There were few second chances in Halabja. The very word has become synonymous
with the worst excesses of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime, and a
justification for the imminent invasion of Iraq. Whole families died in each
other’s arms on March 16, 1988, in the worst documented chemical attack
since the Second World War, succumbing to a combination of blistering and
blood and nerve agents that seeped through the city’s shattered streets
after a devastating seven-hour air and artillery bombardment on the Kurdish
populace. Once they lost consciousness, few of the victims who became
separated from their families in the carnage of fire, rubble and swirling
chemical mists saw each other again.
Blinded parents forced to abandon children choking on pulmonary fluid; cellars
clogged with contorted bodies; black skin, blisters and bleeding eyes: the
accounts of survivors, even 15 years later, are so appalling that after a
short time you block out the details and merely nod dumbly at the rhythm of
their words.
This is the story of a 56-year-old man whom I met on Sunday afternoon, sitting
by a grave in a cemetery in the city. He had two sick young women with him,
and most of his family are dead. But it is the story of a second chance. It
is unusual, and about as happy a story as there is in Halabja.
MARCH 16, 1988: THERE WERE more than 150 Kurds jammed together in Faiq Arif’s
capacious cellar in the Kani Ashqan quarter of Halabja. A rich man, Arif and
his extended family, friends and neighbours had all sought shelter in his
basement just after the first Iraqi airstrikes began at 11.15am. Among them
was Mahmoud Fatah, a bulldozer driver and former guerrilla fighter. With him
were his mother Rana, sister Shamsa, wife Galawezh, and his children; sons
Shivan, 5, and Kurdawan, 4; and daughters Mardin, 7, and two-year old Azhin.
A day earlier, in one of the last advances of the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian
Revolutionary Guard units had entered the Kurdish city. It is cupped to the
north, east and south by gentle green foothills that rise suddenly to the
snow-capped mountain border with Iran, and flanked to the west by a lush
alluvial plain. Halabja’s 70,000 Kurdish population initially rejoiced at
the Iranians’ arrival, though the fighters included wild-eyed teenagers,
heavily indoctrinated and armed only with clubs and knives.
Since the previous year the Kurds had suffered heavily in Saddam Hussein’s
infamous al-anfal operations against Kurdish peshmerga
guerrillas. Thousands were already dead or missing as the Iraqi Army ravaged
its way through separatist Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. Most Kurds
hated the Baathist forces, and many had actively colluded with the Iranians
in the eight years of the Iran-Iraq conflict. However, in Halabja there was
little time for “liberation” celebrations; the late-morning airstrikes of
March 16 sent people scurrying for cover. “We must have been in the cellar
for about six hours,” Mahmoud recalls. “The bombardment outside was very
heavy. Then, just after 5.30pm, some people in the cellar began to notice a
strange smell. I couldn’t smell anything, but I took my daughter Azhin in my
arms and went out to see what was its cause, telling the others to remain.”
In the streets Mahmoud saw hundreds of people running, others staggering and
falling. There was total panic, and shouts to evacuate above the cacophany
of screaming. Parts of the city were on fire, and flames licked high into
the fading light of dusk. Mahmoud saw one of his brothers among the scrum,
handed little Azhin to him and ran back to the cellar for the rest of his
family.
He had been outside for little more than 15 minutes, but as he walked down the
cellar steps he noticed that the darkness was completely silent. There was
not a murmur. A breeze had blown a bank of gas down the cellar steps. “The
smell of gas was thick in the dark,” he says. “All 150 people were silent,
many already dead, though some were moving. I was scrambling over bodies
trying to find my family.”
Lighting a match, he found his mother. “She was unconscious, and there was
saliva pouring from her mouth. I started to panic. I was trying to find my
wife and children but my vision began to fail. Water started coming out of
my nose, and my throat was closing.” Mahmoud fled alone, blundering up the
steps and collapsing unconscious in a street. Waking hours later to the
sense of a cool breeze, he realised that he was totally blind. He staggered
around the empty streets for a while, tripping over bodies, before meeting a
child who could still see.
The boy led him by the hand to the hills, from where he was evacuated by
Iranian troops to a hospital inside Iran. It was 43 days before Mahmoud’s
vision returned. Weeks later he heard that Azhin was still alive. She was
still in Iraq, living with his brother near the town of Darband-i-Khan, 38
miles (60 kilometres) southeast of Sulaimaniyah. But the rest of his family
— mother, sister, wife, daughter and sons — were missing, apparently dead.
Mahmoud spent the next four years in a constant search through Kurdish refugee
camps in Iran hoping to discover them. He found no trace.
ABDUL SOFI MUHAMMAD was a Kurd living in Sanandaj, western Iran. He had a wife
and children of his own, but was moved by the plight of a terrified and very
sick girl, an orphan from Halabja, whom he saw at an Iranian hospital in his
home town. The child was about seven years old and had been blinded in the
gas attack. She suffered severe skin blistering and breathing difficulties,
together with an almost total amnesia which allowed her to remember nothing
but her first name: Mardin. In the summer of 1988 Abdul adopted the child
and took her home to his family.
Though later that year her sight returned, the little girl appeared backward
and confused. Occasionally she would speak of memories of a house. Rather
than awaken her sense of tragedy, Abdul chose instead to tell her that she
was his daughter, and that she had been in an accident.
But in 1997 the comfortable charade came to an end. Abdul was arrested by the
Iranian authorities and charged with being a member of an Iranian opposition
group, a crime punishable by death. In his cell on death row he sat down to
write Mardin a letter.
