Halabja:
Symbol of Hussein’s Inhumanity
By Jim Garamone,
AFPS
WASHINGTON,
March 15, 2003 – "Bloody Friday." That’s what
Iraqi Kurds call the attack on Halabja, Iraq, on March 16, 1988.
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Saddam
Hussein’s largest use of chemical weapons on his own people. At
least 5,000 Iraqi Kurds died from a lethal mixture of mustard
gas and the nerve agents Sarin, Tabun and VX. Another 10,000 were
reported injured.
The victims were not Iranian soldiers, but the
men, women and children of Halabja. Some reports indicated the
Iraqis dropped cyanide gas, but that has never been proven. In
1988, Halabja, with a population of about 80,000, was a battlefield
in the Iran-Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had started in 1980.
Just before March 16, local Kurds and Iranian Revolutionary Guards
had passed through the city.
Local officials and the Iranians would not let
people leave the city. They figured there was no military use
to the city and that Iraq would not bomb a population center.
They were wrong.
Iraqi forces shelled the city, and aircraft dropped
conventional bombs there. On March 16, the chemical weapons attacks
began.
Eight Iraqi aircraft began dropping chemical
bombs over the city, Kurdish officials said later. The chemical
bombardment continued all night with flights of seven or eight
aircraft releasing weapons on the city and roads leading out of
it. The attacks continued through March 19.
"In the streets and alleys of Halabja, corpses
piled up over one another," according to information on the
Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iraq Web page: "Tens of
children, while playing in front of the their houses in the morning,
were martyred instantly…. The innocent children did not
even have time to run back home. Some children fell down at the
threshold of the door of their houses and never rose again."
Christine M. Gosden, a professor of Medical Genetics
at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, reported
on Halabja to the U.S. Senate in 1998. "I was shocked by
the devastating effects of these weapons which have caused problems
such as cancers, blindness and congenital malformations,"
she said.
Gosden likened the secondary effects to those
of an atomic bomb. Survivors of the attack reportedly continue
to suffer and die from its effects, she claimed.
Halabja was not the first instance of Iraqi chemical
attacks. Hussein first used chemical agents against Iranian soldiers
in 1983. CIA documents show the largest documented attack was
a February 1986 strike against al-Faw, where mustard gas and tabun
may have affected up to 10,000 Iranians. Hussein continued to
use the weapons against the Iranians, but then turned the weapons
against the Kurds, who wanted to depose him.
Before the attack on Halabja, Saddam Hussein
launched chemical strikes on 20 small villages in 1987. But the
scale of the attack on Halabja was unlike anything that happened
before.
During the 1930s Spanish Civil War-era, people
were horrified with the conventional bombardment of the Spanish
city of Guernica. On April 26, 1937, reportedly about 1,500 civilians,
one-third of the city’s population, died from 100,000 pounds of
bombs raining down on them. Mention of the word "Guernica"
gave a mental picture of the depths of cruelty man would stoop
to. The Kurds maintain that "Halabja" should also trigger
these feelings.