, Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Northern Gulf Affairs, 9 September 1988, DNSA
doc. no. IG00632.
157
Confidential Information Memorandum, “Update on the Status of HFAC Legislation on Iraq CW,”
National Security Council, William J. Burns to John D. Negroponte, 20 September 1988, folder “Iraq
[1987-1988],” box 91849, Burns Files.
158
Secret Information Memorandum, “CIA Analysis on Impact of US Economic Sanctions on Iraq,”
National Security Council, William J. Burns to John D. Negroponte, 23 September 1988, folder “Iraq
[1987-1988],” box 91849, Burns Files.
 76

By 8 September, Secretary of State Shultz felt compelled to personally confront

Iraqi Foreign Minister Saadoun Hammadi regarding CW use.159 Although many others in

the State Department and CIA did not support this move, Shultz would later claim in his

memoirs, he decided to take this step for humanitarian reasons.160 At this point, the U.S.

government had to at least appear to care about the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish

civilians. On the same day, State Department spokesman Charles Redman publicly called

Iraq’s use of poison gas against the Kurds “abhorrent and unjustifiable,” the first public

U.S. condemnation of Iraq for chemical weapons use since March; the statement made

the Kurds front-page news.161

The administration pressured Iraq to make private if not public assurances that it

would not use CWs in the future. In an example of how officials focused on preventing

future use rather than punishing past use, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told

Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Nizar Hamdoon on 10 September that if

Iraq would assure the international community it would no longer use CWs that “the

matter will then be laid to rest.”162

Meanwhile, SFRC staffer Galbraith headed to Turkey to interview hundreds of

the 65,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees stranded on the border. He spent 11–17 September

1988 investigating whether Saddam Hussein’s regime had indeed used chemical

weapons, returned to Washington, and submitted his report to the committee on 21

September. He concluded that Iraq had used chemical weapons on 25 August; until

159
Secret Cable, “Secretary’s Meeting with Iraqi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Saadoun Hammadi,”
George Shultz to U.S. Embassy, Iraq, 10 September 1988, DNSA doc. no IG00633.
160
George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1993), 235–245.
161
Julie Johnson, “U.S. Asserts Iraq Used Poison Gas Against the Kurds,” New York Times, 9 September
1988, A1.
162
Secret Cable, “Iraqi CW Use: Ambassador’s Meeting with Hamdun,” April C. Glaspie to U.S.
Department of State, 10 September 1988, DNSA doc. no. IG00634.
 77

subsequent human rights work in 1991, Galbraith’s trip was a key component of the

evidence against Iraq at the time.163

On 13 September Ambassador Glaspie cabled Shultz and reported that the Iraqi

government had called the Senate’s genocide bill “part of a Zionist conspiracy to

embarrass and undermine Iraq.” In an example of the lack of solidarity industry would

have shown with a campaign to punish Saddam Hussein for chemical weapons use,

Glaspie also informed Secretary Shultz that Bechtel representatives in Baghdad had

assured the Iraqi Minister of Industry that, if the economic sanctions became law,

“Bechtel will turn to non-U.S. suppliers of technology and continue to do business in

Iraq.” Glaspie made no mention of any official consequences for those plans to defy the

sanctions.164

Meanwhile, Burns wrote National Security Advisor Colin Powell that the

impending sanctions bill was “rapidly becoming a crisis point in US/Iraqi relations” and

urged him to consider “how to limit the damage to our bilateral relationship if/when this

legislation passes. Iraq will be highly disappointed if the President doesn’t veto the

bill.”165

Then, on 14 September, the State Department publicly referred to the Senate’s

actions—passing the Prevention of Genocide Act legislation—as “premature.” The

administration then revealed that it had intercepted Iraqi military communications

163
U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Chemical Weapons Use in Kurdistan: Iraq’s Final
Offensive: A Staff Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, October 1988
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1988).
164
Confidential Cable, “Minister of Industry Blasts Senate Action,” April C. Glaspie to U.S. Department of
State, 13 September 1988, DNSA doc. no. IG00639.
165
Secret Information Memorandum, “Iraqi CW Use—Proposed Letter to Congress,” National Security
Council, William J. Burns to Colin L. Powell, 13 September 1988, folder “Iraq [1987-1988],” box 91849,
Burns Files.
 78

proving Iraq had used poison gas against the Kurds.166 In response, Tariq Aziz reportedly

stated that Baghdad “respects and abides by” all international agreements banning

chemical weapons use. Deputy Asst. Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Peter

Burleigh claimed that Aziz’s statement proved diplomatic efforts were working and that

sanctions were not necessary.167 Rep. Tom Lantos questioned why the administration

would accept such a statement on face value and also said he found the State

Department’s characterization of the Senate bill as “premature” to be “singularly

nauseating” and “absurd.”168

President Reagan never had to exercise his veto, but it appeared that his

administration was prepared to use this power of the executive branch. Burns wrote

Negroponte that “State has sent a memo to Secretary Shultz suggesting he recommend to

the President that the Iraq CW bill be vetoed.” This same memo reiterates the economic

concerns the State Department had: “State has also prepared talking points for White

House LA [Legislative Affairs] to use with Senator Dole (and possibly others)

concerning the impact of agricultural sanctions against Iraq ($1 billion in credits would

be lost which is quite significant).”169

Before members of the NSC knew the bill would fizzle out, they had contingency

plans in case it was attached to legislation the President did not want to veto. The White

House strategy was to “have the President sign the bill and certify [that Iraq was no
166
Robert Pear, “U.S. Says It Monitored Iraqi Messages on Gas,” New York Times 15 September 1988,
A12.
167
John Felton, “Less Sweeping Than Senate Version: House Panels Advance Bill Imposing Sanctions on
Iraq,” Congressional Quarterly, 24 September 1988, 2634, accessed via CQ Weekly Online
http://library.cqpress.com (accessed August 14, 2007).
168
U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Legislation to Impose Sanctions Against
Iraqi Chemical Use: Markup Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One
Hundredth Congress, 2d sess., on H.R. 5337, 22 September 1988 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1988), 12.
169
Confidential Information Memorandum, “Update on Proposed Iraq CW Legislation,” National Security
Council, William J. Burns to John D. Negroponte, 7 October 1988, folder “Iraq [1987-1988],” box 91849,
Burns Files.
 79

longer using chemical weapons] on the same day, thereby nullifying the sanctions.” It

also planned to urge the Iraqi government, through Ambassador Glaspie, “to exercise

restraint in the wake of Congressional action.”170 These back-door maneuvers would have

limited damage and insured that Congress would be prevented from achieving its

objective to punish Iraq for chemical weapons use on the Kurds.

In a memoir published five years after Halabja, Shultz claimed his efforts to get

tough on Iraq were not supported by subordinates at the State Department or CIA and

that the U.S. allied with Iraq for balance-of-power reasons. The concern at the time was

to prevent Iran from threatening the oil-rich Gulf States and Israel.171 Colin Powell, in his

autobiography published in 1995, does not mention Halabja by name but does reveal

knowledge of CW use.

We knew that Saddam had used both mustard and nerve gases in his war against
Iran. We knew that he had used gas on Iraq’s rebellious Kurdish minority in 1988,
killing or injuring four thousand Kurds. 172

Like many other U.S. officials, Powell lumps civilians with guerrillas in his assessment.

He, too, justified American policy towards Iraq with a balance-of-power strategy, in a

discussion concerning the 1991 Gulf War: “However much we despised Saddam and

what he had done, the U.S. had little desire to shatter his country. For the previous ten

years, Iran, not Iraq, had been our Persian Gulf nemesis. We wanted Iraq to continue as a

threat and a counterweight to Iran.” Neither Shultz nor Powell expressed any regrets over

their roles in the administration’s reaction to Iraqi CW use in 1988. On 15 September

2003, then Secretary of State Powell spoke at a ceremony at the Halabja Memorial after

170
Confidential Information Memorandum, “Impact of Congressional Sanctions on Iraq,” National Security
Council, William J. Burns to John D. Negroponte, 11 October 1988, folder “Iraq [1987-1988],” box 91849,
Burns Files.
171
George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 235-245.
172
Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 455.
 80

the U.S.-led coalition toppled Saddam Hussein. He said, “I cannot tell you that the world

should have acted sooner. You know that.” He added, “I will always remember

Halabja.”173

In 1989, after the first Bush administration took the reigns of American power,

credits were doubled to Iraq from $500 million to $1 billion. This policy was enacted in

spite of the fact that in December 1988 the CIA had labeled Iraq’s treatment of the Kurds

as “terrorism” and a report produced within the State Department—prepared by Richard

Schifter, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs—

called Iraq’s human rights record “abysmal” in 1988 for its “grave” human rights

violations against the Kurdish insurgency.174

Schifter’s position, often at odds with other State Department officials and an

example of the divisions within the U.S. government concerning Iraq, may have been

related to personal history. While testifying before a subcommittee hearing on behalf of

the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, ironically held on 16 March 1988,

Schifter stated simply, “Mr. Chairman, I have not added a great deal of emotion to this

statement. Let me simply say to you that it is not necessary for me to do so. My own

father and mother are two of the six million,” referring to the death of his parents during

the Holocaust.175
173
“Secretary Powell Honors Halabja Victims,” Kurdistan Newsline, 16 September 2003, Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan website, http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/paul_halabja030915.html, accessed 6 June
2007.
174
Central Intelligence Agency, “Iraq’s National Security Goals: An Intelligence Assessment,” December
1988, p. 11, CIA Electronic Reading Room, National Security Archive,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/ accessed 8/26/07; and U.S. Department of State,
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1988: Reports Submitted to the Committee on Foreign
Relations, U.S. Senate and Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives by the
Department of State (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1989), 1355-1365.
175
U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Genocide Convention Implementation Act.
Hearing before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law of the Committee on
the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 100th Cong., 2d sess., H.R. 807, 16 March 1988 (Washington,
D.C.: 1988) 15.
 81

The overall impression obtained from the secret memos, however, is of an

administration averse to displeasing the Iraqi government. Officials wanted to prevent the

erosion of relations between the two countries, that had been warming ever since Iraq

was removed from the list of states sponsoring terrorism in 1984, and maximize the

potential for economic trade. Iran was considered a greater threat to Persian Gulf oil, and

the American economy was dependent on fossil fuels as its primary source of energy.

Human rights in such a framework were a side issue, requiring lip service but not

dictating foreign policy strategy.

United Nations Reaction

The United Nations was informed about the Halabja attacks, sent a team to

investigate Iran’s charges that Iraq had used chemical weapons, blamed both Iran and

Iraq for the continued use of poison gas, and pleaded with both sides to stop. These pleas,

however, fell on deaf ears and were completely ineffectual in stopping the Anfal from

proceeding unhindered.