SHIVAN WAS ALIVE: JUST. Very ill, the five-year-old boy was mute. He had no
idea who he was, and unlike his sister Mardin could not even remember his
name. He regained consciousness in an improvised hospital in Rania, 90
kilometres northwest of Sulaimaniyah.
“Many relatives came to see their children there,” he remembers, “but I had no
one. The nurses told me I could not speak because I was so afraid. After
some weeks my health improved, though I had blanks in my thoughts and a very
bad speech impediment. I was confused and sad that no one was visiting me.”
Shivan absconded from the clinic one day in the summer of 1988, and wandered
away to a nearby mosque, confused and looking for his family. He was found
by Najmaddin Khidr Sewaddin, who took pity on the boy and brought him home
to live with his wife and seven children in Rania.
This family was honest with Shivan, telling him that he was an orphan from
Halabja. Since he could remember nothing of his past, not even his name,
because of the effects of severe trauma and chemical contamination, they
called him Bakhtiar Ali Saleh.
“They loved me as their own son,” Shivan says. “But as time passed I wondered
more about my origins and if any of my family could still be alive.” Last
year Shivan, by then a 19-year-old labourer, approached a local newspaper in
Rania and told them his story.
“I LOVED MY ‘FATHER’ Abdul Safi Muhammad,” Mardin says, “and was very sad
after he had been arrested. Then we heard he had been sentenced to death.
The family went to the prison in Sanandaj to visit him the day before he was
to be executed.”They were forbidden to see the captive. Instead they were
permitted an exchange of letters. Abdul’s hastily written words for Mardin
were simple and shocking. “He wrote that he loved me as a daughter but that
I was not actually his daughter. He said that indeed I was an orphan from
Halabja, and that after his death I should return there to see if any of my
relatives remained alive. The next day he was hanged.”
Leaving Sanandaj with one of her adopted brothers, Mardin travelled into Iraq
to Sulaimaniyah, where she registered herself with a refugee tracing agency.
Almost immediately they found a possible trace based on her first name and
approximate age.
Mahmoud had ended the lonely quest for his family in Iran, and since 1991 had
returned to his home in Halabja, where he was living with Azhin. With the
passage of time the father and daughter had given up all hope of finding any
other family members alive, and accepted that they were the only survivors.
In April 1997 he was working in a garage when a car pulled up with local staff
from the tracing agency inside. There was a young woman with them. As she
stepped towards him Mahmoud burst into tears. He recognised the daughter he
had given up for dead, last seen in a cellar nine years before.
“He knew immediately that Mardin was his daughter and she that Mahmoud was her
father,” remembers Fatima Fatah, 65, who watched the meeting.
“Much of it was silent. Their faces changed colour several times and they were
weeping without speaking. It was one of the strongest things I have seen.”
FIVE YEARS LATER there was no similar spontaneous recognition or emotion when
Mahmoud and his two daughters saw Shivan. Instead the mood was cold and
detached.
“After I had been interviewed by the paper and told them my story, many people
from Halabja came to visit me in Rania, hoping I was their lost son,” Shivan
says. “It annoyed me after a while. None of them was a relative.”
In Halabja, Mahmoud had seen the story too. In June 2002 he travelled to Rania
to visit the young man named Bakhtiar. Mahmoud took Mardin with him, as well
as two childhood photos of Shivan, found in the family’s Halabja home long
after the chemical attack.
“I felt nothing for him, nor him for me,” Mahmoud remembers of their meeting.
The photographs failed to jog any memory in Shivan, and the two men spoke in
an awkward, almost hostile, fashion for 40 minutes before parting.
But when he left Rania, Mahmoud took with him an updated photograph of the
young man and showed both sets of photos to a physiology expert in
Sulaimaniyah. After analysing the faces with a computer, he told Mahmoud
there was a 70 per cent chance that Bakhtiar was his son. Two weeks later
Bahktiar travelled to Halabja. His memory began to stir. Though there were
no precise images in his mind, he was emotionally disturbed by meeting
Mahmoud and the two girls again. They left together for Tehran, to visit a
genetic clinic in the Iranian capital.
Two genetic samples were taken from each man’s saliva and joint fluid. They
also underwent cranial measurements. The results came four hours later. The
two men were called into an office. The doctor sitting before them was
succinct: “Your test results match. You are father and son.”
“I measure that moment as the happiest in my life,” Mahmoud says. “Shivan and
I began to cry. There were people in the hospital stopping what they were
doing and coming to look at us. What a moment. What joy. The coldness
between us disappeared in an instant. Fourteen years after I lost him, my
son returned to me.”
THERE ARE FEW second chances in Halabja, and even fewer happy endings. Shadows
from the family’s experience will not go away. I meet Mahmoud beside the
grave of his sister and niece. They were the only bodies from the cellar
positively indentified. He is sure that his wife Galawezh is dead, but still
holds some hope that his missing son Kurdawan, who would now be 19, may have
survived and be living in Iran or northern Iraq, ignorant of his past.
And his returned children are sick. Shivan still has blank moments, migraines,
slow responses and a damaged respiratory system. Azhin has a permanent
cough, while Mardin continues to suffer blistering and bruising.
None is married: all look palid and frail. It is unlikely that any of the
family will live to their full life expectancy, and, probably later this
week, they face another war.
“But do we care?” Mahmoud asks. “I was lost in Iran for four years believing
all but Azhin were dead. Nine years later my other daughter returns to me
from the grave: fourteen years later my son. To have lost then found again
gives me only delight.”
