From Halabja to Ghouta
illustration Nima Rahimiha
As if suffering nearly nine years of what the United Nations has deemed the “crime of extermination” at the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship wasn’t enough, Syrians still have to deal with Westerners determined to whitewash Bashar al-Assad and his regime’s barbaric use of chemical weapons.
Do you think we haven’t heard the whole Baathist-dictator-and-WMDs story before?
This presumably rhetorical question, often cloaking an outright denial of vicious chemical massacres with legitimate criticisms of the 2003 U.S. imperial invasion of Iraq, is particularly frustrating in its insinuations. That the coalition toppled Saddam Hussein under false pretences does not mean his regime never had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, not only did Saddam possess WMDs at a certain point, he actually used them to gas thousands of Kurdish and Iranian men, women and children, with much assistance from Western companies and governments. Furthermore, mass graves of Kurds and Iraqi Shia from Saddam’s ethno-sectarian reign of terror are still being unearthed today; the problem with the overthrow of the Baathist dictator was never the overthrow itself but its timing. In 2003, there was no active armed rebellion against Saddam, and the regime change was led by foreign forces. The international community should have instead supported getting rid of Saddam far earlier — either in 1991, when Iraqis and Kurds themselves led and almost succeeded in an armed rebellion against Saddam following the Gulf War, or during the 1980s, when he was launching chemical attacks on civilians to punish them for rising against him. The lack of an immediate international response to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians - and subsequent slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia and Kurds during the 1991 uprisings while Western troops next door looked the other way - set a dangerous precedent for the Syrian revolution and counterrevolution that would ignite years later.
In 2013, Syrians in rebel-held Ghouta had been hiding in basements and wherever else they could find shelter as the Assad regime rained down bomb after bomb. But there was no respite. Soon enough, a strange scent had begun wafting throughout the town, and people outside were hysterically shouting about chemicals. Here is how Razan Zaitouneh, a Syrian human rights activist who has likely been kidnapped by Jaish al-Islam, described the aftermath of the attack on the Democracy Now! show:
"At the beginning, we thought that it’s like the previous times, that there will be only dozens of injured cases and number of murders, but we were surprised by the great numbers which the medical points received during only the first half of hour following the shelling. Things started to become clearer after that. Hours later, we started to visit the medical points in Ghouta to where injured were removed, and we couldn’t believe our eyes. I haven’t seen such death in my whole life. People were lying on the ground in hallways, on roadsides, in hundreds."
When Words Fail by Mohamad Hafez
Meanwhile, over in Iraqi Kurdistan, 1,200 km away, the chemical attack on eastern Ghouta had reawakened the horror of the Halabja massacre. Many Kurds in Halabja immediately took to the streets to protest against the use of chemical weapons. “I just can’t bear to watch it,” said Bahar Mohammed Mahmoud, a resident of the infamous Kurdish city. “What is happening in Ghouta is what happened to us. This is Halabja all over again.”
Some commentators in the West, however, had strong doubts about the culprit. For example, during her interview with Zaitouneh, Amy Goodman brought in a Western journalist, Patrick Cockburn, to essentially gaslight the Syrian activist on events occurring in the city she was physically in. Their accusatory doubts regarding the chemical massacre utterly clashed with Zaitouneh’s reality — a reality which already consisted of relentless bombardment by the Assad regime. While Goodman and Cockburn wondered why Bashar would switch to chemical weapons, Zaitouneh pointed out that it is not at all surprising for a regime that has exterminated so many people for the sake of power to then use sarin gas and continue the genocide.
Notably, in the interview, Cockburn also mentioned that he questions whether the Assad regime used chemical weapons because it is “the one thing most likely to lead to a foreign intervention.” Of course, to understand why the prospect of significant foreign intervention against the Assad regime was never as high as Cockburn seemed to believe, it is worth flipping back a few pages in the region's history to the chapter on Saddam.
Halabja, a Kurdish town that dared to rebel against the Saddam regime, is the victim of one of the worst chemical weapons attacks since World War I. At the time, many of its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, Kurds who carried out guerrilla warfare against the Baathist dictatorship and chose to fight alongside Iranian forces after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. Unsurprisingly, this defiant streak rendered the city a prime target for the wrath of the Iraqi army.
The massacre at Halabja took place during the final stage of the Iran-Iraq war as part of the al-Anfal campaign, which itself was part of a larger process of Kurdish genocide that began years prior. In 1983, as punishment for Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani’s alliance with Iran, the Saddam regime rounded up and summarily executed 5,000-8,000 Kurds belonging to the Barzani clan; much like the “gendercide” of Bosniak men and boys at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica around a decade later, it was “military-aged” Kurdish males, with many of them still as young as teenagers, who were deliberately chosen to be slaughtered by Baathist Arabs.
