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The Halabja poison gas attack was an incident on 15 March-19 March 1988 during a major battle in the Iran-Iraq war when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces to kill a number of people in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja (population 80,000). Estimates of casualties range from several hundred to 7,000 people. Halabja is located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles from the Iranian border.

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 17, 1988, Iraq dropped poison gas on the Kurdish city of Halabja, then held by Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas 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.

Discovery

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 the Pulitzer Prize awarded 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."

Estabilishing the culprit

The most authoritative 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.

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 1990's. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. In a January 31, 2003 New York Times opinion piece, Pelletiere summarized the DIA's findings and noted that because of the DIA's conclusion there was not sufficient evidence to definitively determine whether Iraq or Iran was responsible. Pelletiere also felt that the administration of George W. Bush was not being forthright when squarely placing blame on Iraq, since it contradicted the conclusion of the DIA study. However the DIA's final position on the attack was in fact much less certain than this preliminary report suggests, with its final conclusions, in June 2003, asserting just that there was insufficient evidence, but concluding that "Iraq ..used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in 1988" . The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion

Another extensive analysis of the incident is contained in a post 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. Rangwala's analysis effectively sums up the current prevailing view of the event, that Iraq was indeed responsible for the attack on Halabja, and that the DIA analysis is in error. This evidence backed up by extensive witness testimony gathered by organisations like Human Rights Watch and Indict has, more recently, added to the growing evidence that the initial DIA appraisal of the events was mistaken.

The most categorical proof is the many further well-documented incidents of deliberate attacks on Kurdish civilians occurring at the same time throughout Kurdish northern Iraq also perpetrated without doubt by Iraqi forces during the Al-Anfal Campaign. Joost Hiltermann, who was the principal researcher for the Human Rights Watch between 1992-1994, conducted a 2 year study, including a field investigation in northern Iraq, capturing Iraqi government documents in the process. 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)

International responsibility

The massacre at Halabja did not raise protests by the international community in March 1988. At the time, it was admitted that the civilians had been killed "collaterally" due to an error in handling the combat gas. Two years later, when the Iran-Iraq War was finished and the Western powers stopped supporting Saddam Hussein, the massacre of Halabja was attributed to the Iraqi government.

While the United States did not supply full-fledged chemical weapons to Iraq, it did approve private business sales of biological weapon precursors to Iraq, according to a 1994 report issued by the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (aka the Riegle Report.) It should be noted that the report does not provide proof of U.S. involvement in Iraqi chemical weapons and that the gas attack was carried out by Mustard gas and not a biological weapon. In addition, there is no evidence that Iraq ever used biological weapons in combat during the war with Iran.

The US also provided satellite photographs and battlefield intelligence to Iraq which it knew was to be used in "calibrating" Iraqi chemical weapons attacks against Iran Furthermore, the US provided dual use helicopters, ostensibly for crop spraying, which intelligence sources believe were used to deploy the chemical weapons in Halabja

Several European nations also participated in arming Iraq, specifically Germany. German chemical companies and German Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) protective gear manufacturers also supplied the Iraqi Army and Rustimiya Officers Academy. Stores of German chemicals and training materials were found in June 2003 by U.S. soldiers in east Baghdad. Details of the findings were described by a U.S. Army corporal in the book American, Interrupted. The soldier also recorded video footage of protective gear and chemicals in store rooms. See Video of German chemicals and NBC gear

The trial

Both Saddam Hussein and Ali Hasan al-Majid (who commanded Iraqi forces in northern Iraq in that period) have not had charges relating to the events at Halabja included within the charges for which they are appearing before the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity.The tribunal has made a point of avoiding directly charging President Hussien with the crimes committed at Halabja. Hussein has repeatedly denied the Tribunal's legitimacy (claiming it to be a "play" of American "theatre"), and refused to sign documents reflecting the charges against him during his first public court appearance.

References

• Lawrence Potter, Gary Sick. Iran, Iraq, and the legacies of war. 2004, MacMillan. ISBN 1403964505

Video

• Video source documenting European protective gear supplies and chemicals.

See also

• Al-Anfal Campaign