Halabja poison gas attack

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article are disputed.
Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

The Halabja poison gas attack occurred in the period 15 March–19 March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces and a number of civilians in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja (population 80,000) were killed.

It was an event that is historically separate from the al-Anfal Campaign but related in that Kurdish civilians were caught up in the fighting and their numbers are often included in accounting the deaths attributable to Saddam Hussein's regime as part of the Anfal campaign. Estimates of casualties in this attack range from several hundred to 5,000 people. Halabja is located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles from the Iranian border.

Iran-Iraq War
Mersad - Dezful -Abadan - Undeniable Victory - Khorramshahr - Ramadan - Dawn V - Marshes - Cities - 1st Al Faw - Karbala-5 - Karbala-6 - Karbala Ten - Halabja - 2nd Al Faw Related U.S. operations Earnest Will - Prime Chance - Eager Glacier - Nimble Archer - Praying Mantis

1 The attack
2 Discovery
3 International sources for technology and chemical precursers
4 Establishing the culprit
5 The trials
6 References in popular culture
7 References
8 Video
9 See also
10 External links

[edit] The attack

Almost all current accounts of the incident regard Iraq as the party responsible for the gas attack, which occurred during the Iran-Iraq War. The war between Iran and Iraq was in its eighth year when, on March 16 and March 17, 1988, Iraq dropped poison gas on the Kurdish city of Halabja, then held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas then allied with Tehran (throughout the war, Iran had supplied the Iraqi Kurdish rebels with safe haven and other military support).

The poison gas attack on the Iraqi town of Halabja was the largest-scale chemical weapons (CW) attack against a civilian population in modern times. It began early in the evening of March 16, when a group of eight aircraft began dropping chemical bombs, and the chemical bombardment continued all night. The Halabja attack involved multiple chemical agents, including mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX. Some sources have also pointed to the blood agent hydrogen cyanide.

A survivor described the attack: "I got some gas in my eyes and had trouble breathing. You always wanted to vomit and when you did, the vomit was green." He said he passed "hundreds" of dead bodies. Those around him died in a number of ways, suggesting a combination of toxic chemicals. Some "just dropped dead" while others "died of laughing." Still others took a few minutes to die, first "burning and blistering" or "coughing up green vomit." [1]

[edit] Discovery

Photo taken in the aftermath of the attack.

The first images after the attack were taken by Iranian journalists who later spread the pictures in Iranian newspapers. Some of those first pictures were taken by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan.

Recalling the scenes at Halabja, Kaveh described the scene to Guy Dinmore of the Financial Times. He was about eight kilometres outside Halabja with a military helicopter when the Iraqi MiG-23 fighter-bombers flew in. "It was not as big as a nuclear mushroom cloud, but several smaller ones: thick smoke," he said. He was shocked by the scenes on his arrival in the town, though he had seen gas attacks before during the brutal Iran-Iraq war:

It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. You went into a room, a kitchen and you saw the body of a woman holding a knife where she had been cutting a carrot.

The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms.

[edit] International sources for technology and chemical precursers

Please help improve this article by expanding this section.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. Please remove this message once the section has been expanded.
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

According Iraq's report to the UN, the know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained from firms in such countries as: the United States, West Germany, the United Kingdom, France and China.^[1] By far, the largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics (now part of EPC Industrie) sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Kim Al-Khaleej firm, located in Singapore and affiliated to United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.^[2]

[edit] Establishing the culprit

An investigation into responsibility for the Halabja massacre, by Dr Jean Pascal Zanders, Project Leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) concluded that Iraq was the culprit, and not Iran. Some debate existed, however, over the question of whether Iraq was really the responsible party. The U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.^{[citation needed]}

A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [2] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion. [3]

In a January 31, 2003 New York Times [4] opinion piece, in which he stated:

"This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja."

Pelletiere went on to say that the administration of George H.W. Bush was therefore not being forthright in presenting the attack in its case for US intervention in Iraq without mention of the DIA's final conclusions and by presenting the incident as being conducted outside the context of the Iran-Iraq war.

Another extensive analysis of the incident is contained in a post [5] to the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq electronic mailing list by Cambridge political theorist Glen Rangwala. Rangwala describes how the attack followed the occupation of the city by Iranian and pro-Iranian forces, leading to the conclusion that the gassing was an attack on these forces by the Iraqis. Rangwala also cites studies done by non-governmental organizations that concluded different chemicals were used than the ones cited in the DIA study. This included witness testimony gathered by organisations like Human Rights Watch (HRW)[6] and Indict [7].

Joost Hiltermann, who was the principal researcher for the HRW between 1992-1994, conducted a 2 year study, including a field investigation in northern Iraq, capturing Iraqi government documents in the process. This research concluded there were numerous other gas attacks perpetrated against the Kurds by the Iraqi armed forces. This research culminated in Iraq's Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (by G. Black, Yale Univ. Press, 1995). According to Hiltermann, the literature on the Iran-Iraq war reflects a number of allegations of CW use by Iran, but these are "marred by a lack of specificity as to time and place, and the failure to provide any sort of evidence". (Potter, p.153) He calls these allegations "mere assertions" and adds: "no persuasive evidence of the claim that Iran was the primary culprit was ever presented".(Potter, p.156)

[edit] The trials

Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ali Hasan al-Majid (who commanded Iraqi forces in northern Iraq in that period) were charged by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity relating to the events at Halabja. However, the Iraqi prosecutors had "500 documented baskets of crimes during the Hussein regime" and Hussein was condemned based on just one case. [8]

On December 18 2006, Saddam Hussein told the court: "In relation to Iran, if any military or civil official claims that Saddam gave orders to use either conventional or special ammunition, which as explained is chemical, I will take responsibility with honor. but I will discuss any act committed against our people and any Iraqi citizen, whether Arab or Kurdish. I don't accept any insult to my principles or to me personally."[9]

Among several documents revealed during the trial, one was a 1987 memo from Iraq's military intelligence seeking permission from the president's office to use mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin against Kurds. A second document said in reply that Saddam had ordered military intelligence to study the possibility of a "sudden strike" using such weapons against Iranian and Kurdish forces.

An internal memo written by military intelligence confirmed it had received approval from the president's office for a strike using "special ammunition" and emphasized that no strike would be launched without first informing the president.

Another document from the Army Chief of Staff reporting that an airstrike with special ammunition killed 31 Kurdish fighters and "communist agents" near Dahuk.[10]

[edit] References in popular culture

The industrial band Skinny Puppy included a track called VX Gas Attack on their album VIVIsectVI, based on the Halabja poison gas attack. The backing video for this song used on their Too Dark Park tour featured various video clips showing victims of the attacks being treated for their injuries, as well as the bodies of those who perished in the attacks.