The first notice the UN received about Halabja was from Iran. Ambassador

Mohammad Ja’afar Mahallati wrote a brief letter to UN Secretary General Javier Pérez

de Cuéllar on 17 March—five days before the story was widely publicized in the media

—in which vague references to Halabja appear. “The criminal and savage Iraqi régime

also deployed chemical weapons in the operational theatre of Valfajr on the said date [16

March],” Mahallati wrote; “several civilians were martyred and injured.” The letter ends,
 82

as do each of these diplomatic missives, with the standard request that “it would be

highly appreciated if this letter were circulated as a document of the Security Council.”176

Mahallati continued writing to the Secretary General, sending him six letters over

seven days between 17 March and 25 March. The foreign minister’s second letter

expanded on the first, saying, “I have the honour and the sad duty to inform you that …

Iraq used chemical weapons on a massive scale in Val Fajr 10 operational theatre and

also against Iraqi Kurdish areas.” The ambassador called the attacks “inhuman” and a

“flagrant violation” of the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of

Poisonous, Asphyxiating and Other Gases. Mahallati charged the UN as a whole and the

Security Council in particular as “constitutionally responsible to adopt effective measures

to uphold” the protocol’s authority and asked the UN to compel the “criminal Iraqi

regime” to stop using chemical weapons. The letter also hinted at an Iranian CW

capability by pleading with the Secretary General to “relieve the Government of the

Islamic Republic of Iran of the agony of considering retaliatory measures.”177

On 18 March Mahallati sent Pérez de Cuéllar more details about Halabja, this

time citing an exponentially higher statistic of fatalities. He reported that “the Iraqi

chemical bombardment resulted in the death of some 4,000 residents and wounded

thousands others, including women and children.”178 The ambassador also mentioned

176
Letter Dated 17 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 17 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19637.
177
Letter Dated 17 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 17 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19639.
178
Letter Dated 18 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 18 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19647.
 83

Iran’s ongoing evacuation operation. Relatively soon after the attacks, the UN knew

about claims of high civilian casualties.

Mahallati’s next letter enclosed a copy of an article from Jane’s Defence referring

to Iraq as the “Middle East’s biggest chemical weapon producer.” Obviously the Iranian

diplomat kept up with English-language media. He again referred to the Halabja attacks:

“I have the honour to draw your attention to the madness of the Iraqi regime which has

not even spared its own citizens from blind and massive chemical attacks…” and urged

the UN to take appropriate reaction.179

On 19 March Mahallati forwarded a letter from Ali-Akbar Velayati, Iran’s

Minister for Foreign Affairs, in which it is clear that Iran intended to use the Halabja

attacks to turn international opinion against Iraq in the context of the Iran-Iraq war.

Velayati criticizes the Security Council for failing to take “any effective measures” in

response to repeated CW use and refers to the council’s “irresponsible and indifferent

attitude” which he charges has “encouraged and emboldened Iraq to employ chemical

weapons even against innocent Iraqi civilians.” He calls the attacks war crimes and

rhetorically asks if the silence of the UN has not turned the UN Charter, the Universal

Declaration on Human Rights and other international instruments into “empty and

ineffective slogans.” 180 Halabja had obviously given the Iranian government—notorious

for its own human rights violations—an opportunity to appear to be taking the high moral

road. In another example of Iran’s use of Halabja’s propaganda value, Tehran declared

179
Letter Dated 18 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 18 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19648.
180
Letter Dated 19 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 21 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19664.
 84

Saturday, 26 March 1988, a day of national mourning “in the memory of the victims of

the chemical bombing of Halabja by the Ba‘athist regime of Iraq” and asked that the

Iranian flag at the UN be flown at half mast.181

Iran then threatened to boycott peace talks with the Secretary General on the Iran-

Iraq war if an investigative team was not sent to see the victims of Halabja. Pérez de

Cuéllar, citing “considerable and most serious evidence in the public domain” that Iraq

had again used poison gas, finally agreed. His spokesman referred to the Secretary

General’s consistent and unequivocal condemnation of chemical weapon use “whenever

and wherever this may occur.”182 Several members of the UN Security Council, including

the U.S. and France, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Secretary General not to send a

team, arguing that the visit would “divert attention from the peace process.”183

On 4 April the Secretary General received three letters from Tehran and one from

Baghdad. In the first, Iran sent dozens of photographs of the corpses lining the streets of

Halabja, which it now called “genocide.” The graphic photographs mostly depict women

and children with liquid oozing from their eyes and mouths; some feature journalists

walking among the dead. The accompanying letter, from Ambassador Mahmoud S.

Madarshahi, states “it is impossible even to try to justify the silence and inaction of the

United Nations machinery.”184 In spite of Iran’s exploitation of the attacks, their

diplomats raised legitimate concerns. Iran also gave the UN a videotape of the “carnage”

181
Letter Dated 25 March 1988 from the Acting Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran
to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 25 March 1988, UN document
no. S/19690.
182
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 8.
183
“U.N. to Study Poison-Gas Charge,” New York Times, 26 March 1988, A2; and Hiltermann, A
Poisonous Affair, 125.
184
Letter Dated 4 April 1988 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic
Republic of Iran to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 4 April 1988,
UN document no. A/43/279, S/19726.
 85

in Halabja, which it said also showed the “hospitality” of the people of the town to

Iranian combatants who “liberated the city without even one shell.”185

In the third Iranian communiqué Madarshahi reported additional chemical

weapons attacks (the second Anfal) to Pérez de Cuéllar and continued to poignantly

question the UN’s inability to stop them.

Is there any doubt for the international community that the continued silence of
the United Nations and its lack of effective action are responsible for
emboldening Iraq to continue its genocide against its Kurdish civilians? How
many more Halabjas and Ghareh-Daghs are required to bring the United Nations
system out of its political expediency? How many innocent civilians have to be
martyred before any effective preventive and punitive measures are adopted
against Iraqi criminals? In the opinion of any objective observer, the time for
effective action is long overdue, and the price for this silence is enormously
high.186

Iraq, meanwhile, continued to deny using chemical weapons at Halabja and went

on a diplomatic offensive, accusing Iran of CW use on the city. Deputy Prime Minister

Tariq Aziz requested on 4 April that the UN send a team to Baghdad to see the Iraqi

soldiers injured by the poison gas.187 Iran responded swiftly to these charges,

categorically rejecting them and accusing Iraq of trying to divert attention from their own

guilt for the Halabja attacks. As evidence that Iraq’s claims were not credible, Velayati

cited the fact that Iraq had not requested a UN mission be sent to Halabja but only to

Baghdad and argued that an investigation that did not include a visit to Halabja would be

incomplete. Velayati also complained that, while the UN waited two weeks before

185
Letter Dated 4 April 1988 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic
Republic of Iran to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 4 April 1988,
UN document no. A/43/280, S/19727. A copy of the videotape was made available for consultation at the
Reference and Bibliography Section of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, room L-211.
186
Letter Dated 4 April 1988 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic
Republic of Iran to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 4 April 1988,
UN document no. A/43/281, S/19733.
187
Letter Dated 4 April 1988 from the Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations addressed to
the Secretary-General, United Nations, 5 April 1988, UN document no. S/19730.
 86

deciding to send a mission to Iran to investigate Halabja, the Secretary General responded

positively to Iraq’s request within twenty-four hours.188

On 20 April Iran sent the UN a long report on Iraq’s chemical weapons use over

the last eight years. The table lists more than two hundred separate poison gas incidents

by place, date, means (artillery, mortar shell, aircraft), number of victims, and substance

(nerve gas, mustard, blister, blood gas). The data covers the time period from 13 January

1981 to 18 April 1988 and runs fourteen pages long. Nearly all of the attacks occurred in

Iranian territory. A sharp escalation in the number of attacks can be traced beginning in

1987. 189 The cover letter accompanying the list sounds more exasperated than diplomatic:

“The Iraqi regime seems to have abandoned all logic and sanity in deploying this most

devastating and anti-human weapon … which is setting a most dangerous historical

precedent threatening the entire human population.”

Meanwhile, Pérez de Cuéllar had dispatched a two-person team to investigate the

Halabja attacks. For the fifth time in four years, he asked Dr. Manual Dominguez, a

colonel in the Spanish Army Medical Corps, to head the team. A professor of preventive

medicine at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Dominguez was a specialist in

atomic, biological and chemical weapons injuries. He was accompanied by James Holger,

a senior official at the United Nations Secretariat.

The team left London on 27 March, spent three days interviewing and examining

patients in Iran, flew to Geneva and began to prepare their report. While in Geneva, the

188
Letter Dated 5 April 1988 from the Chargé d’affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic
Republic of Iran to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations, 5 April 1988,
UN document no. A/43/288, S/19741.
189
The break-down of the number of attacks by year is as follows: 1981-5, 1982-6, 1983-33, 1984-19,
1985-52, 1986-37, 1987-77, 1988-23 (as of 18 April). Letter Dated 20 April 1988 from the Acting
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-
General, United Nations, 21 April 1988, UN document no. S/19816.
 87

Secretary General, in response to Iraq’s request to investigate charges of Iranian CW use,

asked Dominguez and Holger to return to the region, which they did, arriving in Baghdad

on 7 April, where they spent three days as well. They were not, however, permitted by

the Iraqi government to go to Halabja, which greatly hampered their investigation. In Iran

they saw civilians as well as soldiers with CW injuries; in Baghdad they only saw

soldiers with similar symptoms. They returned to Geneva on 11 April and submitted their

findings in two parts: on 25 April Dominguez turned in his 26-page report; on 10 May he

submitted an appendix which listed case notes for each of the 70 patients examined in

Iran and the 39 patients examined in Iraq.190

Dominguez concluded that the patients he examined in Iran had been affected by

chemical weapons and that “a considerable number of those affected were civilians.”191

As for which type of gas was used, he reported that yperite (mustard gas) plus an

unknown type of “acetylcholine esterase-inhibiting substance” or nerve gas had caused

the symptoms he witnessed. He determined that the patients he examined in Iraq—all

military personnel—had also been affected by chemical weapons, with substances similar

to those seen affecting the patients in Iran. Dominguez lamented that the use of chemical

weapons appeared to be on the rise, an observation which he found all the more

disturbing for the “apparent increase in the number of civilian casualties.” Crucially,

Dominguez stated that “it was not possible to make an independent determination in

either of the two phases of the investigation of the extent of chemical warfare agents and

the means by which the chemical agents had been delivered.” In other words, based on
190
Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to Investigate Allegations of the Use of
Chemical Weapons in the Conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq, United Nations, 25 April
1988, UN document no. S/19823; and Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to
Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Conflict between the Islamic Republic of
Iran and Iraq, United Nations, 10 May 1988, UN document no. S/19823/Add.1.
191
UN document no. S/19823, p. 16.
 88

the evidence, he could not say how many victims were killed or injured at Halabja, nor

could he determine whether Iran or Iraq had been the perpetrator.192

Secretary General Pérez de Cuéllar transmitted Dominguez’s report to the

Security Council on 25 April along with prefatory remarks which expressed his “deep

sense of dismay and foreboding” at the report’s conclusions: “that chemical weapons

continue to be used in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq and that

their use in recent days has evidently been on an even more intensive scale than before.”