Kurdish children in Halabja cheer in front of a destroyed portrait of Saddam Hussein in 1988 —before the horrific chemical bombardment.
Officially speaking, Anfal began within a few years of this bloodbath and was led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, infamously known as Chemical Ali, who instructed in 1987 that no Kurdish home in Erbil was to be left standing. It is estimated that 2,000 Kurdish villages were razed to the ground in accordance with his orders. The Anfal campaign ultimately resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq between 1987 and 1989, with the chemical attack on Halabja being carried out on March 16th, 1988. Unfortunately, to this day, only four states — Norway, Sweden, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — have recognized Anfal as a genocide, though efforts have been made by Kurdish political parties to have Anfal gain recognition in more countries. The HDP, for example, has called for the Turkish parliament to recognize the genocide.
In addition to the death toll and physical injuries, the mental scarring from the Halabja massacre has been so excruciatingly thorough that the Assad regime’s chemical attack on Ghouta in 2013 caused many Iraqi Kurds to genuinely believe they were about to undergo the nightmare again. The staff at the Jiyan Foundation clinic noticed a rise in calls from scared patients following the attack and felt compelled to arrange seminars in order to explain that Ghouta is not even in the same country. One Kurdish woman told a doctor, Azad Mustafa Qader, how she “saw all of her dead children in Ghouta.” Another Halabja resident, Nadjat Hussein, voiced her hope and sorrow:
“I relive the day. I remember everything when I see it in the news. I cry for Syria but at least people like you and the rest of the world can actually see what is happening. That wasn’t possible back then.”
Yet the course of the Syrian war would soon demonstrate that despite all the technological advances which now allow the world to see what is happening, the international community has learned nothing from its appeasement of Saddam Hussein for so many years. Though the use of chemical weapons has been banned since the 1925 Geneva Protocol, this formality did not stop a Baathist regime in Iraq, and later in Syria, from using them anyway; today, the “ban” is effectively an empty standard that is only enforced if a major world power is in the mood to do so. For instance, the Obama administration warned Bashar that the use of chemical weapons would be crossing a “red line”, yet it absolutely failed to act decisively after the Assad regime went ahead and used sarin on Ghouta anyway. It was a devastating moment of déjà vu, a stinging repeat of the world’s abandonment of Halabja. Within the context of Syria, 98% of all chemical attacks have been carried out by the Assad regime and the rest by Daesh; of these, 90% have occurred after the notorious attack in August 2013. Is it then any wonder that some Syrians refer to the chemical onslaught on Ghouta as a green light instead? Syrian writers Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami have highlighted what international inaction translated to on the ground:
“The regime clearly believed – perhaps had been advised by Russia’s Vladimir Putin – that Obama’s threat to intervene if the chemical weapons ‘red line’ was crossed was empty. In this, as events soon showed, the regime was absolutely correct. Not only was no punitive action taken against it, the very possibility of action was removed from the table; implicitly, the chemical decommissioning deal that arose in the aftermath handed the Syria file to Assad’s Russian sponsor. So the message of the sarin heard by resistant Syrians was this: no one’s coming to save you, not in any circumstances.”
It was the same message and sense of hopelessness that had been heard and felt by Kurds as well as Iranians when they were being gassed by Saddam, while the world, with all its talk of human rights, not only turned a blind eye but also, in some cases, actively facilitated his use of such weapons. The United States, for example, knew the Saddam regime used nerve gas on Iranian soldiers in Basra, while German companies assisted in the production of Tabun, a lethal chemical agent. Today, the Halabja Victims Society is attempting to hold European corporations, such as TUI A.G., Karl Kolb GmbH, and Heberger Bau A.G., legally accountable for their heinous part in the Anfal genocide.
With regards to motive, files from the Halabja case reveal some insight into why Bashar al-Assad’s “secular government” would use tactics that many onlookers apparently believe would only ever be used by Islamists. In particular, an audiotape of Saddam’s cousin Chemical Ali, recorded after the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Suleimaniya, provides a quick summary of a Baathist regime’s perspective on those who dare defy its Arab nationalist, one-party state ideology:
“I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who will protest? The international community? Fuck the international community and those who pay attention to it. I will not just attack them with chemicals on one day; instead I will continue for fifteen days.”
General Maher Abd al-Rashid, a prominent commander and the father-in-law of Saddam’s son Qusai, had similar feelings about chemical attacks on his enemies:
“If you gave me a pesticide to throw at these swarms of insects to make them breathe and become exterminated, I would use it.”
