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.

It was March 16, 1988, and the Kurdish village of Halabja, which lies near Iraq's border with Iran, had the misfortune of being on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War, then in its eighth year. The inhabitants, who numbered 50,000 or more at the time, knew the hard realities of conventional war firsthand, but they had no preparation for the nightmare that descended upon them that day — and continues to wreak havoc upon the survivors and their offspring today.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written extensively about Halabja, said in a radio interview:

You have to understand something here that's so diabolically clever. The Iraqis knew that gas is heavier than air and would penetrate cellars and basements more effectively by launching a conventional artillery attack on the town for several hours. In other words, they knew that people would do what they always did during an artillery barrage and run to their basements. They were stuck in their basements, and then [the Iraqis] launched the chemical weapons attack�turning them, really, into gas chambers.

A young woman is overcome by the horror of the regime-ordered chemical attack on the civilians of Halabja in March 1988. (Courtesy of the Kurdish Democratic Party)

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, and tried to escape downwind. Goldberg, writing in the New Yorker magazine, relates the account of one survivor, Nouri Hama Ali, who led his family toward Anab, a resettlement center outside Halabja for those whose villages had been destroyed by the Iraqi Army:

"On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to die. The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could see them." People were dying all around, he said. When a child could not go on, the parents, becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. "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."

Young victims of the Halabja attacks. (Courtesy of the Kurdish Democratic Party)

When the pictures of the contorted, often bleached civilian victims first reached a horrified world, the assumption was that several hundred had died in part of a pattern of much larger-scale chemical attacks on Iranian forces. But time and investigation have proved otherwise.

SIDEBAR

Chemical Weapons

The current consensus among experts inside and outside government is that as many as 5,000 died in the March 1988 attack on Halabja. Moreover, the methods used in the attack appear to underscore the regime's interest in using chemical agents to terrorize population centers.

Al-Anfal

Halabja was neither an aberration nor a desperate act of a regime caught in a grinding, stalemated war. Instead, it was one event in a deliberate, large-scale campaign called Al-Anfal to kill and displace the predominately Kurdish inhabitants of northern Iraq. In an exhaustive study published in 1994, Human Rights Watch concluded that the 1988 Anfal campaign amounted to an extermination campaign against the Kurds of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of at least 50,000 and perhaps as many as 100,000 persons, many of them women and children.

Baghdad launched about 40 gas attacks against Iraqi Kurdish targets in 1987-88, with thousands killed. But many also perished through the regime's traditional methods: nighttime raids by troops who abducted men and boys who were later executed and dumped in mass graves. Other family members — women, children, the elderly — were arrested for arbitrary periods under conditions of extreme hardship, or forcibly removed from their homes and sent to barren resettlement camps. As Human Rights Watch details, Iraqi forces demolished entire villages — houses, schools, shops, mosques, farms, power stations — everything to ensure the destruction of entire communities.

Poison's Legacy

Halabja citizens had no protection against chemical attack in 1988. (Courtesy of the Kurdish Democratic Party)

The 1988 chemical attack on Halabja has left behind a cruel and persistent legacy.

Initially, the vicious brew of mustard gas — a blistering agent that affects the membranes of the nose, throat, and lungs — and such nerve agents as sarin, tabun, and VX, attacked the villagers' eyes and respiratory tracts. Some survived with scarred lungs; others were blinded, either temporarily or permanently.

But the chemicals also contaminated the food and water supply, and surveys conducted by the Halabja Medical Institute (HMI) have documented that the health effects on the population have been devastating and long lasting: from increased cancers, notably colon cancer, and respiratory diseases, to heightened levels of miscarriages and infertility among women. And perhaps most tragic: extraordinarily high levels of severe and life-threatening abnormalities among the children of Halabja. One of the first outside medical experts to study the impact of the poison gas attacks on Halabja was Christine Gosden, a British professor of medical genetics who first traveled to northern Iraq in 1998 and founded the Halabja Medical Institute. In a 1998 Washington Post article, she wrote:

What I found was far worse than anything I had suspected, devastating problems occurring 10 years after the attack. These chemicals seriously affected people's eyes and respiratory and neurological systems. Many became blind. Skin disorders which involve severe scarring are frequent, and many progress to skin cancer.

Working in conjunction with doctors in the area, I compared the frequency of these conditions such as infertility, congenital malformations and cancers (including skin, head, neck, respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract, breast, and childhood cancers) in those who were in Halabja at the time with an unexposed population from a city in the same region. We found the frequencies in Halabja are at least three to four times greater, even 10 years after the attack. An increasing number of children are dying each year of leukemias and lymphomas.

In a summary of its research on the attacks, HMI reached these conclusions:

While these weapons had many terrible direct effects such as immediate death, or skin and eye burns, Iraqi government documents indicate they were used deliberately for known long-term effects, including cancers, birth defects, neurological problems, and infertility. Inexpensive in terms of death per unit cost, there is evidence that these weapons were used in different combinations by Ba'ath forces attempting to discern their effectiveness as weapons of terror and war.

The Iraqi military chemical bombardment of Halabja, seen from a distance, in 1988. (U.S. Government Photo)

Mike Amitay, executive director of the Washington Kurdish Institute, spells out one of the important lessons of Halabja: "After the events of 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax crisis, it is clear that no one is immune from weapons of mass destruction. The people of Iraqi Kurdistan represent the largest civilian population ever exposed to such weapons. The benefit to the international community from learning about their experiences is incalculable."

Halabja and Anfal are not simply history lessons but portents of what Saddam and his regime may hold for the future. In the immediate aftermath of the Halabja attack, for example, it is clear that Iraqi soldiers, wearing protective gear, returned to study the effectiveness of their attacks by dividing the city into grids and then determining the number and location of the dead.

For the Iraqi regime, Halabja appears to have been a testing ground.