Halabja was the most notorious and the deadliest single gas attack against the Kurds, but it was one of at least forty chemical assaults ordered by al-Majid. A similar one followed that spring in the village of Guptapa. There, on May 3, 1988, Abdel-Qadir al-‘Askari, a chemist, heard a rumor that a chemical attack was imminent. He left the village, which was situated on low ground, and scrambled up a distant hilltop so he might warn his neighbors of imminent danger. When he saw Iraqi planes bombing, he sprinted back down to the village in order to help. But when he reached his home, where he had prepared a makeshift chemical attack shelter, nobody was inside. He remembered:
I became really afraid—convinced that nobody survived. I climbed up from the shelter to a cave nearby, thinking they might have taken refuge there. There was nobody there, either. But when I went to the small stream near our house, I found my mother. She had fallen by the river; her mouth was biting into the mud bank. . . . I turned my mother over; she was dead. I wanted to kiss her but I knew that if I did, the chemicals would be passed on. Even now I deeply regret not kissing my beloved mother.36
He searched desperately for his wife and children:
I continued along the river. I found the body of my nine-year-old daughter hugging her cousin, who had also choked to death in the water. . . . Then I went around our house. In the space of 200–300 square meters I saw the bodies of dozens of people from my family. Among them were my children, my brothers, my father, and my nieces and nephews. Some of them were still alive, but I couldn’t tell one from the other. I was trying to see if the children were dead. At that point I lost my feelings. I didn’t know who to cry for anymore and I didn’t know who to go to first. I was all alone at night.37
Al-Askari’s family contained forty people before the attack and fifteen after. He lost five children—two boys, one sixteen, the other six; and three girls, aged nine, four, and six months. In Guptapa some 150 Kurds were killed in all. Survivors had witnessed the deaths of their friends, their spouses, and their children.
When word of the gas attacks began spreading to other villages, terrified Kurds began fleeing even ahead of the arrival of Iraqi air force bombers. Al-Majid’s forces were fairly predictable. Jets began by dropping cluster bombs or chemical cocktails on the targeted villages. Surviving inhabitants fled. When they reached the main roads, Iraqi soldiers and security police rounded them up. They then often looted and firebombed the villages so they could never be reoccupied. Some women and children were sent to their deaths; others were moved to holding pens where many died of starvation and disease. Many of the men simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. In the zones that Saddam Hussein had outlawed, Kurdish life was simply extinct.
Official Skepticism
In Washington skepticism greeted gassing reports. Americans were so hostile toward Iran that they mistrusted Iranian sources. When Iraq had commenced its chemical attacks against the Kurds in early 1987, the two major U.S. papers had carried scattered accounts but had been quick to add that that they were relaying Iranian “allegations” of gassing. Baghdad was said to have “struck back” or “retaliated” against Kurdish rebels.38 The coverage of Halabja in 1988 was initially similar. The first reports of the attack came from the Islamic Republic News Agency in Teheran, and U.S. news stories again relayed “Iranian accounts” of Iraqi misdeeds. They gave Iraqi officials ample space for denial. Two days after the first attack, a short Washington Post news brief read: “Baghdad has denied reports of fighting. It said it withdrew from Halabja and another town, Khormal, some time ago.”39
The Kurds, like many recent victims of genocide, fall into a class of what genocide scholar Helen Fein calls “implicated victims.” Although most of the victims of genocide are apolitical civilians, the political or military leaders of a national, ethnic, or religious group often make decisions (to claim basic rights, to stage protests, to launch military revolt, or even to plot terrorist attacks) that give perpetrators an excuse for crackdown and bystanders an excuse to look away. Unlike the Jews of 1930s Europe, who posed no military or even political threat to the territorial integrity of Poland or Germany (given their isolation or assimilation in much of Europe), the Kurds wanted out—out of Hussein’s smothering grasp and, in their private confessions, out of his country entirely. Kurds were in fact doubly implicated. Not only did some take up arms and rebel against the Iraqi regime, which was supported by the United States, but some also teamed up with Iran, a U.S. foe. As “guerrillas,” the Kurds thus appeared to be inviting repression. And as temporary allies of Iran, they were easily lumped with the very forces responsible for hostage-taking and “Great Satan” berating.
