Victims of Iraq gas attack say horrors are a warning
Thirty-three years have passed, but the survivors of an Iraqi poison gas attack on the Iranian town here still suffer — and fight for international recognition of the horrific massacre.
“If someone lost a leg or an arm in the war, you can put a prosthesis on him,” said Saleh Azizpour, who heads an association for victims of the attack.
“But when our l ungs are burned, who will breathe for us?”
Teheran, on Monday, commemorates 40 years since Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, launching a war that raged for eight years.
Iraq’s June 28, 1987, gas attack on the Kurdish town here in northwestern Iran is considered to be the first time chemical weapons deliberately targeted civilians in an urban area.
“The dead and wounded range from a 3-month-old to a 70-yearold man,” Azizpour said. “All were civilians.”
The official toll is 119 dead and 1,518 wounded.
But, according to Azizpour, who was 25 in 1987, many more were affected.
Some 8,000 people were exposed to what experts said was mustard gas and many who survived were struggling with longterm health complications.
“Even today, there is sometimes so much pressure on my lungs... that I really cannot sleep,” said Mahmoud Assadpour, a 50-year-old teacher.
The impact of Covid-19, which has hit Iran hard, is a threat to survivors, said Rojane Qaderi, a doctor who heads the town’s public health network.
“As their immune system is weak... their chances of survival are low,” Qaderi said.
Survivors of the attack are asked to stay in their homes for protection against the virus.
“We are at home, we do not go out, it is as if we are in a cage,” said Mohammad Zamani, 59, who remembers hearing “muffled bangs” as the gas canisters dropped.
His wife, Leila Marouf Zadeh, was a volunteer nurse.
She recalled cries of the wounded at the field hospital begging for help, many people that she knew. The skin of some victims turned red from burns from the incapacitating gas.
“Some had crimson breasts, others, their whole bodies,” she said.
But after a few hours helping the survivors, she too felt the stinging impact. The gas had blinded her temporarily.
Rassoul Malahi, a retired farmer who uses an artificial respirator to breathe, tells a similar story. He was left “totally blind” for 18 days.
“The consequences of mustard gas are permanent,” said Qaderi.
“It affects or destroys the lungs. You have to learn to live with it.”
The list of symptoms include sore and swollen eyes, red and itching skin, as well as a shortness of breath, difficulty in moving and exhaustion, she said. Now there is an extra problem. Since the United States reimposed crippling sanctions against Iran in 2018, it has been hard to find the drugs needed for survivors.
Saddam Hussein began using
chemical weapons against Iran as early as 1982.
But it took the United Nations Security Council until 1986 to deplore the “use of chemical weapons” in the conflict.
Even then, it avoided singling Iraq out specifically for blame.
The same phrasing was used after the attack on the town here.
Survivors said the feeble response from the international community was tantamount to complicity in the attack.
The UN Security Council’s five veto-wielding permanent members — Britain, China, France, the US and, in 1987, the Soviet Union — all supported Iraq.
Several Western companies and governments are accused of having contributed to Iraq’s chemical weapons programme in the 1980s.
Today, the town here has more than 46,000 inhabitants — compared to nearly 18,000 in 1987 — mainly Sunni Muslims from the Kurdish minority.
The town, with modest flatroofed homes built on the slopes of a hill, is surrounded by farmland.
At first sight, there seem few signs of what happened.
Only a commercial building, its upper floor gutted by bomb damage, offers a clue.