KATHY KELLY, ELECTRONC IRAQ, MAY 27, 2006
“Anfal.” It means, “to take everything.”
In 1988, Saddam Hussein ordered a genocidal campaign, the Anfal Operation, against 4,500 defenseless Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. 180,000 people who couldn’t escape are believed to have been buried in unknown mass graves. The Iraqi military deliberately contaminated water sources with TNT, cut down trees, and put TNT and land mines in the foundations of destroyed homes.
For the past four days, we’ve listened to Azad, whose name means “the free person,” pour out memories of what he endured during that time.
“Inside, I am crying,” says Azad, “remembering those awful days. We were shouting, crying, but nobody heard.” He was twenty years old at the time.
He worked as a nurse at a small surgical center in Takya, southwest of Sulaymaniyah. The Iraqi military attacked the city of Halabja with nerve gas on March 17th, 1988. 5,000 people were killed. Four days later, the Iraqi military shelled Takya. The surgical center staff worked frantically to save surviving villagers. Some came to their center, suffering from seizures, severe disorientation and other neurological effects of nerve gas. The health care workers took their tractor out to surrounding areas to try and rescue others. Then they organized everyone to flee as soon as possible.
“Even the animals could sense something was happening,” Azad recalls, marveling over the memory of animals following them out of the village. “Cats and dogs proceeded side by side, even though this is not their nature, with their tails hanging down.”
He and 14 other health care workers helped lead 600 people in a harrowing 760 kilometer escape over mountains, on foot, carrying only as much first aid and bits of bread as they could stuff into backpacks.
The Iraqi military pursued them, by air and by land, shelling the defenseless evacuees with more chemical weaponry, which forced them to travel only at night, in total darkness.
“We didn’t even have one gas mask,” Azad recalls. After the first chemical weapon attack, the health care workers realized they must inject themselves with atrophine sulfate so that they could help others survive. “The first dose had to be two milligrams,” Azad explained. “You feel dizzy, your heart beats very fast, and your mouth becomes completely dry and numb so that you can’t swallow. When a rash breaks out on your skin, then you know that the injection has succeeded.”
“All actions to save the patients had to be done immediately,” says Azad, “or the patients would die.” He learned to quickly dispense antidotes to nerve gas. Recalling theory that he’d studied in nursing school, he swiftly learned to deliver babies and, in one instance, to complete the amputation of a child’s hand after a bomb had nearly severed it completely. Every waking moment was a matter of life and death emergency.
“I would need days”, says Azad, “to describe one family. I will never forget them.”
He tells of a tailor from the village of Sewsenan who made clothes for the surgical center. He had four girls aged 14, 12, 8 and 6. Azad was very close to the girls. They had green eyes, dark blonde hair and very fair skin. The father was handsome, the mother beautiful. In his free time, Azad would visit their house, and they made him feel like part of the family. When the bombing began, a rocket landed on their home. The tailor hurried home from the mosque and found his wife and his daughters, all dead.
Azad remembers walking by night on the 10th of May when they were encircled by Iraqi military camps and had come upon Peshmerga troops following a 12 hour battle between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi military. The Peshmerga told them they could choose either to stay where they were and face almost certain death, or try to cross a road which required first climbing a slippery, steep cliff and then bolting across a road in hopes of not being seen.
Peshmerga troops helped each of the people climb the cliff. They all crossed the road safely but then went the wrong way and were headed into the camp of Kurdish Iraqi military. The Kurdish Iraqi military shouted, “Don’t come near the camp! If you do, we will start to shoot!” But then, to help them, they illuminated the route using flares.
That same night, when they were walking in total darkness along a road, people in the front suddenly stopped. “Doctor, Doctor!” people whispered to him in alarm. “They need you in front. They smell something strange.” He made his way to the front of the line. Because they were surrounded by military camps in the hills, they couldn’t turn on a flashlight. He used his “locally” made mask, cupped his torch in his hand, and bent to smell the ground where people were pointing.
“I told them, be quiet,” said Azad, smiling softly. “We are safe. It’s only flowers.”
He recalls another point when they came to a river with a very strong current. The Iraqi military had opened a dammed lake so that refugees would find it difficult to cross the rivers. But fishermen helped them by letting them use rafts they had fashioned by laying wooden planks across tires.
After crossing the river, they rested for two days. But the Iraqi military began new chemical weapon attacks. There was no way to return and help the victims in the towns under attack. They had to press forward toward the Iranian border.
The Iraqi military followed them, attacking first by chemical weapons and then by conventional means.
Finally, in June of ’88, they reached a refugee camp near Iran.
Yesterday, Azad took us to a mountain top facing a series of mountain ranges where, before the Anfal Operation, Kurdish villagers had lived as farmers and shepherds. He pointed to an opening between two of the mountains, a gap which was the only route into the mountain valley where they had found protection from the Iraqi military attacks.
We stood above a small cave. “Yes, we hid in caves like this and under trees, in the daytime,” he said, “and then at night, single file, holding on to the belt of the person in front of us, we walked, trying to reach a road so that we could pass behind the mountain into a safer area. If it were not for that mountain, I would not be here.” He stoops in front of a thorny weed. Now this is too ripe, but when these grasses are just growing in the springtime, you can peel the stem and inside it is very sweet. This is what we ate for one week.”
He repeats, several times, that he never would have imagined, during that time, when he could barely imagine living till the next day that he would one day stand on a mountain, free and safe, and point to the places where he lived through such horrors.
Even now, people who were part of that journey sometimes spot Azad in the market or other public spots and race to embrace him, covering him with kisses.
“Now we can hear each other’s stories,” Azad says as Azad says as he gazes at calm valleys where thousands of villagers once lived. “I hope the whole world can become like one village.”
And he hopes that his children will never fear the smell of flowers.
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Share this:

HALABJA, Iraq (AFP) — An X-ray of Kamil Abdel Qader’s lungs show a lower third that is entirely scarred — lasting damage from the poisonous gas that rained down on his Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988.
Doctors say he needs to get a fist-size chunk of tissue removed from his damaged lungs if he is going to survive, but he still considers himself the lucky one.
The rest of his family of eight died as they fled the gas, some dropping before his very eyes as they tried to flee into the hills.
Abdel Qader wants payback — for his dead family, his shattered lungs and most of all for battered survivors of an attack that claimed 5,000 lives and destroyed a town.
The Halabja Chemical Victims’ Society, Abdel Qader’s small non-profit organization, wants the companies and governments which helped Saddam Hussein amass his stockpiles to pay compensation.
The funds would go to the few hundred survivors of the attack that came in the waning days of the Iraq-Iran war that raged between 1980 and 1988.
Though Abdel Qader blames the attack on Saddam and the mastermind of a sweeping anti-Kurd campaign, Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed “Chemical Ali” for this attack and others, he said commercial enterprises from around the world shared responsibility for helping arm the regime.
“We are trying to find the companies that helped the Iraqi government get chemical weapons for Saddam. We are trying to tell the world what happened here,” said an emaciated Abdel Qader as he sat cross-legged on a carpet in his home.
The names of specific firms which sold Iraq the equipment and expertise needed to assemble its chemical arsenal have never been released.
A UN special disarmament commission UNSCOM set up after the 1991 Persian Gulf War over Kuwait to investigate Saddam’s weapons arsenals protected its sources in order to encourage disclosure.
It is believed that just as the U.S. government provided Saddam with intelligence and dual-use technology, such as helicopters, to combat Iran, a long list of Western firms made fortunes exporting chemicals and armaments to Washington’s one-time ally.
Abdel Qader has suffered severe health problems for the past 18 years, including chronic bronchitis, severe pulmonary fibrosis and opacity of the left cornea — conditions that doctors said affect a high number of Halabja residents.
Saddam is currently on trial on charges of ordering the killing of 148 Shiite villagers in the mid-1980s, after which he will face charges of genocide for the “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds in which an estimated 100,000 died.
Prosecutors are expected to press charges linked to Halabja in a separate case, but Abdel Qader and other Kurdish activists said the courts should also prosecute those who gave Saddam the tools of his trade.
“Those who are suffering need a lot of money to get treatment in Western hospitals. We want to see those who helped Saddam punished and our rights restored,” said Abdel Qader, who needs costly medical treatment abroad.
Abdullah Mahmud, a Kurdish author who has spent most of the past two decades cataloguing the debris from Saddam’s numerous campaigns against the Kurds, said the U.S., Britain, France, ex-West Germany, the former Soviet Union and a handful of other countries helped arm the former dictator. “At that time Saddam had a good economy because of Iraq’s oil wealth and he could afford pretty much any weapons he wanted,” Mahmud said. “The people deserve to be compensated, and these companies should be uncovered.”
But Iraqi authorities have not made clear whether they plan to probe into issues that could potentially ruin the reputations of major international companies. Asked if he expected such information to come out of the Saddam trial, chief investigating judge Raed al-Juhi said: “I cannot answer this question at the time to protect the investigation … Everybody involved in the crime will be brought to trial.”
Doctors said they believed cases of lung disease, therapeutic abortions and cancers were off the charts in Halabja, though the studies have not been done to prove it.
And while infertility rates are high, those women who do manage to conceive are likely to be faced with an early termination of their pregnancy because of abnormalities in the spinal cords or oversized heads in fetuses.
“There are still chemicals in the ground and in the food. Nobody has done anything to try to clean up,” said Dr Shnow Hussien, a gynecologist in Halabja Hospital.
Even those with no obvious problems linked to the chemical attack have been angered by the Kurdish regional government’s lack of attention to local concerns.
On March 16, the anniversary of the chemical attack, a group of thousands of rampaging youths burned down the city’s towering memorial to the victims, protesting, among other things, the authorities’ use of the tragedy as a propaganda tool.
Visiting officials have used the occasion to make generous promises but have never followed through, said Habat Nawzad, a local journalist.
“Every year March 16 is like a supermarket that opens for one day but closes before you have time to carry anything out,” Nawzad said.