The March 1988 Halabja onslaught did more than any prior attack to draw attention to the civilian toll of Hussein’s butchery. In part this was because the loss of some 5,000 civilians made it the deadliest of all the Iraqi chemical assaults. But it was also the accessibility of the scene of the crime that caused outsiders to begin to take notice. Halabja was located just fifteen miles inside Iraq, and Western reporters were able to reach the village wasteland from Iran. They could witness with their own eyes the barbarous residue of what otherwise might have been unimaginable. Reporters had the chance to provide rare, firsthand coverage of a fresh, postgenocidal scene.
Iran, which was still struggling to win its war with Iraq, was eager to present evidence of the war crimes of its nemesis. European and American correspondents visited Iranian hospitals, where they themselves interviewed victims with blotched, peeling skin and labored breathing. The Iranians also offered tours of Halabja, where journalists saw corpses that Iranian soldiers and Kurdish survivors had deliberately delayed burying. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran stories on their front pages on March 24, 1988, and U.S. television networks joined in by prominently covering the story over the next few days. The journalists were aghast, and the dispatches reflected it. Patrick Tyler’s Washington Post story described “the faces of the noncombatant dead: four small girls in traditional dress lying like discarded dolls by a trickling stream below the small hamlet of Anap; two women cuddling in death by a flower garden; an old man in a turban clutching a baby on a door-step.”40 For the first time, Kurdish faces were on display. They were no longer abstract casualty figures or mere “rebels.”
KDP Archive, Salahaddin
Western journalists filming a Kurdish man and his infant son killed in the March 1988 Iraqi chemical attack on Halabja.
U.S. officials insisted that they could not be sure the Iraqis were responsible for the poisonous gas attacks. Western journalists, who had little experience with Iraq and none with the Kurds, hedged. The disclaimers resurfaced. “More than 100 bodies of women, children and elderly men still lay in the streets, alleys and courtyards of this now-empty city,” Tyler wrote, “victims of what Iran claims is the worst chemical warfare attack on civilians in its 7½-year-old war with Iraq.”41 The New York Times March 24 story buried on page A11 was titled, “Iran Charges Iraq with Gas Attack.” Newsweek wrote: “Last week the Iranians had a grisly opportunity to make their case when they allowed a few Western reporters to tour Halabja, a city in eastern Iraq recently occupied by Iranian forces after a brief but bloody siege. According to Iran, the Iraqis bombarded the city with chemical weapons after their defeat. The Iranians said the attack killed more than 4,000 civilians.”42 This was not fact; this was argument, and Iranian argument at that. The victims themselves could tell no tales. The journalists were privy to the aftermath of a monstrous crime, but they had not witnessed that crime and refrained from pointing fingers. Thus, the requisite caveats again blunted the power of the revelations.
The Iraqis further muddied the waters by leading their own tours of the region. The regime denied the atrocities and reminded outsiders that bad things happen during war. Around the time of Halabja, Iraq’s ambassador to France told a news conference: “In a war, no one is there to tell you not to hit below the belt. War is dirty.”43 Yet “war” also implies two or more
sets of combatants, and Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks were carried out mainly against Kurdish civilians. But Iraq had its cover: Kurdish rebels had fought alongside Iranians, Iraq was at war with Iran, and the war, everyone knew, was brutal. The fog of war again obscured an act of genocide.
