by Robert Fisk
Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis-(2-chloroethyl) sulphide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: “Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as having said [sic] that the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas . . .” The days before the New York Times report, U.S. secretary of state George Shultz had met the Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in Washington, but uttered no criticism of the chemical weapons attack. Despite the mass of evidence now available, my own paper, The Times of London, was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from “burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons.”
Mohamed Salam was again one of the few correspondents to obtain first-hand, almost lethal evidence of this latest poison gas attack. Again, he should tell his own awesome story:
I was invited with Zoran Dogcamadjev of the Yugoslav Tanjug News Agency to go down to Basra where there had been a major offensive by the Iranians. The 3rd Army Corps under Major General Maher Abdul Rashed was faced by this huge attack, totally overwhelming, so the only way of handling it was by mass killing. Rashed had crushed the Iranian offensive. There had been no flooding, no fire, no electricity. Zoran and I wandered around the desert where all this had happened and we came across hundreds and hundreds of dead Iranians, literally thousands of them, all dead. They were still holding their rifles—just think, thousands of them dead in their trenches, all still holding their Kalashnikovs. They had their little sacks of food supplies still on their backs—all the Iranians carried these little sacks of food. There were no bullet holes, no wounds—they were just dead.
We started counting—we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.
We described all this in our reports, but we didn’t know what it was. We asked the Iraqi soldiers. They had been eating—tomatoes and cucumbers— but when they weren’t eating, they would wear gas masks. From that visit, I developed an infection in my sinus and went to see a friend of mine in Baghdad who was a doctor. He said: “This is what we call ‘front line infection’—I would advise you to leave Iraq immediately.” I went to see Eileen and Gerry [Eileen Powell and Gerry Labelle, a husband-and-wife AP team in Nicosia] and they put me into the Cyprus Clinic. They gave me antibiotic injections.
But what I saw was a killing machine. Zoran and I, in the end, we thought we had seen about 4,700 Iranian bodies. You know, the things that happened in that war, you would need centuries to write about it.
Every evening at 6 p.m., the Iraqis would broadcast their official war communiqué for the day. I remember word for word what it said in early 1985: The waves of insects are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab Nation. But we have the pesticides to wipe them out.
So where did the “pesticides” come from? Partly from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994 the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs of the U.S. Senate produced a report, United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-RelatedDual-Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequencesof the Gulf War. The “Gulf War” referred to the 1991 war and liberation of Kuwait, but its investigations went all the way back to the Iran–Iraq War—which was itself originally called the “Gulf War” by the West until we participated in a Gulf war of our own and purloined the name. The committee’s report informed the U.S. Congress about government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq since 1985. These included Bacillus anthracis— which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucellamelitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (E. coli). The same report stated that “the United States provided the Government of Iraq with ‘dual use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile-system programs, including . . . chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans), chemical warhead filling equipment . . .”
In the summer of 1985, the Iraqi Information Ministry took Salam close to the Syrian border, where there was a quarry with the name Al-Qaem-ukashat. The government “minders” told Salam it produced fertilisers. “There was an American engineer there from Texas,” he was to recall.
I interviewed him and he said they were making fertilisers there. Actually, they were producing the mustard and nerve gas there. Many people in Iraq knew about this. There was a kind of artificial town next to it with a restaurant and chalets. The place was bombed by the Americans in the 1991 war. The regime people stayed there for a while immediately after the American invasion in 2003. But at the time they wanted us to write about this wonderful fertiliser plant. They laid on this big banquet with lots of wine and whiskey.
Hamid Kurdi Alipoor lies on his hospital bed in a semi-stupor, wheezing through cracked lips, his burned forehead artificially creased by his frown of pain. The nurse beside him—a girl in dark-framed spectacles wearing an equally black chador—pours water gently into his mouth from a plastic mug. The girl smiles at the young man as if she does not notice the dark skin hanging from his face or the livid pink burns around his throat. Something terrible has happened to him, but the Iranian doctors insist that I ask him to tell me his own story.
It is the same as that of many of the other 199 Iranian soldiers and Revolutionary Guards lying in torment in their beds in the Labbafinejad Medical Centre in Tehran. It is now February 1986. “I was in a shelter on the Iranian side of the Arvand [Shatt al-Arab] River,” Alipoor says. “When the shell landed, I did not realise the Iraqis were firing gas. I could not see the chemical so I did not put my gas mask on. Then it was too late.” He relaxes for a few moments, breathing heavily, the nurse holding out the cup to him again. How old is he? I ask. He looks at the girl when he replies. “Nineteen,” he says.
Some of the other patients watch him from their beds, others are lying with their eyes congealed shut, a bowl of damp, pink swabs beside their pillows. They do not talk. All you can hear is the sound of harsh, laboured breathing. “The lungs are the real problem—we send them home when they improve and we can deal with the blood infections.” Dr. Faizullah Yazdani, one of the senior medical staff at the hospital, is a small man with huge eyebrows who radiates cheerfulness among all the pain. “But they come back to us with lung problems. They cough a lot. And some have been attacked with nerve gas as well as mustard gas.”
The Iranians very publicly flew some of their chemical warfare victims to London, Stockholm and Vienna for treatment, but Dr. Yazdani’s wards are overflowing with patients. So far, only 7 of the 400 he has received have died. He still hopes to send 200 home, although many will never recover. According to the doctors, the Iraqis use mustard and tabun gas and nerve gas on the Iranians; they renewed their chemical attacks on a large scale on 13 February. When the victims are badly affected, they drown in their own saliva. Those who survive are brought choking to the long hospital trains, successors to the train of gas victims on which I travelled three years earlier. Now these trains are running from Ahwaz every twenty-four hours. “You cannot see the gas so it’s often a terrible surprise,” Dr. Yazdani says. “The soldier will smell rotten vegetables, then his eyes start to burn, he suffers headaches, he has difficulty seeing, then he starts crying, he coughs and wheezes.”
The pain is physically in the ward as the doctor takes me round bed after bed of blistered y
oung men, their strangely contorted bodies swathed in yellow bandages. The blisters sometimes cover their bodies. They are yellow and pink, horribly soft and sometimes as large as basketballs, often breeding new bubbles of fragile, wobbling skin on top of them. In bed sixteen, I come across a doctor who is also a patient, a thirty-four-year-old dermatologist from Tabriz called Hassan Sinafa who was working in a military hospital near the Shatt al-Arab on 13 January when a gas shell burst only 20 metres from him. I can tell he must have been wearing his gas mask at the time because it has left an area of unblemished skin tissue around his eyes and mouth, producing a cynical dark line around his forehead and cheeks. “There was nothing I could do,” he says slowly, dosed in morphine. “I had my anti-gas clothes on but the shell was too close for them to protect me. I felt the burns and I knew what was happening.”
He smiles. He had been brought safely to Tehran but it was two days before he gave the doctors permission to telephone his wife, at home in Tabriz with his twenty-month-old daughter. What did she say when she arrived at his hospital bed and saw him? I ask. “She has not come,” he replies. “I told her not to—I don’t want her or our baby seeing me like this.”
THROUGHOUT ALL THESE YEARS, the Americans also continued to supply the Iraqis with battlefield intelligence so that they could prepare themselves for the mass Iranian attacks and defend themselves—as the U.S. government knew—with poison gas. More than sixty officers of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb-damage assessments. After the Iraqis retook the Fao peninsula from the Iranians in early 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, a U.S. defence intelligence officer, toured the battlefield with Iraqi officers and reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to secure their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Colonel Walter Lang, later told The New York Times that “the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.”
The Iraqis had used gas to recapture Fao on 19 April 1988—to the virtual indifference of the world. Just a month earlier, on 17 and 18 March, during Operation Anfal—anfal means “booty”—the Iraqis had taken a terrible revenge on the Kurdish town of Halabja for allegedly collaborating with the Iranians during Iran’s brief Val Fajr 10 offensive in the area. For two days, Iraqi jets dropped gas, made from a hydrogen cyanide compound developed with the help of a German company, onto Halabja, killing more than 5,000 civilians. In Washington, the CIA— still supporting Saddam—sent out a deceitful briefing note to U.S. embassies in the Middle East, stating that the gas might have been dropped by the Iranians.
Humanitarian organisations would, much later, draw their own frightening conclusions from this lie. “By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful,” Joost Hiltermann of Human Rights Watch was to say fifteen years afterwards. The U.S. State Department even “instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.” In the United States, Halabja was mentioned in 188 news stories in 1988, but in only twenty in 1989. By 2000, Halabja featured in only ten news stories in the American media. But then it was reheated by the George W. Bush administration as part justification for its forthcoming invasion of Iraq. Halabja was remembered by journalists 145 times in February 2003 alone. In common with Tony Blair and many other Western leaders, Bush repeatedly emphasised that Saddam “is a person who has gassed his own people.”
The possessive “his own” was important. It emphasised the heinous nature of the crime—the victims were not just his enemies but his fellow Iraqis, though that might not be the Kurds’ point of view. But it also served to distance and to diminish Saddam’s earlier identical but numerically far greater crimes against the Iranians, who had lost many more of their citizens to the very same gases used at Halabja. And since we, the West, were servicing Saddam at the time of these war crimes—and still were at the time of Halabja—the gassing of the Kurds had to be set aside as a unique example of his beastliness.
Nearly a decade after Halabja, the United States accused Iran of trying to acquire chemical weapons, and it was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in charge of Iranian forces during a large part of the Iran–Iraq War, who—as outgoing president of Iran—formally denied the American claim. “We have had such a malicious experience of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis in the Imposed War that we would never wish to use or possess them,” he said with unusual emotion in 1997. “At the time I was the sole commander of Iranian forces in the war. When we captured the Howeiza area, I witnessed such terrible scenes that I could never forget them. The people of Halabja cooperated with us after victory . . . Saddam had got away with using it on our people so he resorted to advanced chemical weapons which he then received from Germany and used these against those [Kurdish] people. These chemical substances were used and the people were harvested down on the ground. When you could smell this substance no one could survive. I saw terrible scenes there [in Halabja] and I hope this scene could never be repeated in any country.”
I AM SITTING ON THE FLOOR of a tent in northern Iraq on 28 May 1991. Halabja was gassed three years ago. Around us, thousands of Kurdish refugees, victims of Saddam’s latest ethnic cleansing—the repression that followed our instigation and then betrayal of the post-Kuwait Iraqi uprising—are languishing amid squalor and disease under U.S. military protection. The hillside is cold and streaks of snow still lie in the hollows around the tents, the air frozen, but thick with the thump of American Chinook helicopters transporting food and blankets to the refugee camp.
Zulaika Mustafa Ahmed is twenty-two and wears a white embroidered dress, a long skirt and a scarf over her dark hair. Her family are victims of the Anfal campaign during which perhaps 10,000 Kurds were murdered. Zulaika, married at the age of fourteen, was with her six children and her husband, Moussa Issa Haji, when the Anfal started and, like so many thousands of Kurds, they were obeying government instructions to report to their nearest town. “We were approaching Dahuk in our van when we were stopped by Iraqi soldiers,” she says. “We were taken along with hundreds of other Kurds to Dahuk fort. They took us to the second floor where I saw Moussa being beaten with concrete blocks. I saw myself ten men who died after they were beaten with the blocks—I was standing only 6 metres away. Then they took them all away. I managed to speak to Moussa. I said to him: ‘Don’t be afraid, you are a man.’ He answered: ‘Please, you have to take care of my children. If they kill me, it doesn’t matter.’ What was I to say? They took him away and I have never seen him again. Sometimes I think I will never see my husband again—yes, sometimes I think this.”
Zulaika returned to her village of Baharqa. “It was some days later. We were used to the aircraft. I had left the village early with three of my children—the other three were with their grandfather—to go to the fields but I saw the two aircraft come low over Baharqa and drop bombs. There was a lot of smoke and it drifted towards us on the wind. It covered the land. We were hiding ourselves behind a small hill but we saw it coming towards us. The smoke had a nice smell, like medicine. Then my smallest children, Sarbas and Salah, started to cry. They started having diarrhoea but it didn’t stop. I couldn’t help them so I took them to the hospital in Irbil. The doctors were afraid. They gave them injections and medicine but it was no use. Both of them started to go black, as black as asphalt, and they both died nine or ten days later. The older child, when he died, he was vomiting his lungs. I buried them in the village cemetery. A lot of children died there. Now, if I go back there, I would not be able to find them.”
Zulaika says she will never marry again. How does she see her life, we ask. “I am living just to raise my children, that is all. In my dreams, I dream about my children who died. In one dream, I
dream that my husband says to me: ‘You didn’t take care of the children as you promised. This is the reason why they died.’”
FOR SOME OF THE SOLDIERS in the Iraqi army—the perpetrators, not the victims—the memory of those chemical attacks will also remain with them for ever. It is now July 2004, almost a quarter of a century after the start of the Iran–Iraq war, sixteen years since the Anfal operation against the Kurds. Under the occupation of the Americans and its puppet government, Baghdad has become the most dangerous city on earth. Suicide bombings, executions, kidnappings are the heartbeats of the city. But I arrive at the little market garden behind Palestine Street to buy a fir tree for the balcony of my hotel room, something to keep me sane in the broiling heat of midsummer Iraq. The garden is a place of flowers and undergrowth and pot plants and it is ruled over by Jawad, a forty-four-year-old with a sharp scar on his forehead, but who knows he lives in jenah. Jenah means “heaven.”
But Jawad, I quickly discover, has also lived in hell. When I ask about the scar, he tells me that a piece of Iranian shell cut into his head during a bombardment on the Penjwin mountain during the Iran–Iraq War. He was a radio operator and spent thirteen years in the Iraqi army. “I lost almost all my friends,” he says, rubbing his hands together in a false gesture of dismissal. “What happened to us was quite terrible. And what happened to me. I can’t remember the name of one of my dead friends—because the shell fragment in my head took my memory away.”
Not all his memory, however. Jawad moves silently through the trees, only the trickle of water from a fountain and the back-cloth sound of Baghdad’s traffic disturbing his journey. A white ficus tree, perhaps? Very good for withstanding the heat. A green ficus tree? The only fir trees for sale are so deeply rooted, they would take an hour to dig up. All his life, Jawad has worked in the market garden, along with his father. The heat accentuates the smells so that the smallest rose is perfumed, white flowers turning into blossom.