Share this:

Donald Rumsfeld shakes hands with Saddam during his visit to Iraq on December 19-20, 1983. Declassified papers leave the White House hawk exposed over his role during the Iran-Iraq war.
He visited again on March 24, 1984, the day the UN released a report that mustard gas and the nerve gas Tabun had been used by Iraq against Iranian troops. On March 29, 1984, the New York Times reported that “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.
On March 16, 1988, Saddam’s air force bombed the Kurdish town of Halabla with cyanide and nerve gases, killing thousands, part of a series of attacks on Kurdish towns and villages. That same year, the Dow Chemical Company sold $1.5million worth (£930,000) of pesticides to Iraq despite suspicions they would be used for chemical warfare.
With the 18th anniversary of the Halabja massacre looming, it is worth re-reading this 2002 article from The Guardian in London.
RUMSFELD ‘OFFERED HELP TO SADDAM’
Julian Borger writing in The Guardian, Tuesday December 31, 2002
The Reagan administration and its special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, did little to stop Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, even though they knew Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons “almost daily” against Iran, it was reported yesterday.
US support for Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war as a bulwark against Shi’ite militancy has been well known for some time, but using declassified government documents, the Washington Post provided new details yesterday about Mr Rumsfeld’s role, and about the extent of the Reagan administration’s knowledge of the use of chemical weapons.
The details will embarrass Mr Rumsfeld, who as defence secretary in the Bush administration is one of the leading hawks on Iraq, frequently denouncing it for its past use of such weapons.
The US provided less conventional military equipment than British or German companies but it did allow the export of biological agents, including anthrax; vital ingredients for chemical weapons; and cluster bombs sold by a CIA front organisation in Chile, the report says.
Intelligence on Iranian troop movements was provided, despite detailed knowledge of Iraq’s use of nerve gas.
Rick Francona, an ex-army intelligence lieutenant-colonel who served in the US embassy in Baghdad in 1987 and 1988, told the Guardian: “We believed the Iraqis were using mustard gas all through the war, but that was not as sinister as nerve gas.
“They started using Tabun [a nerve gas] as early as ’83 or ’84, but in a very limited way. They were probably figuring out how to use it. And in ’88, they developed Sarin.”
On November 1 1983, the secretary of state, George Shultz, was passed intelligence reports of “almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]” by Iraq.
However, 25 days later, Ronald Reagan signed a secret order instructing the administration to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq losing the war.
In December Mr Rumsfeld, hired by President Reagan to serve as a Middle East troubleshooter, met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and passed on the US willingness to help his regime and restore full diplomatic relations.
Mr Rumsfeld has said that he “cautioned” the Iraqi leader against using banned weapons. But there was no mention of such a warning in state department notes of the meeting.
Howard Teicher, an Iraq specialist in the Reagan White House, testified in a 1995 affidavit that the then CIA director, William Casey, used a Chilean firm, Cardoen, to send cluster bombs to use against Iran’s “human wave” attacks.
A 1994 congressional inquiry also found that dozens of biological agents, including various strains of anthrax, had been shipped to Iraq by US companies, under licence from the commerce department.
Furthermore, in 1988, the Dow Chemical company sold $1.5m-worth (£930,000) of pesticides to Iraq despite suspicions they would be used for chemical warfare.
The only occasion that Iraq’s use of banned weapons seems to have worried the Reagan administration came in 1988, after Lt Col Francona toured the battlefield on the al-Faw peninsula in southern Iraq and reported signs of sarin gas.
“When I was walking around I saw atropine injectors lying around. We saw decontamination fluid on vehicles, there were no insects,” said Mr Francona, who has written a book on shifting US policy to Iraq titled Ally to Adversary. “There was a very quick response from Washington saying, ‘Let’s stop our cooperation’ but it didn’t last long – just weeks.”