The U.S. official position reflected that of its allies in Europe. But whereas they were almost completely mute about Halabja, the State Department issued a statement that confined its critique to the weapons used. “Everyone in the administration saw the same reports you saw last night,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters. “They were horrible, outrageous, disgusting and should serve as a reminder to all countries of why chemical warfare should be banned.”44
The United States issued no threats or demands. American outrage was rooted in Hussein’s use of deadly chemicals and brazen flouting of the 1925 Geneva Protocol Against Chemical Warfare. The New York Times editorial page condemned the Iraqi gas attack and called upon Washington to suspend support to Baghdad if chemical attacks did not stop. On Capitol Hill Senator George Mitchell (D.–Maine) introduced a forceful Senate resolution decrying Iraqi chemical weapons use. Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post condemned Iraq for calling out the “Orkin Squadron” against civilians. Hoagland, who happened to have been with Mullah Mustafa Barzani in the mountains of Kurdistan in March 1975 when the United States abandoned him, now urged America to use all the influence it had been storing up with Hussein to deter further attacks.45
Human rights groups were more numerous, more respected, and better financed than they had been during Cambodia’s horrors. Helsinki Watch had been established in 1978, and it added Americas Watch in 1981 and Asia Watch in 1985. But it did not have the resources to set up Middle East Watch until 1990. As a result, the organization refrained from public comment on the gassing of Kurds. “We didn’t have the expertise,” explains Ken Roth, who today directs an organization of more than 200 with an annual budget of nearly $20 million but who was then deputy director of a team of no more than two dozen people. “None of us had been to the region, and we felt we could not get in the business of saying things that we could not follow through on. We would only have raised expectations that there was no way we could meet.” Amnesty International had researchers in London who had established contacts with Iraqi Kurds who confirmed the horror of the press reports, but Amnesty staff were unable to enter Iraq. Shorsh Resool, a thirty-year-old Kurdish engineer and Anfal survivor, had never been abroad but wondered why news of the slaughter was never reported on the BBC’s Arabic service. He was told that people in the West did not believe the Kurdish claims that 100,000 people had disappeared. The figure sounded abstract and random. Resool resolved to make it concrete. Between October 1988 and October 1999, he walked through northern Iraq, dodging Iraqi troop patrols and systematically interviewing tens of thousands of Anfal survivors. He assembled a list of names of 16,482 Kurds who had gone missing. When he extrapolated his statistical survey, he concluded that between 70,000 and 100,000 Kurds had in fact been murdered. But when he presented this evidence to the Amnesty researcher in London, she asked, “Do you really expect people to believe that that many Kurds could disappear in a year without anybody knowing about it?”
Amnesty did circulate photographs of the victims as well as the names of those it could confirm had disappeared. But as Curt Goering, Amnesty-USA deputy director, says, “The problem then, as now, was getting our grassroots base to have any actual influence in Washington.”
U.S. officials claimed that the proof of Iraqi responsibility was inconclusive and blamed “both sides.”46 U.S. officials cited “indications” that Iran had also used chemical artillery shells against Iraq, although they had to concede that the evidence was unconvincing. State Department spokesman Charles Redman issued a forward-looking, even-handed proclamation. He said, “We call upon Iran and Iraq to desist immediately from any further use of chemical weapons, which are an offense to civilization and humanity.”47 Nearly three weeks after the Halabja attack, the Washington Post ran a front-page story citing Defense Department claims that “it wasn’t a one-way show.”48 At the UN Security Council, the United States blocked an Iranian attempt to raise the question of responsibility for the Halabja attack.49
Whatever the surface confusion, Kurdish refugees were adamant about what they witnessed and experienced. David Korn, a State Department Middle East specialist who later interviewed dozens of Kurdish survivors, recalls, “The facts were available, but you don’t get the full facts unless you want the full facts.” The facts of the larger campaign of destruction were undeniable. A Defense Intelligence Agency cable, dated April 19, 1988, reported that “an estimated 1.5 million Kurdish nationals have been resettled in camps”; that “approximately 700–1000 villages and small residential areas were targeted for resettlement”; that “an unknown but reportedly large number of Kurds have been placed in ‘concentration’ camps located near the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders.”50 But these horrors captured no headlines. Thus, U.S. officials never hurried to gather details on the conditions in the camps or the welfare of the men they knew had been taken away. The story of Halabja died down as quickly as it had popped up, and the State Department maintained full support for Iraq.
Mass Executions
Iraqi gas attacks received the public attention, but most Kurds who died in the Anfal were killed in mass executions. U.S. officials knew throughout the 1987–1988 offensive that Iraqi men who were captured were led away and imprisoned. It is unclear when these officials learned of the ritualized mass killing. Senior Reagan administration officials had made it plain that the fate of the Kurds was not their concern, so it would not be surprising if U.S. intelligence officers did not attempt to track the prisoners’ condition at the time the massacres were happening. Several Kurds who survived Iraqi firing squads later came forward to describe the horror that befell those who ended up in al-Majid’s custody.
Some Kurds who were rounded up in the prohibited zones during the Anfal campaign were dumped at the sprawling Topzawa detention center near the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. Survivors said that some 5,000 Kurds occupied Topzawa at one time, but the turnover was rapid, as busloads of men were removed and arrived daily. Through the barred windows, women and children watched the men in the courtyard outside being handcuffed and beaten savagely. Usually after no more than a day or two, the guards read off a list of names, and the men were packed, stripped to their shorts, bound together, and forced into windowless green-and-white vehicles, which reminded many of ambulances. The elderly (those between fifty and ninety) were driven twelve to fifteen hours to the Pit of Salman, or Nugra Salman, an abandoned, lice-infested fortified prison, where an average of four or five men died each day from starvation, disease, and physical abuse.51 The men of fighting age met fates even more sinister.
In April 1988 Ozer, an unmarried, twenty-five-year-old construction worker, had ended up in Topzawa after Iraqi shelling and bulldozers forced him from his home for a second time. At about 8:00 one morning, he and several hundred others were dragged onto sealed vehicles that were thick with old urine and human feces and steamy hot. After a full day on the road, Ozer’s nine-vehicle convoy made its way onto a dirt path, ahead of which he spotted only desert and darkness. Ozer and the other men knew the end was near and began to pray, to weep, and in keeping with the Islamic tradition, to ask one another for forgiveness.52 The prisoners could hear the steady melody of nearby gunfire, the sounds of screams, followed by the groan of bulldozer engines. The driver of Ozer’s bus turned on his highbeams so the Iraqi police would have an easier time killing the men in the bus ahead. Ozer and his fellow prisoners watched as Kurdish men were dragged in front of the light, shot by a uniformed firing squad, and thrown into a freshly dug pit.
Confronted with the visual reality of their destiny and unable to take solace in wishful thinking, Ozer’s busload did something quite unusual: They attempted forcibly to resist their execution, injuring one of the gua
rds in a scuffle. But the prisoners were outnumbered, and the guards outside simply emptied their guns, again and again, into the bus. Ozer was grazed by a flying piece of shrapnel but lay coiled on the bus floor as dead bodies piled up around him and as he listened to the steady patter of blood dripping from the porous vehicle. Ozer eventually stole away into the safety of the dark desert night. Unable to see clearly, he stumbled into a trench with some 400 bleeding bodies. But he crawled out and found his way to the Kurdish quarter of Kirkuk.
The Iraqis tended to vary their methods. As Middle East Watch later found:
Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved roughly into trenches and machine-gunned where they stood; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it—a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses.53
In some areas women and children who had been removed from their homes also became targets. Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, a twelve-year-old, became the Kurds’ most famous survivor. In April 1988 he lived with his parents; eleven-year-old sister, Gaylas; ten-year-old sister, Leyla; and nine-year-old sister, Serwa. Iraqi troops swept through their town and rounded up his family and brought them to Topzawa, where Taimour thought himself fortunate not to be housed with the men. By peering through a small hole in the compound wall, he saw his father being stripped down to his underclothes, manacled to his nearest neighbor, and dragged out of the compound with the other men. Other women and families were competing for access to the same hole, and Taimour remembered wives, mothers, and daughters screaming, shouting, beating themselves, and pulling at their hair in agony.54
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