Such venomous words can be difficult to process, reminiscent of Hitler’s vitriolic diatribes against the untermenschen. However, they are perhaps the most truthful harbinger of the terror that followed the pronouncements. More to the point, Chemical Ali was completely right about the fact that world powers would not lift a finger to stop him. On the contrary, the West spun fabrications which better suited their narrative and preconceived notion of the region. Palestinian journalist Said Aburish illustrated the insanity of the whole situation:
In March 1988, the Kurds and Iranians achieved yet another victory. A combined force captured the town of Sari Rash, moved on to capture Halabja and threatened the strategic dam at Darbandikan. Saddam responded swiftly and ordered his cousin to show no mercy. Ali Chemical reacted without hesitation: the town of Halabja was repeatedly attacked with chemical weapons which caused many thousands of casualties. Incredibly, the United States put the blame for the attack on the unfriendly Iranians and issued a report to that effect from the US War College. In a bizarre move the USA, playing both sides against the middle, still tried to maintain a line to the Kurds and in June 1988 held secret meetings with their leader Jalal Talabani. As usual, the UK was not far behind. Soon after Halabja, Her Majesty’s government approved 340 million in extra credits to Iraq.
There are a few possible reasons behind the apathy of the Western world towards Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. Perhaps the international community’s indifference was because of the belief that Saddam’s victims were his own citizens, and the ban on chemical weapons did not extend to their usage on one’s own people (something that may have been unimaginable at the time). However, since Saddam had also used chemical weapons against Iran, it is also likely that outsiders considered the problem too difficult to deal with.
In any case, Saddam generally used chemical attacks on Iranian soldiers as a last resort to roll back their military advances, particularly once Khomeini’s zealotry rapidly eroded what had at first been a defensive war for the average Iranian. The punitive Baathist campaign against the Kurds, however, had a slightly different purpose in mind. Saddam may have had a visceral hatred of Persians, but at the end of the day, Iran was an external opponent. Kurds, on the other hand, were an “untrustworthy” population with large numbers located in Iraq itself and could stir up trouble in the north by collaborating with their ethnic brethren across the border or with the Iranian regime. Thus, in order to deter Kurdish civilians from allying with advancing Iranian forces, Saddam's chemical attacks on Kurds were not limited to Iraqi Kurdistan. Prior to the assault on Halabja, during which his regime killed around 5,000 Kurds and injured 10,000 more, Saddam gave several Kurdish villages in Iran "the same ‘medicine,’ with some 100 people dead and 2,000 injured.”
It is the consequent overwhelming crushing of civilian willpower that makes chemical attacks exceptionally disturbing, and this effect is what makes their usage desirable for tyrants in the league of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. While indiscriminate bombardment using ‘conventional’ weapons might say, “I can kill you whenever I want”, the use of chemical attacks with impunity essentially gloats, “I can kill you however I want.” On this front, a report by the Global Public Policy Institute explains the psychological consequences of the chemical attack that struck Douma on April 7th, 2018, which killed at least 43 Syrians and injured hundreds:
One Douma resident and member of the negotiation committee that worked via foreign governments in Istanbul described how in the immediate aftermath of the attack, he and other opposition representatives had felt renewed pressure to surrender 'due to the fear of another attack and the absence of any international deterrent.' A member of Faylaq al-Rahman concluded in a resigned voice how, after years of fighting on the frontlines, 'the use of chemical weapons has settled the equation in favor of the regime.' Another activist observed that the Assad regime’s apparent freedom to use chemical weapons had led locals to the collective realization that 'nothing and no one will protect civilians from the violence and brutality of the regime,' leaving surrender or death as the only realistic outcomes.
Another Morning Will Rise For Us, As We Leave In Troops by The Syrian People Know Its Way
As far as physical consequences go, one noticeably common effect among many of the victims is how the distinct smell of chemical weapons permanently alters one’s perception of similar scents. One Iranian, Dara Meshkati, was 10 years old when his city of Nowdesheh suffered three chemical attacks in a single month in 1988. “I saw the gas and smelled peaches,” Meshkati recalls. “Then my eyes closed and I couldn’t see anything. I was blind for two months.” Hosman Morad Mohammed, a Kurdish teacher at the Halabja Institute of Computer Science, states that "everybody in Halabja has a bad story about the smell of apples" and that it is still difficult for them to eat apples today. Hassan Hassani Sa'di realized Iraqi warplanes were dropping chemical weapons on Iran because he smelled garlic, which is the "telltale aroma of mustard gas.” He was an 18-year-old soldier at the time; within mere hours of the attack, "his body was badly blistered, and he had gone blind." Mustard gas, unlike its nerve equivalent, has no antidote.