Referring as well to the increase in civilian casualties, Pérez de Cuéllar expressed his

“grave concern” that “such use could further escalate and seriously undermine the

Geneva Protocol of 1925.” He urged the two parties to allow UNSC resolution 598

(1987) to be implemented, aimed at the “achievement of a comprehensive, just,

honourable and durable settlement of this conflict.”193

Thus, the UN did not single out Iraq for its responsibility for the attacks on

Halabja, and when both countries were named Iran was always cited first (the countries

were likely named in alphabetical order to foster a sense of evenhandedness). Both Iran

and Iraq were treated equally, sharing the blame for the attacks in particular and for

chemical weapons use in general, despite the lack of evidence of Iranian use. The UN

was following the lead of the Reagan administration, which had claimed Iranian

culpability without producing any evidence of Tehran’s involvement. Once the UN report

came out, there was little international will to hold Iraq accountable.

Both the Secretary General and the investigators recognized the limitations of

such UN missions. Pérez de Cuéllar cited a passage from a previous investigation, the 6

192
Ibid., 6.
193
Ibid., 3.
 89

May 1987 UN report, which alluded to the need for political efforts rather than repeated

medical investigations if the global community wanted to stop CW use. The specialists

wrote:

We have done all that we can to identify the types of chemicals and chemical
weapons being used in the Iran-Iraq conflict. … Technically there is little more
that we can do that is likely to assist the United Nations in its efforts to prevent
the use of chemical weapons in the present conflict. In our view, only concerted
efforts at the political level can be effective. …194

Without leadership on the Security Council, from the U.S. and other members, there was

no political will to hold Iraq accountable.

When asked why the report did not state who carried out the Halabja attack, Pérez

de Cuéllar said experts could not detect “the nationality of the weapons.”195 The UN

failed to indict Iraq because the international body gave immense weight to U.S. charges

that Iran too had used chemical weapons, even though evidence backing that claim was

never presented. Iraq thus encountered no obstacles to its continued chemical weapons

use against the Kurds during the spring and summer of 1988.

Other Actors

While Iraq denied using chemical weapons on Halabja and Iran exploited the

attacks for their own purposes (evening flying patients to Europe and the U.S. for

treatment to maximize publicity), how did other governments in the Arab/Muslim world

react?196 After all, Halabjans were fellow Muslims, part of the umma or global Muslim

194
Report of the Mission Dispatched by the Secretary-General to Investigate Allegations of the Use of
Chemical Weapons in the Conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq, United Nations, 8 May
1987, UN document no. S/18852.
195
“U.N. Sets No Blame in Gulf War Gas Attack,” New York Times, 27 April 1988, A10.
196
Jennifer A. Kingson, “Victims of Gulf War Treated at Queens Hospital,” New York Times, 6 April 1988,
A14; Teddie Weyr, “Kurds Apparently Suffering from Mustard Gas Wounds Arrive For Treatment,”
Associated Press, 29 March 1988; and Ben Dobbin, “Kurds in Europe, New York for Treatment of
Apparent Gas Wounds,” Associated Press, 29 March 1988.
 90

community. Iran had called the attacks “a disgrace for the Middle East,” yet no Arab

country condemned Iraq for Halabja, an indication of the influence Saddam Hussein had

in the region. 197 In fact, at a conference held in Jordan ten days after Halabja, Iran was

condemned. The 46-nation Islamic Conference Organization denounced Iran for riots in

Mecca the year before and for failing to sign the ceasefire agreement with Iraq. The

Iranian delegation to the conference walked out in protest.198

Western governments fell in step behind the United States. On 23 March the

British government, for example, said it condemned the atrocity but had no independent

evidence of who was guilty.199 Ottawa also condemned the attacks. Canada’s External

Affairs Minister Joe Clark said he was appalled at the “atrocious and inhuman attacks”

against the Kurds, but promised action against both governments, pledging to promote an

arms embargo on all arms sales to Iraq and Iran.200

In an example of European reticence to allow human rights to dictate trade policy,

later that summer, West Germany invited Tariq Aziz to Bonn in July ostensibly to

mediate an end to the war. Aziz disclosed that Iraq had used chemical weapons but that

Iran had used them first. While in Bonn, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl quietly

reopened a credit line of $167 million to Iraq, which had been suspended due to

nonpayment.201 Chemical weapons use, evidently, did not get in the way of such financial

arrangements.

Many European governments did offer humanitarian help to the victims, however.

The Belgian government sent two physicians to Tehran. Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx examined
197
Alan Cowell, “Iran Charges Iraq with Gas Attack,” New York Times, 24 March 1988, A10.
198
“Islamic Nations End Meeting with Denunciations of Iran,” New York Times, 26 March 1988, A32.
199
“The Town where Thousands Died,” The Guardian (London), 24 March 1988.
200
Andrew Bilski, “Under a Cloud of Death,” Maclean’s, 4 April 1988, 18.
201
Serge Schmemann, “Iraq Acknowledges Its Use of Gas But Says Iran Introduced It in War,” New York
Times, 2 July 1988, A3.
 91

survivors, took a helicopter tour of the zone, and concluded that chemical weapons had

been used and that there was “no doubt that these bombings were made by Iraq.” 202 His

conclusions contrast sharply with the UN report but were not widely publicized.

NGOs also played in a role in the response to Halabja. On 24 March the

International Committee of the Red Cross atypically issued a strongly-worded statement:

“The use of chemical weapons, whether against military personnel or civilians, is

absolutely forbidden by international law and is to be condemned at all times.” Medecins

sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), a French organization composed of physicians

who assist victims of international conflicts or disasters, sent a team to Iran in March and

reported preliminarily at least 2,000 dead and 5,000 wounded from the Halabja attacks.203

The group of doctors, from 15 Western countries, blamed Iraq solely for the use of

chemical weapons on the town.204

Later that year, Physicians for Human Rights, an American group of health

professionals concerned about human rights abuses “regardless of the ideology of the

offending government or group,” sent a mission to Turkey to investigate the 25 August

chemical weapons attacks (the Final Anfal) which had sent so many Kurds to the Turkish

border. The team included three physicians: Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan of Georgetown

University, Howard Hu of Harvard Medical School, and Asfandiar Shukri, Emergency

Services Director of the Northwest Medical Center in Detroit, who served as translator

202
A. Heyndrickx, “Clinical Toxicologic Reports and Conclusions Concerning the Biological and
Environmental Samples Brought to the Department of Toxicology and the State University of Ghent for
Toxicologic Investigation,” Report no. 88/Ku2/PJ881, in Documentation of the International Conference
on “Human Rights in Kurdistan”: 14-16 April 1989, Hochschule Bremen by International Conference on
Human Rights in Kurdistan, (Bremen, Germany: The Initiative for Human Rights in Kurdistan, 1989), pp.
210–225.
203
Marian Houk, “Iran Enlists US Help in Treating Victims of Chemical Attack,” Christian Science
Monitor, 1 April 1988, 12. MSF reportedly obtained water, soil, and human tissue samples from Halabja
but I was unable to access any subsequent report. “A Terrible Survival,” Maclean’s, 11 April 1988, 22.
204
“Iraq Uses Chemical Weapons, Doctors Say,” Japan Economic Newswire, 27 March 1988.
 92

and observer. The group tried to enter Iraq, but the government refused them entry. The

mission was in Turkey from 7–16 October. One method of data collection consisted of

having twenty-seven refugees fill out a 120-question survey. Based on the questionnaire,

physical examinations and videotaped interviews, Physicians for Human Rights

concluded poison gas had been used.

Their report also criticized several Turkish physicians, under duress no doubt

from their own government, who had told Western journalists they did not find evidence

of poison gas after examining refugees along the border.205 “The inability of Turkish

physicians either to carry out their own complete investigation or, perhaps more likely, to

disclose the full results of such investigations is a chilling reminder of the political

pressure that can be brought to bear on medical inquiry,” the trio later wrote. “It also

raises the question of whether physicians have an ethical obligation to report violations of

international law to national and international authorities.”206

In November 1988, a British journalist, Gwynne Roberts, with the help of the

KDP, secretly entered Iraq to obtain samples to determine whether poison gas had been

used. He collected bomb fragments, soil and wool samples, which were then examined in

a private British laboratory as well as the UK’s Chemical Defence Establishment; both

analyses detected chemical weapons.207

205
Physicians for Human Rights, Winds of Death: Iraq’s Use of Poison Gas Against Its Kurdish
Population: Report of a Medical Mission to Turkish Kurdistan by Physicians for Human Rights,
(Somerville, Mass.: Physicians for Human Rights, 1989).
206
Howard Hu, Robert Cook-Deegan, and Asfandiar Shukri, “The Use of Chemical Weapons: Conducting
an Investigation Using Survey Epidemiology,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 4
August 1989, vol. 262, no. 5, pp. 640–43.
207
Alastair Hay and Gwynne Roberts, “The Use of Poison Gas Against the Iraqi Kurds: Analysis of Bomb
Fragments, Soil, and Wool Samples,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 23 February
1990, vol. 263, no. 8, pp. 1065-1066. Roberts also produced, along with Wykeham Films, a documentary
video on the attacks called Winds of Death which was broadcast on the British television show
Despatches, channel 4 TV, on 23 November 1988. I was unable to obtain a copy or transcript of this video.
 93

Human rights organizations also responded but at the time were not major

players. London-based Amnesty International made an unusually direct appeal to the UN

Security Council to stop the “massacre” of Kurdish civilians by Iraqi forces, but not until

September of 1988. They stated the killings were part of a “systematic and deliberate

policy by the Iraqi government to eliminate large numbers of Kurds” and a “flagrant

contravention of fundamental international human rights norms.”208 Finally, Human

Rights Watch founded one of its five watch committees, Middle East Watch, in 1989 and

published its first report on the attacks in 1990 based on interviews with exiles before the

organization was able to visit Iraq.209 Later, after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the

subsequent Gulf War of 1991, the United States created the “no-fly zone” over the

northern third of Iraq to protect the Kurds. This de facto autonomy gave the Kurds some

breathing space; many Western observers first entered northern Iraq during this period.

The opening created the opportunity for Middle East Watch to obtain evidence from

within Iraqi Kurdistan for the first time.

But by that point, all efforts could only work towards holding the Ba‘athist regime

accountable for the atrocities of Halabja and Anfal. The window of opportunity for

preventing them was over. Neither the efforts of journalists to tell the stories of the

victims of Halabja, nor the urgent pleas from some members of Congress could overcome

the UN’s inertia or the Reagan administration’s apparently deliberate obfuscation of the

origin of the chemical bombs.

208
Elaine Sciolino, “Shultz to See Iraqi on Reported Gassing of Kurds,” New York Times, 8 September
1988, A16.
209
Human Rights Watch began in 1978 with the founding of Helsinki Watch by a group of publishers,
lawyers and other activists. In 1993, when it published this report, it had offices in New York, Washington,
D.C., Los Angeles, London, Moscow, Belgrade, Zagreb and Hong Kong and conducted investigations of
human rights abuses in sixty countries. Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq, xi-xii.
 94

Chapter 5: Accountability

Who or what entities have been held accountable for Halabja? Who or what

entities have not been held accountable? And what long-term affects, if any, have

Halabjans experienced as a result of the 1988 attacks? Some high-ranking members of

the Ba‘athist government have gone to trial and been sentenced. Most companies, largely

from the West, that sold Iraq the technology and supplies used to make the chemical

weapons have not been penalized or charged with any crime. And the legacy of Halabja

lingers in the high incidence of health problems experienced by the survivors in addition

to other economic and social impacts.

The Iraqi High Tribunal

For many years after Halabja, different constituents attempted to charge Iraqi

President Saddam Hussein and others with war crimes under international law. The U.S.

Congress repeatedly advocated for such a trial. In 2000 the U.S. Senate passed a

resolution (S. Con. Res. 95) commemorating the victims of Halabja on the twelfth

anniversary of the attacks, noted the failure of the U.S., UN and other bodies of the

international community to “bring the perpetrators of the Halabja massacre to justice”

and cited sixteen previous occasions in which the Senate and the House “called upon

successive administrations to work toward the creation of an international tribunal to

prosecute the war crimes of the Iraqi regime.”210 None of these administrations,

Republican or Democratic, followed up on Congress’s request for a tribunal.

210
Congressional Record, Senate, 9 March 2000, p. S 1436, cited in Meho, 396–97. Notably, the resolution
lists 5,000 civilians killed at Halabja compared to the mere hundreds cited in 1988.
 95

Human Rights Watch (HRW) tried in vain to find a state willing to bring a case to

the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the Iraqi regime. The organization viewed

Iraq’s use of chemical weapons as war crimes—which it hoped would be adjudicated by

an ad hoc criminal tribunal modeled after the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals—and the

Anfal campaign as genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948. 211 Any one state

that has signed onto the Convention can petition the ICJ; non-state actors, however, like

the Kurds, can not. HRW staff felt the U.S. would not be seen as an “impartial litigant,”

so they sought out other governments. Two states were willing, but only as part of a

coalition that included at least one European state. But no major European power was

willing to petition the ICJ.212

In 1994, HRW attempted to garner U.S. political support for an ICJ case against

Iraq. The State Department’s legal advisor determined that there was a genuine case of

genocide under the Genocide Convention and that an ICJ was winnable.213 Secretary of

State Warren Christopher wrote a departmental memo in support of the effort, but no

concrete progress was achieved.

The need for a tribunal was also expressed by Kurdish leaders. At the August

2003 Memorial Service for the Victims of Saddam held in Washington, D.C., for

example, Kurdish Regional Government representative Howar Ziad listed four broad

211
Genocide has multiple, shifting definitions. Under the Genocide Convention of 1948, genocide means
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial
or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly (9 December 1948), article 2.
Peter Ronayne, Never Again? The United States and the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide since the
Holocaust (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) 211–12.
212
Joost Hiltermann, “Elusive Justice: Trying to Try Saddam,” Middle East Report, no. 215 (summer
2000): 32–35.
213
Ibid., 34; and Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 213.
 96

steps he believed Iraqis should take: honor the victims and prevent recurrence yet

recognize that not every crime can be tried; that Iraqis of middle and low rank as well as

high-ranking Iraqi leaders should be put on trial; that Iraqis should run the tribunal; and

that a truth commission be set up to educate those Iraqis who doubt the veracity of some

of Saddam Hussein’s crimes. Ziad noted that some Shi‘i Arabs loathed the former regime

but had never heard of Halabja. He also dismissed claims that Iraqis were not qualified to

run the tribunal. “Some human rights groups with short memories have claimed that we

are not objective enough to try our oppressors, a view that many Iraqis find frankly rather

patronizing,” he said and referred to the Nuremberg tribunal after World War II as a

successful precedent.214

After the U.S.-led Coalition of the Willing overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime

during the Iraq War launched in 2003, a tribunal was put in place to try the multiple

crimes of the Ba‘athist government. The Iraqi High Tribunal (also known as the Iraqi

Special Tribunal) was set up by the Iraq Interim Government in 2004 under the watchful

eye and financial support of the U.S., which provided $150 million, tight security and

lawyers from the Justice Department. The latter gathered evidence and developed

prosecution strategies for the trials.215

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was initially tried in the Dujail case, in

which he was charged with killing 148 Shi‘i men and boys in southern Iraq after a failed

assassination attempt against him in 1982.216 Hussein was also a defendant in a second

214
Howar Ziad, “Ba‘athist Genocides: Lest We Forget,” Remarks made at The Memorial Service for the
Victims of Saddam, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., 2 August 2003. Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan website http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/hawar030803.html (accessed 6 June 2007).
215
John F. Burns, “Chemical Ali Denies Role in Gas Attacks on Kurds,” International Herald Tribune, 14
May 2007.
216
John F. Burns, “Hussein’s Cousin Sentenced to Die for Kurd Attacks: Found Guilty of Genocide,” New
York Times, 25 June 2007, A1.
 97

trial which focused on crimes committed during the Anfal campaign. In November 2006,

while the Anfal trial was underway, Hussein was sentenced to death for the Dujail crimes

and swiftly hanged on 30 December 2006. Three other former officials, including his

half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, were also hanged.217 Many felt Hussein was

executed by his Shi‘a enemies before he was made to pay for crimes against Kurds.218

If Saddam Hussein held ultimate authority for the repression of the Kurds, Ali

Hassan al-Majid was the campaign’s principle architect. Known by the nickname Ali

Kimiawi (Arabic for “Chemical Ali”), al-Majid was found guilty of genocide, war

crimes, and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death on 24 June 2007. His

sentence was upheld by the Iraqi High Tribunal’s appellate court on 4 September 2007

and ordered to be carried out within thirty days. The death sentences of two other

defendants—former Defense Minister Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Jabouri al-Tai and

former Iraqi Military Deputy Commander of Operations Hussein Rashid—were also

upheld.

At the time of this writing, all three executions have been put on hold indefinitely.

Reportedly the U.S. government, which has custody of these convicted Sunni prisoners,

believes their executions may jeopardize recent alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in what

had been the volatile Anbar province; in addition, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has stated

his personal reservations about capital punishment. It appears at this point that Sultan

Hashem, who is widely respected by senior U.S. military officials, may have his sentence

217
Burns, “Chemical Ali Denies Role in Gas Attacks on Kurds,” International Herald Tribune, 14 May
2007.
218
Andrew Wilson, “Halabja: ‘They’ve Suffered So Much,’” Sky News, Inside Iraq Series, 17 March 2007,
Kurdistan Regional Government website, http://www.krg.org/articles/article_print.asp?ArticleNr=16772
(accessed 21 May 2007).
 98

reduced.219 Two other officials in military intelligence—Sabir Abdul-Aziz al-Duri and

Farhan Motlak al-Jabouri—received life imprisonment for their roles in the Anfal. 220

As of Fall 2007, a trial specifically focusing on the attacks at Halabja is in

preparation along with at least ten other trials under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi High

Tribunal. The Intifada trial will concentrate on the suppression of the Shi‘a uprising

across southern Iraq in 1991 in which 150,000 people were killed. Two of the defendants

for that trial will include Saddam Hussein’s chief bodyguard, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-

Tikriti, and Saddam’s half-brother, the former director of the security agency

(Mukhabarat) Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti. Other upcoming trials will center on the

disappearances of thousands of male members of the prominent Kurdish family, the

Barzanis, in 1983 and the persecution of Shi‘a marsh Arabs in southern Iraq.221

The highest authorities in the former Iraqi government are thus being held

accountable for crimes against the people of Iraq: Saddam Hussein for his repression of

the Shi‘a—and not the Kurds—and “Chemical Ali” for the Anfal—not Halabja. If al-

Majid is executed before the Halabja trial begins, then middle-ranking military officers

and government officials will likely be prosecuted for their supportive roles in the 16

March attacks. But while former Iraqi officials have been publicly paraded into a court of

law, other parties, with less visible, more indirect roles—such as the companies that

supplied Iraq with the means to make chemical weapons—have managed to deflect

responsibility and evade prosecution.

The Companies That Supplied Iraq

219
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Alissa J. Rubin, “Execution Case Tests Iraq’s Bid to Ease Divide,” New York
Times, 27 October 2007.
220
Burns, “Hussein’s Cousin Sentenced to Die for Kurd Attacks,” New York Times, 25 June 2007.
221
Ibid., A6.
 99

When journalist Kevin McKiernan visited Halabja in 2003, one of the Kurds he

spoke with was Ibrahim Hawrahmani, a man who had witnessed the chemical attack from

a nearby mountain. Hawrahmani asked the reporter, “Did you know that 287 companies

got contracts for the chemical weapons that were used against us? … You news people

didn’t come here to do reports.” Accountability for the companies—mostly Western—

that sold Iraq the materials and technology to manufacture chemical weapons in the

1980s has largely been absent. There have been a few cases, however.

Two individuals have been charged and convicted for crimes relating to the sales

of chemical weapons to Iraq. Frans van Anraat, a Dutch businessman, was charged with

complicity in war crimes for supplying chemicals that were used by the Iraqi government

against the Kurds. Acting as a middleman, van Anraat arranged for the shipment of

chemicals—labeled as “flame retardants”—from various manufacturers to Iraq via

countries such as Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Singapore. According to the Dutch

court’s indictment, he used a Panamanian company based in Switzerland to conceal his

dealings with Iraq. The court said van Anraat knew the materials would be used to make

poison gas and continued to supply Iraq with CWs after the Halabja attacks.222

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been investigating van

Anraat since 1984 and turned over significant evidence to Dutch authorities. ICE agents

determined that van Anraat had sold Iraq thousands of tons of thiodiglycol, a known

precursor to mustard gas, and that he had bought these chemicals from Alcolac, a

company then based in Baltimore, Maryland. 223 After a U.S. indictment in 1989 for
222
Marlise Simons, “Vendor Tied to Gas Attack Is Convicted,” New York Times, 24 December 2005, A5.
223
“17 Years for Supplying Chemicals to Iraq,” Summary of the Judgment of the Court of Appeals, English
translation, 9 May 2007, http://www.rechtspraak.nl (accessed 3 October 2007); and “Fact Sheets: Select
ICE Arms & Strategic Technology Investigations,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, March 2006,
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/ICEarmsstrategic.htm (accessed 6 June 2007).
 100

export violations, van Anraat fled to Iraq where he lived under Saddam Hussein’s

protection until 2003. He was later arrested by Dutch authorities in 2004.

During his trial an Iraqi special security forces memo was entered as evidence. It

indicated that van Anraat had been granted an Iraqi passport with the name “Faris

Mansour” as a reward for his “valuable services” providing “our institutions and the

military industry with chemical and other rare materials.”224 On 23 December 2005 the

court found him guilty of complicity in war crimes and gave him the maximum sentence

of 15 years imprisonment. The court acquitted van Anraat of complicity in genocide,

however, saying it could not be proved that he knew the chemicals would be used for

genocide. His intent, they said, was greed. He appealed the decision. On 9 May 2007 the

Dutch Court of Appeals in The Hague not only denied his appeal but extended the

sentence of the 65-year-old to 17 years.225 The van Anraat case was especially significant

because it was the first time a court had ruled that the attack on Halabja was genocide.226

The other person to be charged in connection with chemical sales to Iraq was

Christopher Drogoul, a banker based in Atlanta. Drogoul was a bank manager for the

Atlanta branch of the Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), and was

convicted of fraud for illegally granting Saddam Hussein more than $5 billion in secret

loans, which in turn were mostly used to make arms purchases. Drogoul was sentenced to

three years and one month in prison on 10 December 1993; his trial was part of what

became known as the Iraqgate scandal. Allegations, never proven in court, were made

against the first Bush administration for arranging the loans. Hearings on the BNL
224
“Dutch Businessman Who Sold Chemicals to Saddam Appeals War Crimes Conviction,” International
Herald Tribune, 1 April 2007.
225
Marlise Simons, “World Briefing Europe: The Netherlands: Stiffer Sentence for Iraq Poison Gas,” New
York Times, 10 May 2007, A14; and “Frans Van Anraat,” Facts and Legal Procedure, Trial Watch
http://www.trial-ch.org/trialwatch/profil_print.php?ProfileID=286&Lang=en (accessed 3 October 2007).
226
Simons, “Vendor Tied to Gas Attack is Convicted.”
 101

scandal were held on Capitol Hill, revealing a complex web of economic deals between

the U.S. and Iraq during the 1980s. President George H. W. Bush was subpoenaed to

testify in person at Drogoul’s trial, but the banker decided to plead guilty in exchange for

a reduced sentence; Bush did not have to appear in court. In 1990, after Hussein’s

invasion of Kuwait, Iraq defaulted on the multi-billion dollar loans; on 18 February 1995

the federal government agreed to pay $400 million to BNL to settle their claim for $450

million in unpaid loans to Iraq. These loans had been guaranteed by American taxpayers

under the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC).227

Drawing a direct line, however, between the BNL players and the attacks at Halabja is

problematic. What is certain, however, is that the billions of dollars in U.S. government-

backed loans enabled Saddam Hussein to be able to afford massive arms purchases

during the 1980s, including chemical weapons materials and technology. In other words,

without the cash, Hussein may have had to resort to more conventional means in

suppressing the Kurdish peshmerga during and after the Iran-Iraq war, which may have

spared civilian casualties.

Relatively few companies have had legal action taken against them, and none

have provided the victims with compensation. A Baltimore-based chemical manufacturer,

Alcolac, which illegally sold van Anraat tons of thiodyglycol in 1987–1988, pled guilty

227
Iraqgate largely focuses on fraud and risky credit lending rather than the use of chemical weapons on
civilians. See Neil A. Lewis, “Bank Official Gets Reduced Term Over Iraq Loans,” New York Times, 10
December 1993; “Settlement Reached on Loans Made to Iraq,” New York Times, 18 February 1995; U.S.
House of Representatives, Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Iraqi and Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro Participation in Export-Import Programs, Hearing before the Committee on Banking, Finance
and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, 102nd cong., 1st sess., 17 April 1991, (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1991); Congressional Record, House of Representatives, “Concerns About Foreign Bank Regulation,
BNL Loans to Iraq, and BNL Loans to Iraqi Front Companies,” 31 July 1992, p. H7137-7144; Said
Aburish, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000), 361; and
Stephen J. Hedges and Brian Duffy, “Iraqgate: How the Bush Administration Helped Saddam Hussein buy
His Weapons of War and Why American Taxpayers Got Stuck with the Bill,” U.S. News & World Report,
18 May 1992.
 102

in 1989 to federal export violations involving shipment of chemicals that could be used to

make mustard gas (the guilty plea was actually for a shipment that was headed for Iran,

but prosecutors said the company shipped more to Iraq). The company was fined nearly

$438,000 in 1990 and has since restructured. Alcolac Inc. is currently based in Georgia

and owned by a French-based firm, Rhodia Inc., whose U.S. operations are located in

Cranberry, New Jersey.228

Accountability for corporate entities can be elusive due to the ability of

companies to change ownership or management and the existence of numerous

middlemen between a chemical’s manufacturer and its ultimate buyer. Responsibility for

end-use is also made more complex because many chemicals have dual uses, both

civilian and military. Nerve gas is made up of the same components as common

pesticide, for example. In Iraq’s case, however, a red flag was the massive quantities

ordered.

Another American company, Al Haddad Enterprises based in Nashville,

Tennessee, had a shipment of 74 barrels of potassium fluoride—a component of Sarin

nerve gas—seized by U.S. Customs in 1984 before it reached Iraq’s State Establishment

for Pesticide Protection (SEPP), widely regarded as one of many front entities used by

Hussein to camouflage his chemical weapons program. Al Haddad was headed up by

Sahib Abd al-Amir al-Haddad, an Iraqi-born, naturalized American citizen; he was never

228
“Md. Chemical Manufacturer Fined,” Washington Post, 27 May 1990, D7; “Guilty Plea in Gas Sale to
Iran,” Washington Post, 14 February 1989; Eric Rich, “Baltimore Firm Part of Probe of Poison Gas: Dutch
Authorities Tracking Chemicals Used by Iraq,” Washington Post, 9 November 2005; Seth Carus, The
Genie Unleashed: Iraq’s Chemical and Biological Weapons Program, Policy Papers no. 14 (Washington,
D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1989), 43n2; and Jim Crogan, “Made in the USA,
Part III: The Dishonor Roll: America’s Corporate Merchants of Death in Iraq,” LA Weekly, 24 April 2003.
 103

charged with a crime for this shipment, as U.S. export controls had not yet come into

effect. His company has since dissolved.229

Litigation was also directed toward companies in Germany which supplied Iraq

with equipment and ingredients for chemical weapons. Twenty-five defendants from

thirteen firms were investigated including the company Pilot Plant, a subsidiary of

laboratory equipment supplier Karl Kolb. Three Karl Kolb employees were charged with

violating German export laws but were all found not guilty. A Dutch company,

Melchemie Holland B.V., was convicted of selling restricted chemicals without a license

and fined $30,000. One of the chemicals it sold to Iraq’s SEPP was phosphorous

oxycholoride, a nerve gas component. But such legal judgments do not link these

suppliers with specific attacks. More documentation, company memos and Iraqi military

records perhaps, will have to surface before direct connections can be made.

As recently as 2006 a French news article quoted Kamil Abdel Qader, head of the

Halabja Chemical Victims’ Society, as saying the list of companies that supplied Saddam

Hussein had not been made public, and the reporter, surprisingly, seemed to agree.230

Apparently Qader and this reporter were both unaware at that time that the list had been

leaked, was published by a German paper and is available online. Although there has

been relatively little litigation of companies that supplied Iraq, the list of companies from

the U.S. and Europe has indeed been reported; perhaps word of the leaked list has not

been widespread.

229
John J. Fialka, “Outlawed Weapons—A Scourge Returns—Fighting Dirty: Western Industry Sells Third
World the Means to Produce Poison Gas—Germans in Particular Supply the New ‘Pesticide Plants’ in
Volatile Mideast Region—Nabbing a Cargo at Kennedy,” Wall Street Journal, 16 September 1988, 1;
Philip Shenon, “Suppliers: Declaration Lists Companies That Sold Chemicals to Iraq,” New York Times, 21
December 2002, A11; and Crogan, “Made in the USA.”
230
Simon Ostrovsky, “Halabja Wants Saddam’s Chemical Suppliers to Pay,” Agence France-Presse, 20
May 2006, in The Centre of Halabja, C.H.A.K., http://www.nawandihalabja.com (accessed 24 June 2007).
 104

The list was leaked in the following manner. In the context of meeting UN

demands for full disclosure of its weapons of mass destruction capability, the Iraqi

government produced two massive reports, one in 1996 and another in 2002, which

included long lists of the companies that had armed Iraq. One copy of the 11,000-page

document was provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the other

to the UN. Under pressure from Western governments, the UN declined to release the list

to the public. The U.S., however, reportedly obtained the UN copy, distributed unedited

versions to select permanent members of the Security Council, and distributed edited

copies, with the sections referring to international corporations omitted, to the press.231

The attempt at censorship failed, however, and the unedited list leaked out.

Andreas Zumach, the Geneva-based UN correspondent for the Berlin alternative daily

newspaper Die Tageszeitung, obtained the top-secret unedited list which his paper

published on 17 December 2002. The unedited report listed twenty-four American

companies as having illegally supplied Iraq with weapons. (For a list of the American

companies, see Appendix 7.) Germany had the most companies on the list at eighty.

France had ten companies on the list; the total came to more than 150 foreign companies

supplying Iraq with nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional weapons from 1975

to 2001.232

231
Tony Paterson, “Leaked Report says German and US Firms Supplied Arms to Saddam,” The
Independent, 18 December 2002. For a list of the twenty-four American companies in the list, see
Appendix 6.
232
Ibid.; Andreas Zumach, “Fremde Hilfe fur Saddam (Strange Assistance for Saddam),” Die Tageszeitung
(Berlin), 17 December 2002, http://www.taz.de/index.php?
id=archivseite&dig=2002/12/19/a0080&type=98, (accessed 3 October 2007); and “Top Secret Iraq
Weapons Report Says the U.S. Government & Corporations Helped to Illegally Arm Iraq, Part Two,”
Democracy Now! 19 December 2002, http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=03/04/07/0315209,
(accessed 3 October 2007).
 105

Two German companies on the list with chemical weapons links were Preussag,

later called TUI, which provided Iraq with thirty tons of phosphorus oxychloride (sarin

nerve gas component) and Hoechst, which sold Iraq ten tons of the same chemical. Both

companies have since been split up.233

Only one of the twenty-four American companies was identified as having

specifically supplied Iraq’s chemical weapons program (as opposed to nuclear, biological

and conventional weapons): Alcolac. But later investigative reporting by Jim Crogan of

LA Weekly, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, produced a more comprehensive

list of ninety-one American companies or foreign companies with U.S. affiliates selling

arms to Iraq; among these are eighteen with ties to chemical weapons manufacturing,

sales, and technology (for a list of the eighteen companies, see Appendix 8).234

Several of these American companies are household names while others are

obscure. Bechtel Group, based in San Francisco, California, served as the engineering

consultant for a $2 billion petrochemical complex near Baghdad known as Petrochemical

Complex 2. The company has deep ties to former and current U.S. officials, including

Secretary of State George Shultz, Bechtel’s former president and member of the board of

directors, and former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, Bechtel’s general counsel,

among others. Hewlett-Packard, based in Palo Alto, California, provided more than

$690,000 worth of computer equipment and frequency synthesizers to Iraq’s Ministry of

Industry and Military Industrialization (MIMI) which was responsible for Hussein’s

chemical weapons programs. Honeywell, based in Morristown, New Jersey, sold more

than $353,000 worth of computers to MIMI and supplied a “process flow controller” used

233
Shenon, “Suppliers: Declaration Lists Companies that Sold Chemicals to Iraq,” New York Times.
234
Crogan, “Made in the USA.”
 106

in Iraq’s CW program.235 Lummus Crest Inc., formerly based in Bloomfield, New Jersey,

provided more than $250,000 worth of equipment to MIMI used for a multibillion-dollar

petrochemical complex at Basra to make thiodiglycol (mustard gas component).

Some other examples from the group of eighteen include Nu Kraft Mercantile

Corp., a front company and subsidiary (reportedly no more than an empty warehouse) for

Brooklyn-based United Steel and Strip Corp., an import/export firm. Nu Kraft allegedly

transferred more than 300 tons of thiodiglycol from Alcolac to Iraq via stops in Antwerp,

Belgium and Jordan and is no longer in business. Phillips Export, now part of Houston-

based ConocoPhillips, sold 500 tons of thiodiglycol to Iraq’s SEPP via the Dutch firm

KBS Holland. Union Carbide, formerly based in Danburry, Connecticut, and which later

merged with Dow Chemical Company based in Midland, Michigan, shipped the chemical

xylene to Iraq which was also used in its CW program. And finally, Unisys Corp., based

in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, sold $2.2 million worth of computers to MIMI.236

In 2003 the New York Times published a map of the world showing the origins by

country of Iraq’s chemical weapons program. The graphic was produced by Gary

Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington-based research group that

tracks WMD. No American firms appeared on the map, but Milhollin noted that they

“show up on lists of suppliers of anthrax strains to Iraq, and of advanced electronics for

nuclear and missile sites.”237 What the map does show is only part of the picture, since it

is based on Iraq’s own declaration. In addition to Western sources, Asian suppliers also

appear on the map. The major role of Singapore may be deceptive; van Anraat, for

235
Ibid.
236
Ibid.
237
Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz, “The Means to Make the Poisons Came From the West,” New York
Times, 13 April 2003.
 107

example, had used Singapore as a stop between the country of origin and the final

destination.

The Iraqi-supplied data was broken down into three categories: ingredients,

equipment, and munitions. Iraq declared imports of 17,602 tons of chemicals (that were

technically dual-use); Singapore sold Iraq the most (4,515 tons), followed by the

Netherlands (4,261 tons) and Egypt (2,400 tons). Iraq declared imports of 340 pieces of

CW equipment; Germany sold the most equipment (52 percent), followed by France (21

percent) and Austria (16 percent). The declaration said that between 1983 and 1989 Iraq

imported more than 200,000 artillery shells, aerial bombs, and rockets designed for

chemical weapons delivery. Italy was the country that sold Iraq the most munitions

(75,000 shells/rockets) followed by Spain (57,500) and China (45,000).238

Thus, the components of the chemical weapons program responsible for the

attacks on Halabja evidently had their origins in numerous parts of the globe, mostly in

Europe, but with substantial contributions from the United States. Accountability among

such a maze of trails is daunting. One individual, however, unrelated to Iraq’s chemical

weapons use on the Kurds, is attempting to hold Western companies accountable: Gary

B. Pitts, a Houston lawyer, is representing thousands of Gulf War veterans in a lawsuit

against many of the larger companies, alleging they may be responsible for the veterans’

health problems.239 His ongoing lawsuit has made documents available which before had

been under wraps. It is unclear, however, whether Halabja survivors will be successful in

their attempts to get compensation from such companies for the loss of relatives and

lingering affects from the attacks.

238
Ibid.
239
Shenon, “Suppliers: Declaration Lists Companies That Sold Chemicals to Iraq,” New York Times.
 108

Long-Term Impacts of Halabja on the Kurds

What long-term affects have survivors of the attacks experienced, and what

efforts have been made to alleviate them? And what do the Kurds of Halabja want from

local government as well as multinational corporations?

One of the largest problems affecting Halabjans is the lack of in-depth, systematic

studies on the health of survivors and environmental impacts on soil and water.

Preliminary studies have concluded that Halabjans experience dramatically higher rates

of cancers, vision and respiratory problems, miscarriages, and children born with

deformities compared to towns nearby that were not gassed. Access to sophisticated

healthcare treatments has been limited, and many people, especially women, suffer from

depression. The people of Halabja are frustrated with the lack of assistance they have

received from both local Kurdish government officials as well as the international

community.

The little research that has been carried out on these impacts was spearheaded by

two physicians, one British and the other Kurdish. In 1999, Dr. Christine M. Gosden,

professor of medical genetics at the University of Liverpool, in collaboration with Dr.

Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist and one of Kurdistan’s best-known

doctors, formed the Halabja Post-Graduate Medical Institute (HMI). The institute consists

of four centers dedicated to the study and treatment of long-term affects of chemical,

biological, and radiological weapons on men, women, and children.240 With support from

HMI as well as the Washington Kurdish Institute, the State Department, the UK’s

240
Treatment & Research Programs for WMD Survivors in Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja Post-Graduate Medical
Institute (HMI), http://www.kurd.org/halabja (accessed 6 October 2007). HMI’s four centers were founded
at the three medical colleges (Dohuk, Erbil, Suleymaniya) and the town of Halabja.
 109

Department for International Development and others, Baban conducted preliminary

research which was reported by Gosden in testimony before a U.S. Senate Judiciary

subcommittee hearing in 1998.

In her remarks, Gosden described the especially daunting challenges of treating

victims of poison gas attacks when the precise nature of the compounds used was an

unknown “cocktail.” “The Halabja attack involved multiple chemical agents—including

mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX,” she told the senators.241 She

noted that there is no known antidote for any of these poison gases and that some

symptoms “do not appear to respond to conventional therapy.”242 Citing an abundance of

medical literature in the annex accompanying her written statement, she testified that the

appearance of genetic mutations and cancer rates were comparable to those who were one

to two kilometers from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gosden described the

lingering affects on the survivors of Halabja, at that time, ten years after the attacks:

• severe respiratory problems (requiring drug trials and lung transplants)

• cancers (occurring at very young ages and consisting of large, aggressive,

rapidly metastasizing tumors and requiring imaging technology, chemotherapy,

and palliative care)

• congenital malformations (including heart conditions, mental handicaps, cleft lip

and palate requiring surgeons to repair these defects and speech therapists)

241
Testimony of Christine M. Gosden, Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology,
Terrorism and Government and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Chemical and Biological
Weapons Threats to America: Are We Prepared? 22 April 1998,
http://judiciary.senate.gov/oldsite/gosden.htm (accessed 3 October 2007).
242
Ibid.
 110

• neurological and psychiatric problems (high incidence of suicide and suicide

attempts; conventional anti-depressants often have severe side affects on poison

gas victims)

• skin and eye problems (mustard gas burns causing life-long pain requiring

research into new treatment methods)243

Gosden’s research revealed a high incidence of blindness and four times the rate of

infertility, miscarriages, congenital malformations, infant mortality, and cancers

compared to a nearby town that had not been gassed and that no chemotherapy or

radiation therapy (among other needed treatments) was available in the region.244

During her testimony, Gosden noted that medicine’s basic tenets consist of

maintaining health, relieving human suffering, and preventing death from disease. She

said, “In the case of Halabja, all these seem to have been overlooked or forgotten and we

have so far failed to understand what has happened to these people or helped them

effectively.”245

Mental health problems in particular plague the people of the town. Writer

Christiane Bird traveled to Kurdistan in 2002 and reported that “in the last six-seven

years ‘suicide through burning’ had become alarmingly widespread in Iraqi Kurdistan.”246

A study conducted by the Women’s Information and Cultural Center in Sulaimaniya

estimated that between 1991 and 2000 fourteen-hundred women had tried to burn

themselves to death. “The victims were usually young village women suffering from

depression perhaps over forced marriages, cruel husbands or desperate economic

243
Ibid.
244
Christine Gosden, “Why I Went, What I Saw,” Washington Post, 11 March 1998, A19.
245
Ibid.
246
Christiane Bird, A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan, (New York: Random
House, 2004), 225.
 111

situations—traditional tribal customs coupled with the general breakdown of Kurdish

society post-Anfal.”247

Gosden received death-threats from Iraqi government officials (prior to the

overthrow of Hussein in 2003) for her research in Halabja but continued her work long-

distance from London. She assisted the victims by secretly bringing Iraqi doctors to the

UK where they received training tailored to the Kurds’ medical complications.248 She also

lobbied on behalf of the chemical weapons victims, decrying in one Op-Ed the “appalling

lack of detailed scientific information on damage to [the Kurdish] people and their

environment” and warned that “severe health problems reported throughout Iraq and

neighboring countries suggest environmental damage may be widespread.”249

There have been other attempts by various parties, local and foreign, to help

Halabja survivors. The Washington Kurdish Institute, founded in 1991 by Najmaldin

Karim, an Iraqi Kurdish-American brain surgeon, received a grant from the State

Department to do a DNA study in Halabja in 2004. Mike Amitay, an American Jew

“interested in the Kurdish holocaust” was then WKI’s executive director. Major funding

from the U.S. government for the project, however, mysteriously ended before the results

could be analyzed. Perhaps influential business interests who might be embarrassed or

implicated in such a study may have persuaded the State Department to pull the plug on

WKI’s funding. No other funders have stepped up to fill the gap. 250

Other projects focused on Anfal survivors (called anfalakan). In 1999 the Kurdish

regional administration established the Ministry of Human Rights, Displaced Persons and
247
Ibid., 226.
248
“Mercy Mission to Save Ailing Kurds,” BBC News, 3 February 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1793791.stm (accessed 6 October 2007).
249
Christine Gosden and Mike Amitay, “Lesson of Iraq’s Mass Murder,” Washington Post, 31 May 2002.
250
Kevin McKiernan, The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2006), 351.
 112

Anfal in Sulaimaniya. Director Kak Mansour claimed it was the first ministry to

methodically provide for the survivors, coordinating social services, landmine removal,

and returning families to destroyed villages. The ministry is also trying to improve access

to healthcare facilities and provides Anfal survivors with a pension of $40 per month per

family and educational benefits, including a preference for the children of anfalakan in

order to increase their chances of attending university.251

Another program was run by the Kurdistan Women’s Union (KWU), a group

formed in 1953 in Baghdad, home to one million Kurds. Jula Hajee, president of the

Dohuk branch of the KWU, focuses on war widows who are burdened with psychological

and economic problems and tries to provide them jobs in order to give these women, she

says, a reason for living. One project run by young women involved the distribution of

sheep to 270 villages. The 13,000 sheep contributed wool, mutton and income to 2,300

families and resulted in healthier pregnancies and a lower infant mortality rate, according

to the group. Another project, funded by the World Food Program, provided one hundred

bee-keeping kits to the survivors.252

Victims who did not survive the attacks have been honored through the

construction of a memorial. In 2003 the $3 million Halabja Memorial was built with U.S.

funds (for a photograph see Appendix 9). A metal sculpture rose sixteen feet in the air,

symbolizing the sixteenth of March, from its base of locally quarried marble. The names

of five thousand victims were reportedly engraved into the marble. A sculpture of the

Kurdish flag was next to sixteen hands, a planet Earth, and four electric candles,

symbolizing the four regions of Kurdistan in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The fingers on
251
Kerim Yildiz, The Kurds in Iraq: The Past, Present and Future, (London: Pluto Press/Kurdish Human
Rights Project, 2004), 131.
252
Mike Tucker, Hell Is Over: Voices of the Kurds After Saddam, (Guilford, Conn.: The Lyons Press,
2004), 155.
 113

the hands were of varying thicknesses, correlating to the percentage of the Kurdish

population in each country: the thickest finger represented Turkey and the thinnest Syria.

The memorial originally included a building that housed a theater, seminar rooms, and a

photo exhibit.253 A separate room housed a life-sized scene of the attacks, with bodies of

children, women and men sprawled on top of one another, attempting to flee. A mist

sprayed into the room, depicting clouds of poison gas.254 Each year on the 16 March

anniversary, dignitaries and accompanying journalists annually made the trek to the

Halabja Memorial.

