SADDAM HUSSEIN discovered the power of weapons of mass destruction during the brutal Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of troops manning miles of trenches fought much as European armies of the First World War did.

The Iraqis, who invaded an Iran weakened by revolution, were quickly thrown back by Iran’s superior troop strength.

Saddam experimented with chemical weapons when he used mustard gas in 1984 against massed formations of Iranian infantry.

The first widespread use of chemical weapons was recorded in the winter of 1986, when Iranian troops launched the Kerbala offensive and captured the Iraqi peninsula of Fao at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. This time nerve agents as well as mustard gas killed or wounded thousands of Iranian troops and helped to blunt an offensive that threatened to overrun Basra, Iraq’s second city. Iranian veterans of the conflict said later that gas attacks had had a devastating psychological effect on the troops, many of whom fled in the face of gas shells.

A year later Iraqi forces, under the command of Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, attacked with chemical bombs Kurdish villages suspected of sympathising with the Iranians. In 1988 5,000 Kurds were killed in the market town of Halabja.

An estimated 20,000 people were killed or injured by Iraqi chemical agents during the war. President Khatami of Iran said recently that victims were still dying from the after-effects of chemical attacks.

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