Share this:

May 5, 2006
“They say that corrupt officials have siphoned most of the money.”
Before it became a symbol of Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Kurds, Halabja was one of the most prosperous communities in Iraq.
Pomegranates, grains, grapes, tobacco and nuts grew in Halabja’s fertile soil. Local factories employed those not working in the town’s thriving agricultural sector.
Today, 18 years after the Iraqi military launched chemical attacks on this mountainous city near the Iranian border, the community’s economy remains in ruins.
The agriculture industry, which once employed about 90 percent of local residents, never recovered from the 1988 attacks and the United Nations-imposed sanctions in the 1990s. Local products now struggle to compete with lower-priced imports.
Many in the city of about 80,000 in Sulaimaniyah province say they have been waiting since 1991, when the Kurds took administrative control of the northeastern Iraq, for some help.
They certainly expected something to happen after Saddam was overthrown in 2003.
Instead, residents in Halabja, especially those who survived Saddam’s chemical-weapons attack, say they still cannot receive treatment for the variety of ailments caused by the attack, including cancer and respiratory illnesses. They note that many of the roads in the city remain unpaved and that most of the buildings destroyed during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s still lie in rubble.
In March, demonstrators staged a protest during ceremonies marking the anniversary of Saddam’s chemical attack.
Security forces opened fired on the demonstrators, killing a teenage boy.
Soon after the protest, the Kurd-ish government pledged $30 million for projects in Halabja. Officials promised that basic services such as water, roads and health care would be provided.
But a conference scheduled for last month on the rehabilitation projects had to be indefinitely postponed after Kurdish authorities revealed they could not come up with the financing for the projects.
All of this has left locals in Halabja wondering what happened to the millions of dollars in aid that have poured into the region since 2003.
Even the town’s former mayor, Jameel Abdulrahman, said he has no idea how much the central Kurdish government has spent in his community. He does know that his request for economic development funds, to open some of the shuttered factories in the city, have gone unheeded.
According to officials with the central Kurdish government, $105 million has been spent on recovery efforts in the region over the last three years. But most local observers say there is little to show for it. They say that corrupt officials have siphoned most of the money.
For example, Abdulrahman said, after pouring the foundations for three new government buildings in Halabja last year, all construction came to a halt because of lack of funds.
Meanwhile, unemployment is rampant. There are few private-sector jobs in the region and those who can get jobs in the government sector, usually the police force, have relied on family connections for their posts.
“The economic situation is terrible in Halabja,” said Yaseen Najim, 27, an unemployed resident who has tried several times to find work. “There is no company or factory we can work in.”
At the same time, farmers have abandoned their fields, saying they cannot compete with cheaper fruits and vegetables coming from Iran and Syria.
“It’s a shame that we’re importing products when we have such fertile land,” said Arsalan Manucher, an economics professor at the University of Sulaimaniyah.
“It’s not just Halabja,” said Ibrahim Khidr Ahmad, head of planning for the government’s agriculture ministry. “The situation for farmers and farming isn’t good in all of the areas (of Iraq). The country was destroyed.”
Ahmad said ministry officials recently visited Halabja to discuss assistance for the area and have pledged $6 million for irrigation projects. He also said the Baghdad government will start buying wheat from Iraqi farmers later this year. Currently, three-fourths of the country’s needs are provided by the United States.
But government officials say they are unwilling to finance the reconstruction of factories in the region.
“We’re not taking on the burden of building factories because all government factories are unsuccessful,” Ahmad said. “All over the world the private sector runs factories. The era of the government building them and employing people is over.”
Mariwan Hama-Saeed is a journalist in Iraq who writes for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Readers may write to the author at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 48 Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8LT, U.K.. Its Web site is http://www.iwpr.net . Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

Share this:

Awene – By Bakhtiyar Ali
By Bakhtiyar Ali (Awene, March 28, 2006)
Until March 16, if anyone would have asked me about the most appalling political event in the past twenty years, I would have answered that it was on August 31, 1996 (when the Kurdistan Democratic Party asked Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces to help them defeat Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s militias in Erbil.) But what happened in March 16 was a political and ethical earthquake that was larger than August 31. Firstly, (March 16) marks the day that a generation emerged that can set monuments on fire. Secondly, a power that can shoot at children was born on that day. The most meaningless interpretation is (that the burning of the Halabja memorial) was like burning the history of Halabja, as party media says. On the contrary, nothing expresses Halabja’s history like the burning of the monument.
Setting the monument on fire is simply like burning a small faction of the lies that have been repeated for the past fifteen years. It rejects the policy of worshipping the dead while those who are alive are treated like dogs. Halabja actually stood up when the monument was set on fire; it marked a revolution of the town, a revolution of which the public was previously unaware. The irony is that the ones who opened fire on kids and freedom of expression are the same ones now crying for the burnt monument. It is the biggest hypocrisy and ethical crises that you kill me while guarding my statue; that you cry for my past while stabbing me. The ones who open fire on secondary and university students and shoots at hundreds of unarmed people cannot say they love our statutes more than us. The policy of this (Iraqi Kurdish) administration is that for the sake of the monument they are ready to destroy Halabja; they are ready to kill dozens of people, to detain them and talk about executions.
(Awene is issued weekly by Awene Company in Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan.)

Share this: