The day when Saddam gassed 5,000 Kurds
HALABJA (Iraq): On March 16, 1988, as many as 5,000 Iraqi Kurds, mostly women and children, were killed when deadly gas was released on the northern town of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces.
The massacre was believed to have been the worst gas attack targeting civilians.
In the final months of the eightyear Iraq-Iran war, ethnic Kurdish fighters, who sided with Iran, captured the large farming town here on March 15.
Home to more than 40,000 people, the town is in the Kurdistan region and just 11km from the Iran border, while 250km from the Iraqi capital.
Saddam’s army retaliated with artillery and airstrikes.
The Kurdish fighters and most of the town’s men withdrew to surrounding hills, leaving behind the children, women and elderly.
The following day, Iraqi fighter planes circled above the area for five hours, releasing a mixture of toxic gases.
The slaughter was quickly revealed: the fighters who came down from the hills gave the alert and foreign journalists were soon on the scene.
By March 23, the first images were broadcast on Iranian television. Corpses scattered the streets with no obvious sign of injury, although witnesses later said some had blood around their noses.
The cameras of journalists brought in by the Iranian army lingered on the bodies of the children. The town was the victim of a chemical weapon attack, said the commentaries, using official Iranian explanations that accused Iraq of responsibility. lives here since Iraqi planes released their deadly poison”.
Many of the thousands who fled were in camps in Iran.
A French MSF team estimated the number of dead at 2,000 to 3,000. Teheran gave a toll of 5,000. A Belgian toxicologist said analysis showed that several gases were used, including mustard gas and nerve agents. He estimated that 3,800 people were killed and 10,000 poisoned.
Analysts said the attack might have been in revenge for the Kurdish fighters’ support of the Iranian army in the 1980-1988 war.
Justice came more than 20 years later when General Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for ordering poisonous gas attacks, was hanged in 2010.
A cousin of Saddam, he was found by the courts to have ordered the attack here. He received four death sentences, but i nsisted he acted in the interests of Iraqi security and expressed no remorse. In 2012, the Iraqi government handed Halabja authorities the rope used in his hanging.
Saddam is hanged in 2006 for another atrocity, closing various investigations underway against him, including for genocide of the Kurds.