HAMID DEHGHAN had just begun to tell his harrowing story when his tiny frame was racked by a violent coughing fit.

“I heard the explosion. A big circle in the battle area became white. It was like sugar and there was a smell of rotten fish,” he gasped after drawing deeply on an inhaler, his eyes still watering.

“It was four hours before we realised we’d come under chemical weapons attack.”

Blisters erupted on his skin. “Then we were coughing blood and I collapsed. I felt like I had passed to the other world and was unconscious for three days.”

Mr Dehghan was a 20-year-old Iranian soldier on the front line when his unit came under Iraqi mustard gas attack in 1985, a weapon rarely deployed in battle since the First World War. His two best friends died within hours. He still coughs blood and passes it in his urine. His fertility was also impaired.

Mr Dehghan is what Iran calls a “living martyr”, one of thousands of Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks from the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Their plight, with that of the 5,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians massacred by chemical bombing at Halabja in 1988, is now being invoked by those in Washington and London pressing for military action against President Saddam Hussein’s regime.

As President Bush reminded the United Nations General Assembly recently, the Iraqi dictator “attacked Iran in 1980” and he has “gassed many Iranians”.

Such belated expressions of concern anger Iran’s “living martyrs”. They accuse Mr Bush of hypocrisy for using their suffering to help to justify an attack on Iraq.

At the time, international condemnation of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran was muted. Washington had quietly supported Saddam’s war effort against Iran, whose Islamic Revolution the United States saw at the time as the greater threat to the stability of the oil-rich Gulf.

American support to Baghdad included the provision of satellite photography to help the Iraqis to understand how Iranian forces were deployed against them.

“If the US or the Europeans wanted to stop Saddam from using chemical weapons, they could have done it at the beginning of the war,” Hamid Sohrab-Pour, a pioneer in treating Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical weapons, told The Times. “Bush doesn’t have sympathy. He is using Iranian people as a tool.”

Tehran estimates that 100,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons, mostly mustard and nerve gases, during the war with Iraq. Iranian doctors say that between 2,000 and 3,000 of Saddam’s victims are still under medical surveillance, with about 1,000 severely injured with chronic lung diseases.

Grim experience has made Dr Sohrab-Pour, a softly spoken professor who studied for several years in the United States, a world expert on chemical weapons victims. He has treated about 10,000 since 1983, he said. He estimates that about 10 per cent of the victims died shortly after chemical exposure. The mortality rate among those exposed to nerve gas, which paralyses the muscles and respiratory system, was much higher than among those who suffered mustard gas attacks, which produces blisters first on the skin and then inside the lungs.

“Nerve gas either kills the patient or, if they are cured, they are cured for good,” Dr Sohrab-Pour said. “Mustard gas has long-term effects, most importantly chronic lung disease.” Many exposed to mustard gas, the main agent used by Iraq in the war, also suffer from impotence, infertility, badly impaired sight and devastating psychological problems.

Parvin Karimi-Vahed, an Iranian Kurdish mother of two, looks ten years older than her 36 years. In the summer of 1987, married just a month, she was visiting relations 15km (nine miles) from the Iraqi border when an Iraqi aircraft dropped a bomb on the house as she was taking a bath. It shot through the building, but miraculously missed everyone inside. “We were even laughing with relief,” she said.

Then came the smell of garlic and with it the terrifying realisation that they were engulfed by mustard gas. She was blind and unconscious by the time she reached hospital two hours later. It was three months before she regained her sight, which is still badly impaired, a further three months before she left hospital. Within 17 days, 11 members of her family, including her mother, sister and two brothers, were dead.

“Seventy per cent of my lungs are ruined. Eighty-five per cent of my skin was burnt,” she said. She still spends eight months a year in hospital.

She regards Washington’s expressions of concern now as no more than crocodile tears. “Bush is insincere. If he really thought about us, he could have helped us before.”

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