The victims of Halabja were remembered in another symbolic way which gave

the Kurds a measure of long-awaited recognition: Halabja is mentioned in the preamble

of Iraq’s new constitution, approved by national referendum in 2005. Part of a long list of

passionately invoked sufferings, it reads:

… inspired by the tragedies of Iraq’s martyrs, Shiite and Sunni, Arabs and Kurds
and Turkmen … and recollecting the darkness of the ravage of the holy cities and
the South in the Sha’abaniyya uprising and burnt by the flames of grief of the
mass graves, the marshes, Al-Dujail and others and articulating the sufferings of
racial oppression in the massacres of Halabcha, Barzan, Anfal and the Fayli Kurds
… so we sought hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder to create our new Iraq, the
Iraq of the future free from sectarianism, racism, locality complex, discrimination
and exclusion. …255

Despite these official and honorary forms of recognition, observers have detected

a simmering discontent among the Halabja survivors. Foreign journalists have often

noticed a lack of the routine hospitality and courtesy normally extended to visitors. One

woman told reporter Kevin McKiernan, “Look, the journalists always come here and tell
253
McKiernan, The Kurds, 350.
254
“Secretary Powell Honors Halabja Victims,” Kurdistan Newsline, 16 September 2003, Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan website, http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/paul_halabja030915.html (accessed 6 June
2007).
255
Associated Press, “Full Text of Iraqi Constitution,” Washington Post, 12 October 2005. The text was
translated from the Arabic by the UN’s Office for Constitutional Support and approved by the Iraqi
government.
 114

us they will get help, but nothing ever happens—what is the use of talking to them?”256

Nasreen Jaffar, who is partially blind and has trouble breathing, said she has ceased to see

any point in telling her story to foreigners, saying, “We are like laboratory rats here in

Halabja. Everyone comes to interview us and hear our tragedy and look at us, but no one

helps us.”257 In 2006, Habat Nawzad, a local Kurdish journalist, described to a French

reporter how visiting officials use the Halabja anniversary to make generous promises but

have never followed through. “Every year March 16 is like a supermarket that opens for

one day but closes before you have time to carry anything out,” he said.258

In 2003, a former KDP intelligence officer complained that an investigation into

mass graves had been postponed due to lack of funding (possibly WKI’s project). “There

has been a great lack of international cooperation,” he said. “Where is the United Nations

on this matter? The UN has only proven that it manages problems, and does not solve

them. The UN is doing nothing to aid the investigation of war crimes and mass graves in

Iraq! Where are the Germans with the lessons of their own Holocaust?”259

Discontent in Halabja boiled over one day in March 2006. All across Iraq a

minute of silence was observed to commemorate the poison gas attacks in 1988. But in

Halabja demonstrators, angry with the Kurdish government, blocked the entry of officials

into a ceremony at the Halabja Memorial. Demonstrators handed out flyers that read,

“This is a city, not a mass grave.” Kurdish security officers fired on the crowd, killing a

17-year-old teenager and injuring a dozen more Kurds. By the time order was restored,

256
McKiernan, The Kurds, 353.
257
Omar Sinan and Kathy Gannon, “In Town that Saddam Gassed, Bitter Times Abound,” Associated
Press, 19 February 2007, http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=14091.
258
Simon Ostrovsky, “Halabja Wants Saddam’s Chemical Suppliers to Pay,” Agence France Press, 20 May
2006, in The Centre of Halabja, C.H.A.K., http://www.nawandihalabja.com (accessed 24 June 2007).
259
Faisal Rostinki Dosky, director, KDP intelligence, interviewed by Mike Tucker. Tucker, Hell Is Over,
99.
 115

the three-year-old memorial had burned down, destroying documents that had been

painstakingly acquired by the memorial’s director, Ibrahim Hawramani, himself a

survivor of the attacks.260

The event reveals a number of different realities: the current government is

challenged to provide for freedoms of speech and assembly for demonstrators as well as

the press, and the people of Halabja have grievances they feel remain unmet. Journalists

who covered the unrest were beaten and detained by PUK police. One Kurdish reporter,

Mariwan Hama-Saeed, said officials should not have been surprised by the protest since

the student-demonstrators had alerted them of their plans three weeks ahead of time.261

Said Eddin, a shop owner and survivor of the 1988 attacks, said the demonstrators had

reason to complain. “We haven’t had any reconstruction here. The people of Halabja are

very, very angry.”262 There were only two new buildings in town: the memorial and office

of the PUK. Others complained of lack of proper medical care. Hama-Saeed said the

people are frustrated by the government’s failure to provide services or stop corruption.

“They have been doing well to liberate us, but they have failed to serve us. I don’t need

slogans like, ‘Baath is terrible, Arabs are chauvinists.’ I need universities and I need

roads paved. I don’t need to see officials with ten million dollar houses while people are

suffering.”263 Obviously the economic boom in Iraqi Kurdistan is not trickling down to

people of all income and educational levels.

260
David Enders, “Unrest in Halabja,” Mother Jones, 23 March 2006; “Kurdistan Islamic Scholars Union
Condemns Burning of Halabja Monument,” Kurdistan Nuwe, 21 March 2006, trans. NTIS, U.S.
Department of Commerce from the newspaper of the PUK; and Amanj Khalil, “Iraq: Journalists Arrested,
Harassed at Halabja Monument,” Hawlati, 22 March 2006, trans. NTIS, U.S. Dept. of Commerce.
261
Enders, “Unrest in Halabja.”
262
Ibid.
263
Ibid.
 116

While many Halabjans are angry, the trials of Saddam Hussein and “Chemical

Ali” did evoke a sense of justice among many Kurds. When al-Majid’s death sentence

was announced, one Kurdish woman said, “I am very happy today … I want them to be

hanged in Kurdistan. I do not want Chemical Ali and others to die in a split second,

because our men and sons were suffering from bullet injuries for days and our women

and children were dying from thirst in the prisons.” A Kurdish man said, somewhat less

vividly, “I salute the court that has served justice in Iraq. I feel I am a true citizen when I

see the court of law is passing lawful sentences.” Another sought to rid himself of the

seemingly derogatory name of anfalak: “Today it is clear to everyone that Anfal is

genocide. … We do not need the dirty label of Anfal on us. We are martyrs of the

trenches.”264 Others were less enthusiastic. Rizgar Mohgadeh Basher, 24, whose father

was disappeared by Iraqi soldiers during the Anfal, said when Saddam Hussein’s trial

began, “We’re nearing justice, but it’s too late.”265 Nokham Mohammed, a Halabja

survivor who lost eight family members in the attacks, has a persistent cough, burns on

his skin and is blind in one eye. He needs surgery but can’t afford it. He says people still

fear that the vegetables they sell to each other in the markets are grown in poisoned soil

but they don’t have the resources to check.266

Another Halabja survivor, Kamil Abdel Qader, whose lungs are severely

damaged, formed the Halabja Chemical Victims Society, a small nonprofit organization.

He wants the companies and governments that helped Hussein to pay compensation to

264
“Iraqi Kurds React to Death Sentence of ‘Chemcial Ali,’” KurdSat, PUK satellite TV, Al-Suleimaniyah,
24 June 2007, trans. NTIS, U.S. Dept. of Commerce. All speakers in this transcript are unidentified by
name.
265
Sudarsan Raghavan, “For Kurds, A Long Wait for Justice: Hussein Begins Trial Today for 1988
Offensive That Used Chemical Attacks,” Washington Post, 21 August 2006, A1.
266
Sky News, “Halabja: ‘They’ve Suffered So Much,’” 17 March 2007, Kurdistan Regional Government
website, http://www.krg.org/articles/article_print.asp?ArticleNr=16772 (accessed 21 May 2007).
 117

the victims who are still living. “Those who are suffering need a lot of money to get

treatment in Western hospitals,” he said. “We want to see those who helped Saddam

punished and our rights restored.”267

Compensation, medical care, further studies, and development are repeatedly

called for by Kurds in Iraq and in the diaspora. Washington Kurdish Institute president

Najmaldin Karim, speaking after al-Majid’s conviction, called on academics to research

Hussein’s repression of the Kurds. “Now is the time for a full study of the Anfal. I hope

that American institutions will lead this effort,” he said.268 When then-Secretary of State

Colin Powell attended the Halabja Memorial inauguration in 2003, Suhayba Abdul-

Rahman, a survivor, showed him a photograph of her five children and husband killed in

the attack. She thanked Bush for launching the war but asked Powell to help get her

medical attention to try to restore her sight.269 And Kamil Abdul Qadir said, with a cough,

“I believe the world has forgotten about us. The Americans and the British did half the

job when they got rid of Saddam Hussein. We thought they would come and help us and

reconstruct Halabja—especially after they used it as a symbol to justify the war.”270

Nearly two decades later, the legacy of the attacks on 16 March 1988 indeed lingers.

267
Ostrovsky, “Halabja Wants Saddam’s Chemical Suppliers to Pay.”
268
Washington Kurdish Institute, “Washington Kurdish Institute President Commends Anfal Trial Verdict,”
29 June 2007, WKI Press Release, http://www.krg.org/articles/detail.asp?
smap=02010200&1ngnr=12&rnr=73&anr=18748 (accessed 30 June 2007).
269
“Secretary Powell Honors Halabja Victims,” Kurdistan Newsline, 16 September 2003, Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan website, http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/paul_halabja030915.html, (accessed 6 June
2007).
270
Caroline Hawley, “Halabja Survivors Seek Justice,” BBC News, 19 October 2005.
 118

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Based on English-language written documents obtained from a variety of sources,

including interview-based reports by human rights organizations, UN correspondence and

reports, U.S. government documents, and media coverage, it is clear that at least 3,200

and perhaps as many as 5,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians, disproportionately children and

women, were killed on 16 March 1988 and thousands more wounded as a result of

chemical weapons dropped by the Iraqi military under the authority of Ali Hassan al-

Majid and Saddam Hussein. The attack appears to have been collective punishment for

the alliance of the Kurdish guerrillas, peshmerga, with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The

Kurds have historically been in a frequent state of rebellion against the central

governments that have ruled over them in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria since the breakup

of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

The evidence also shows that the Reagan administration not only failed to take

action to prevent further poison gas attacks on civilians by their de facto ally, Iraq, but

indeed actively sought to prevent other bodies from sanctioning the Ba‘athist

government. Their motive for such a policy, as is clear from their own memos, was

heavily influenced by economic objectives. Further, it is clear that dozens of Western

companies and governments, especially West Germany but also the United States,

facilitated Iraq’s chemical weapons program either through supplying equipment,

ingredients, and technology or the capital to purchase such goods and services without

which the attacks on 16 March could not have taken place.

While media coverage of the attacks was adequate, and no government or

corporate officials with access to television or print news can credibly claim they did not
 119

know about the attacks on Halabja, nevertheless many survivors feel neglected by the

international community in general and the regional Kurdish government in particular.

Unmet needs currently include sophisticated medical treatment and environmental

studies, and some Iraqi Kurds are demanding compensation from the companies that

profited from chemical supplies and technology sales. Although a handful of former Iraqi

officials have been tried for war crimes and genocide, it remains unclear how far the

reach of the upcoming Halabja trial under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi High Tribunal in

Baghdad will go and whether survivors will indeed obtain financial settlements from the

companies implicated in the arming of Iraq.

What implications can be drawn from this study of the attacks on Halabja?

Certainly this is a story that depicts the brutality of Saddam Hussein and his regime. It

also shows what the consequences can be if men and women working in corporate

positions make business decisions based on the bottom line—increasing shareholder

profits—without considering the impact of the end-use of their products on

noncombatants such as unarmed civilians and especially children, women, and the

elderly. It raises the necessity of enforcing a global ban on the use, stockpiling, and

manufacturing of chemical weapons—including eliminating the stockpiles of the United

States and those of other Western democracies to avoid giving other nations the double-

standard excuse for non-compliance.271

Human rights and international law, which were apparently so easily dismissed by

many persons in positions of authority in this story, are increasingly becoming harder for

governments to ignore as voters are more aware of human rights abuses all over the
271
Senator Hatfield called for the “complete and final destruction of the world’s nerve gas arsenals” in
1988. The U.S. ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1998, but attached many reservations that,
Hiltermann charges, “effectively rendered US adherence to the treaty meaningless.” Congressional Record,
Senate, 24 June 1988, pp. 15918–21, cited in Meho, 40; and Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 242.
 120

globe. This awareness is emerging thanks to the explosion in communications

technology; e.g., satellite television and the Internet are accessible to more and more

households across the planet. These better-informed voters in turn pressure government

officials to act or face the reality of being voted out of office (the loss of many

Congressional seats in the 2006 post-hurricane Katrina election, for example). The

Reagan administration, in contrast, was apparently able to look the other way, block

efforts by others to intervene, and provide military assistance to Ba‘athist government

leaders—who have since been convicted of genocide—with impunity.

The relative impotence of the UN is vividly clear in the story of Halabja. As

Faisal Rostinki Dosky, director of KDP intelligence, insightfully observed, the UN often

seems to be satisfied with managing problems rather than solving them.272 Since 1988

other cases have occurred that have been labeled as genocide, including Rwanda, Bosnia,

and the Darfur region of Sudan. If the international community wants to effectively

prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing rather than attempting only to punish such crimes,

the UN system, particularly the Security Council framework, will have to undergo

fundamental restructuring and reform.

As more legal precedents are established regarding the attacks on Halabja,

survivors with access to legal representation may be able to win a measure of

compensation—and the medical care they seek—from corporations wanting to avoid

additional negative publicity. Only time will tell.

The Halabja attacks were indeed an “inconvenient atrocity.”273 It was

inconvenient to support the Kurds in 1988. Western government leaders and the

272
Tucker, Hell Is Over.
273
Peretz, “Cambridge Diarist: Neighborhood Bullies,” The New Republic. Although Peretz coined this apt
phrase, the rest of the observations in this paragraph are mine.
 121

corporate donors who funded their campaigns did not allow Kurdish civilian deaths to

jeopardize lucrative post-war reconstruction contracts. Their paramount foreign policy

objective was to protect Persian Gulf oil from any threat—at the time they considered

Iran to be the greatest danger to the unencumbered, free flow of black crude. From the

U.S. government’s perspective, Iraq was a convenient, proxy military force to act as a

buffer between the hostile Islamic Republic of Iran and the more pliable Gulf States. The

fact that their alliance with Iraq in effect required U.S. policymakers to tolerate the

gassing of children and women did not prevent them from pursuing their strategic

objectives. And for that callous calculus, many have yet to be held accountable.
 122

List of Appendices

Appendix 1: Photographs of Omar Hama Saleh and Infant.............................................126

Appendix 2: Map of Kurdistan.........................................................................................127

Appendix 3: Photograph of Adela Khanum of Halabja...................................................128

Appendix 4: List of Articles from 11 March 1970 Peace Accord....................................129

Appendix 5: List of Names of Civilian Victims...............................................................130

Appendix 6: Photographs of Corpses in Halabja.............................................................132

Appendix 7: List of U.S. Companies Supplying Arms to Iraq.........................................133

Appendix 8: List of U.S. Companies Linked to Iraq’s CW Program..............................134

Appendix 9: Photograph of Halabja Memorial................................................................135

 123

Appendix 4: List of Articles from 11 March 1970 Peace Accord

1. The Kurdish language shall be, alongside the Arabic language, the official language in
areas with a Kurdish majority; and will be the language of instruction in those areas
and taught throughout Iraq as a second language.

2. Kurds will participate fully in government, including senior and sensitive posts in the
cabinet and the army.

3. Kurdish education and culture will be reinforced.

4. All officials in Kurdish majority areas shall be Kurds or at least Kurdish-speaking.

5. Kurds shall be free to establish student, youth, women’s and teachers’ organizations of
their own.

6. Funds will be set aside for the development of Kurdistan.

7. Pensions and assistance will be provided for the families of martyrs and others stricken
by poverty, unemployment or homelessness.

8. Kurds and Arabs will be restored to their former place of habitation.

9. The Agrarian Reform will be implemented.

10. The Constitution will be amended to read ‘the Iraqi people is made up of two
nationalities, the Arab nationality and the Kurdish nationality.’

11. The broadcasting station and heavy weapons will be returned to the Government.

12. A Kurd shall be one of the vice-presidents.

13. The Governorates (Provincial) Law shall be amended in a manner conforming with
the substance of this declaration.

14. Unification of areas with a Kurdish majority as a self-governing unit.

15. The Kurdish people shall share in the legislative power in a manner proportionate to
its population in Iraq.

Source: David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 327–28.

 124

Appendix 5: List of Names of Civilian Victims

Who Survived the Halabja Attacks Compiled from UN and Media Reports

Name Sex Age

From UN report
Alluan Ali Mohammed F 12
Servin Ali F 15
Marayam Mohammad Amin F 15
Taban Ali F 18
Mahnaz Mohammad F 3
Shilan Hakim M 9
Layla Habibollah F 22
Kochar Ali F 22
Khadijeh Abdolrahim F 22
Ayeshe Rashid F 30
Kollaleh Abdolgader F 14
Shamsi Mohamad F 21
Nasrin Mohammad F 25
Clavesh Ali F 25
Shaho M 11
Unidentified child F 5
Taban Mahdi F 2
Halab Caarm F 20
Maryam Mohamad F 25
Soam Hussei F 8
Unidentified child M 4
Nasrin Abdeolchader F 18
Leyla Abdeolchader F 13
Hossein Fasel M 20
Mohammad Abdollah M 35
Amaca M 17
Norabbas M 42
Mohammad Karim Rascool M 60
Davood Karim M 52
Conna Mohammad F 4.5
Unidentified child F 6 mos.
Ardalan M 4
Halimeh F 10
Sabihe Ali F 15
Son of Sabihe Ali M 2 mos.
Najibeh Ali F 7

From media sources source

Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad F 16 JG
Rangeen Abdel Qadir Muhammad F 15 JG
Bakhtiar Abdul Aziz M 30 JG
 125

Name Sex Age source

Muhammad M N/A JG
Nouri Hama Ali M N/A JG
Awat Omer M 20 JG
Muhammad Ahmed Fattah M 20 JG
Salah Fattah M N/A JG
Bahar Jamal F N/A JG
Hamida Mahmoud F N/A JG
Dashneh Mahmoud F 2 JG
Jamila Abdullah F 28 NB
Abdul Rahman M 60 NB
Soman Mohammed M 14 PK1
Haj Ali Rasa M 50 PK2
Mohamed Mahmoud Bharam M 35 JB
Aras Abed M N/A CH

Key to sources

JG = Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” New Yorker

NB = Nicholas Beeston, “Gas Victims Frozen in the Agony of Death,” The Times
PK1 = Paul Koring, “High Civilian Toll in Iraqi Attack on City,” The Globe and Mail
PK2 = Paul Koring, “Poison-Gas Attack Leaves City of Dead,” The Globe and Mail
JB = John Bierman, “A Terrible Survival,” Maclean’s
CH = Caroline Hawley, “Halabja Survivors Seek Justice,” BBC News

Compiled by Susan Schuurman

 126

Appendix 7: List of U.S. Companies Supplying Arms to Iraq

1. Honeywell (R, K)
2. Spectra Physics (K)
3. Semetex (R)
4. TI Coating (A, K)
5. Unisys (A, K)
6. Sperry Corp. (R, K)
7. Tektronix (R, A)
8. Rockwell (K)
9. Leybold Vacuum Systems (A)
10. Finnigan-MAT-US (A)
11. Hewlett-Packard (A, R, K)
12. Dupont (A)
13. Eastman Kodak (R)
14. American Type Culture Collection (B)
15. Alcolac International (C)
16. Consarc (A)
17. Carl Zeiss-U.S. (K)
18. Cerberus Ltd. (A)
19. Electronic Associates (R)
20. International Computer Systems (A, R, K)
21. Bechtel (K)
22. EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc. (R)
23. Canberra Industries Inc. (A)
24. Axel Electronics Inc. (A)

Weapons Key: A=Nuclear, B=Biological, C=Chemical, R=Rockets, K=Conventional

Source: Andreas Zumach, “Fremde Hilfe fur Saddam” (Strange Assistance for Saddam),
Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), 17 December 2002, http://www.taz.de/index.php?
id=archivseite&dig=2002/12/19/a0080&type=98.
 127

Appendix 8: List of U.S. Companies Linked to Iraq’s CW Program

1. Al Haddad Enterprises (formerly based in Nashville, Tenn.)

2. Alcolac International (formerly based in Baltimore, Md., now in Georgia)
3. Bechtel Group (San Francisco, Calif.)
4. Dow Chemical (Midland, Mich.)
5. Evapco (Taneytown, Md.)
6. Gorman-Rupp Co. (Mansfield, Ohio)
7. Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, Calif.)
8. Honeywell (Morristown, N.J.)
9. Lummus Crest, Inc. (Bloomfield, N.J., now part of ABB Global, a Swiss
conglomerate with U.S. headquarters in Norwalk, Conn.)
10. Mouse Master (formerly located in Lilburn, Ga.)
11. Nu Kraft Mercantile Corp. (formerly located in Brooklyn, N.Y.)
12. Perkin-Elmer Corp. (formerly based in Norwalk, Conn., later restructured and based
in Wellesley, Mass.)
13. Phillips Export (now part of ConocoPhillips, based in Houston, Texas)
14. Posi Seal Inc. (formerly based in North Stonington, Conn.; sold off)
15. Pure Aire Corp. (formerly located in Charlotte, N.C.)
16. Sullaire Corp. (formerly based in Charlotte, N.C.)
17. Union Carbide (based in Danbury, Conn., later merged with Dow Chemical, Midland,
Mich.)
18. Unisys Corp. (Blue Bell, Penn.)

Source: This list is culled from a longer version compiled by Jim Crogan, “Made in the
USA, Part III: The Dishonor Roll: America’s Corporate Merchants of Death in Iraq,” LA
Weekly, 24 April 2003.
128
 129

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