Each and every chemical weapons survivor shares a story of hell on earth, and even living under the shadow of such an attack is a nightmarish experience. Sina Azodi, who grew up in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, recalls living in constant fear of a chemical attack and how his own father “went through so much trouble to obtain gas masks for his family,” while Loqman Mohammed, head of the Halabja Survivor’s Union, gives this reminder following the Ghouta massacre:
When my family and I saw that footage on television, we all wept because we remembered our own pain. This is only the beginning; the real struggle will be in the future after the effects of the gas start unfolding in the years to come. Had the international community taken a position against chemical weapons in Halabja, this crime in Syria would have been prevented.
Thus, when Max Blumenthal and other conspiracists (both on the political left and right!) mock a Syrian father for preparing gas masks for his children in case of exposure to chemical weapons, they not only reveal the depths of their depravity but also the ignorance of privileged people who have never had to deal with such horrors in their entire lives.
As Robin Wright reports, one of the main centres for research on the effects of chemical weapons today is indeed Iran, "in part because of the sheer numbers of Iranian victims, but also because of a little-studied phenomenon called low-dose exposure.” Years after the Iran-Iraq war ended:
“Iranian doctors noticed that respiratory diseases with unusual side-symptoms — corneal disintegration, rotting teeth and dementia, a combination synonymous with mustard gas — had started killing off veterans who had not always been on the frontlines. Civilians were also dying.”
As such, according to Dr. Shahriar Khateri, Iran’s leading expert on chemical weapons victims, “almost every day there are new cases — 30 years after the war.” Or as international law expert Reza Nasri puts it, “every Iranian - whether ordinary citizen or high-ranking politician - still remembers how world powers and neighbouring countries, remained morbidly silent in face of these atrocities or outright assisted Saddam Hussein in his war crimes, one way or the other.”
This fact only makes the Iranian regime’s relentless backing of Bashar al-Assad even more bitter to witness. Following chemical attacks, there is often a brief, faint hope that Iran may reevaluate its level of support for the Assad regime (as a matter of reputation, at the very least). Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has declared that the nation's history as a victim of chemical weapons meant that its stance would be against their usage no matter who the perpetrators or victims are. Sadly, if predictably, these words turned out to be utterly hollow and did not translate into any concrete action from the Iranian regime. Its continued backing of a Baathist dictator who gasses civilians is tantamount to a death sentence for Syrians, an insult to the Kurds and Iranians who suffered and continue to suffer from chemical attacks, and one of the most tragic ironies in the modern history of the region.
However, despite acknowledging the painful hypocrisy of the U.S. at least speaking out against Bashar’s use of chemical weapons after deliberately enabling Saddam to do the same, many ordinary Kurds and Iranians have still come out in support of their fellow victims in Syria — and, crucially, for the international community to take measures that would prevent the Assad regime from using them again. Unlike Western activists who like to whatabout and bring up inaction in the past to justify inaction today for the sake of their political ideology, Others who have experienced the horror of chemical massacres firsthand realize the importance of taking a principled stand against such atrocities, regardless of the players involved. A small sample of these statements of solidarity following the chemical attacks on Ghouta, Douma, and Khan Sheikhoun can be found below.
Ghouta
I’m ready to protest against chemical weapons use anywhere in the world and by anyone.
—Amineh Vahhab-zadeh, a medic on the front lines for nearly five years during the Iran-Iraq war, who suffers long-term effects from the Iraqi chemical attacks
Anyone and any country that uses weapons of mass destruction or nuclear or chemical weapons must be punished.
—Gholam Delshad, one of the 100,000 Iranians who receive government-funded compensation or medical attention for chemical attack wounds
Douma
I saw one child choking to death on TV and I swear it reminded me of my own brother. [...] I wish the US government took this step earlier when chemical weapons were used in Syria. Nonetheless we believe Trump’s action will force those who believe in the use of chemical weapons to think twice next time.
—Loqman Abdulqader, a Kurd who lost several family members in Halabja, discussing Donald Trump’s retaliatory air strikes on Assad regime bases in Syria
I believe none should get away with using chemical weapons attack. If there is ample evidence that Assad has used chemical weapons, he should be punished for it, far more strongly than what we saw.
—Namo Abdulla, an Iraqi-Kurdish television correspondent
Khan Sheikhoun
Indeed, for some people, it may be shocking to hear about a state launching chemical weapons attacks “when it is winning.” Perhaps they do not realize that the only “victory” for tyrannical dictators is the total suppression or annihilation of disobedient subjects. But for many who lived through Saddam’s atrocities, or whose friends and family suffocated under his brutal regime in more ways than one, Bashar’s crimes against humanity are less of a surprise and more of a predictable continuation of the reigns of authoritarianism that continue to plague this world. To quote an old man from Halabja, “we and the Syrians are brothers; similarly, Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein come from the same background; they both have no mercy in their hearts.”