THE sound of slow death penetrated the room as the young woman struggled for breath to tell her story. It was a continuous rasping wheeze that got worse as the afternoon shadows lengthened and her diaphragm worked overtime to find enough oxygen to speak.
Rezan Fakhraden was five when Iraqi forces bombed her home city of Halabja with a mixture of nerve and mustard gases on March 16, 1988. More than 5,000 civilians died in the attack, the most infamous massacre of President Saddam Hussein’s year-long campaign of chemical strikes against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.
It is estimated that another 10,000 were affected by the gas. Many, like Rezan, have discovered that their condition is deteriorating with time, and early mortality, cancers, respiratory failure and birth defects are stalking the survivors.
“I had to leave school because I no longer had the strength to walk there,” she said. “I cannot climb more than ten stairs. I cannot run. Sometimes my lungs bleed. I cannot stop coughing and I am often sick. No one will marry me, and I cannot work.”
Yet if Saddam’s record of human rights abuses and the use of chemical weapons against his own people is being drawn by Tony Blair as the last arrow in his quiver of credible reasons for war with Iraq, the rhetoric has made little impression on the people of Halabja.
“I don’t trust Britain or America at all,” Rezan gasps. “They have said nothing about our plight due to the gases for 15 years. They even supported Saddam then. We have received no medicines from Britain or America in all that time to help us, and now we have no more protection against chemical attack than we had then. Yet we may be the first to get struck.”
Saddam’s use of mustard gas against the Kurds began in 1987 when his aircraft bombed village strongholds in northern Iraq controlled by the Kurdish peshmerga resistance.
Ali Hassan Majid, Saddam’s first cousin and the supreme commander of Iraqi forces in Kurdistan, nicknamed “Chemical Ali” by the Kurds, conducted the campaign.
Dr Faiq Mohammed Gulpy, 46, now the Kurds’ foremost chemical expert, was working with the peshmerga in the hills above Sulaimaniyah when he saw his first chemical victim.
“It was night and there was a distant bombardment,” Dr Gulpy recalled. “Later I was brought a casualty, a peshmerga named Mahid. He was short of breath. His eyes and hands were blistering and he smelt strange. I bathed him in warm water and gave him eye drops and antihistamines. Then I noticed my own hands and eyes were sore. The skin on my face became congested and darkened. Then I realised: this is mustard gas.”
Dr Gulpy has treated more than 1,000 Kurdish victims of chemical attacks since then. Most were casualites during Chemical Ali’s notorious 1987-1988 al-Anfal operations in which more than 182,000 people “disappeared” after arrest, while scores of villages were bombed with gas and hundreds more bulldozed.
Halabja seemed to be the Kurds’ darkest hour. Iranian Revolutionary Guards had entered the city on March 15, 1988 in one of their last advances of the Iran-Iraq war. They were greeted by jubilant crowds of Kurds, but the celebrations lasted less than 24 hours before disaster struck.
At 11.15 the following day Iraqi MiGs began bombarding the town with conventional bombs, which lasted until just after 2pm. Then the sound of the bombing began to change, becoming duller and muffled.
Hiding in his family’s cellar with his parents, five sisters, brother and 15 neighbours, Kamel Abdulqader, now 30, remembered what happened.
“Three young men left the cellar for about half a minute to see what was happening,” he said. “When they returned their faces had changed. They were swollen and darkening. The men seemed exhausted and weak. We began to smell a strange odour, like apples. An older man said, ‘They are using gas’”. At dusk Kamel and his family left their shelter. Some of the city was on fire.
“I saw people burning and blasted by bombs. There was a fog everywhere. Great numbers of dead were lying in the streets. Children were dead in their mothers’ hands. People had blue skins and mucus pouring from their mouths and noses. Whole families were huddled together dead. There were wounded people lying beside the dead, twitching. Some people did not know whether to leave their dying relatives and flee, or stay and die,” he said.
In the confusion Kamel’s family became separated. He went blind and lost consciousness. He woke up in an Iranian hospital five days later. It was three weeks before his vision returned; two months before he could walk. He was the only survivor of his family. Like Rezan, he has chronic respiratory illness and cannot lift anything heavier than 9lb.
His wife’s first child was aborted three years ago after serious deformities were diagnosed during pregnancy.
“Why are America and Britain now helping to defend Turkey, Israel and Kuwait against chemical attack, but not us?” Kamel asked. “We have suffered so much already without any medical aid, and we are so much closer to Saddam’s missiles than anyone else. Do they not believe we will be attacked like this again, or do they just not care?”
Dr Gulpy, whose mother and brother died in the Halabja attack, said: “Britain and America supported Saddam back then because for them Iran and its revolutionary ideology was the threat. We were of no use or interest to them. But now they have new plans for involvement in Iraq and suddenly they talk about our suffering. Where have they been for 15 years?”
Iraq's Kurds
- Kurdish population: more than 6 million living mainly in the northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan, an area about the size of Scotland. Most live in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, which has been under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government since 1991
- Rival groups: northern Iraq has been split by bloody clashes between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the northeast and the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the north. The two groups signed a unity pact earlier this month
- Refugees: Several thousand former pan-Kurdish Kurdistan Workers’ Party militants have fled neighbouring Turkey and settled in northern Iraq
- Post-war: Turkey and Iran both worry that their own Kurdish populations could become restless
