Ansar al-Islam was a young organization, formed only about eight months earlier, in September 2001, from several splinter groups that had previously broken away from the more moderate but still fundamentalist Islamic Movement in Kurdistan (IMK). Once the third-largest political party in Kurdistan,2 the IMK had received 5 percent of the vote in the 1992 parliamentary elections. After unsuccessfully contesting that vote, the party split off from the Kurdish regional government to operate largely independently in an area bordering Iran. Headquartered in Halabja, where it received strong support from Iran, the IMK had its own separate administrative and political infrastructure, and its own militia. For most of the period between 1992 and 2001, the IMK ran Halabja—enforcing the veil, building religious schools, banning cinema and music, and requiring mosque attendance, but not publicly endorsing terrorism or the harshest strictures of sharia. Then in late September 2001, the PUK stormed the city, forcing the clerics from power, and reinstituted secular control—much to the anger of the city’s more radical Islamists.
Our escorts en route to Halabja
The militant Ansar al-Islam was fiercely opposed to the IMK’s more moderate approach and policy of cooperating with the secular PUK and KDP. The splinter group called for the strictest application of sharia, including the barring of women from education and employment, and for harshly punishing those who failed to comply. Among its members were Arabs and Kurds who had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the early 2000s, fleeing to Kurdistan after the Taliban’s defeat. The PUK accused the group of having links with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Prior to the Iraq war of 2003, the United States contended that Ansar al-Islam was also the connecting link between the Baath regime and Al Qaeda, thus necessitating invasion. But this claim was never credibly proven, and the unsophisticated nature of the group’s recovered documents call the allegation into serious question. Ansar al-Islam was routed from Kurdistan, as least temporarily, during the Iraq war of 2003, when about two-thirds of its members were killed or captured and the rest escaped into the mountains.
At the time of our visit, however, the Islamist group was still a significant threat, and peshmerga-filled Jeeps, one with a mounted antiaircraft gun, protectively flanked our sedan at either end as we drove toward the city. Around us were low hills patched with blond fields, pink wildflowers, and flocks of sheep. All was silent, with the promise of a hot day on its way.
Descending the hills, we came to a bright blue river, where we climbed out to wait for a flatbed ferry, now on the other side. The river flowed south to the Darbandikhan Lake and Dam, a strategic point much fought over in recent years, as it provided Baghdad with most of its water supply. While we waited, I snapped photos of our peshmerga, all impeccably dressed in pressed camouflage uniforms, despite hours spent traveling in dusty open Jeeps. The men carried a large assortment of weapons, including Kalashnikovs, AK-47s, hand grenades, and a thirty-plus-year-old rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG—an antique anyplace else in the world. But in the hot morning sunlight, in a land of blond fields and plump sheep, none of the weapons seemed quite real.
The ferry came, and we crossed, to arrive a short time later at Halabja, its entrance marked with a statue of a prone man in traditional dress lying protectively over a small child. The figures were based on one of the most famous photographs of the March 16–18, 1988, attacks, when Halabja was smothered with a concoction of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and perhaps VX. The man’s gesture had proved futile; both he and his grandson were already dead when photographed.
Downtown Halabja centered on a few commercial blocks. Men and a handful of women, their heads tightly covered, wandered from shop to shop, but the atmosphere felt guarded and subdued, as if everyone was waiting for disaster to strike again at any moment. A Land Cruiser packed with bearded men sailed by, making me wonder about the citizenry we were passing. Although Halabja was now ruled by the PUK, it remained a conservative, religious city. If there were any Islamist spies among the ordinary believers—waiting, perhaps, for an unforgivable breach in Islamic law— they would be hard to pick out.
Outside the immediate downtown reigned a large new green-and-white mosque with a wide dome, followed by neglected street after neglected street, all flanked with blank walls, half-destroyed homes, and piles of rubble. Fourteen years after the bombings, much of the city still lay in ruins, due to a lack of funds and to inertia caused by depression and fear. Although the city had received some foreign aid in the early 1990s, that aid had ended abruptly in 1994 when the internal fighting began, with the IMK siding with the KDP. Then had come problems with Iran and the rise of the Islamists. One or two aid organizations had returned to Halabja in 1999, but their activities were limited.
I tried to imagine the city as it once had been. For Halabja, and the surrounding Shahrizur, one of the world’s richest agricultural regions, had no ordinary history. Throughout the Shahrizur rose hundreds of unexcavated mounds, some dating back to the Assyrians, others to the Sassanian Persians, who developed trade in the area from the 200s until 637, when Islam arrived. The Arabs associated the Shahrizur with Saul and David of the Bible, suggesting an early Jewish presence, while the Ahl-e Haqq—the “cult of the angels” faith—believe that the valley will be the site of the Last Judgment; “on the threshing floor of the Shahrazur, all the faithful will receive their due,” say their holy scriptures.
In the 1700s, about fifty thousand Jaf, one of the largest, oldest, and most powerful of Kurdish tribes, moved into the Shahrizur from Persia. Known for their fierce independence, arrogance, and un-Kurdish-like ability to work together, the Jaf had had a violent falling out with their Ardalan rulers, who had slain their agha. The Suleimaniyah pasha offered the Jaf protection and the right to graze their animals in the region, while the Jaf chieftains took up residence in the area’s villages and towns, including Halabja.
During much of the twentieth century, Halabja was a center of trade, learning, and enlightenment, home to many merchants, poets, scientists, and religious scholars, and a by-then thriving Jewish community. One elderly Halabja native I met remembered that in his boyhood, the city boasted near-weekly celebrations and festivals, large public gardens encircling the entire town, and many intellectual gatherings, during which the literate had read fat histories to the nonliterate on long winter evenings. Some of Kurdistan’s most famous twentieth-century poets were from Halabja.
Much of the credit for Halabja’s cultural flowering goes to Adela Khanoum, or Lady Adela. Born into the Ardalan dynasty, Adela Khanoum moved to Halabja around the turn of the twentieth century, after her marriage to Osman Pasha, a Jaf chieftain and the Ottoman-appointed governor of the Shahrizur. Halabja was then still a dusty, unsophisticated town, but the well-cultured, aristocratic Adela Khanoum set about re-creating the life she was accustomed to in Persia. She built two fine mansions, many woodsy Persian-style gardens, and a large bazaar of her own design, then invited old Persian friends to come for extended visits. Halabja’s fame spread, attracting both merchants and learned Kurds to the growing town.
Adela Khanoum also built a new prison, instituted a court of law over which she ruled, and, after her husband’s death in 1909, governed the entire Shahrizur district, to reign until her own death in 1924. She hired the Englishman Ely Bannister Soane, traveling through the region disguised as a Persian, as a scribe for six months in 1909. Perhaps because of his influence, she sided with the British against the rebel Shaikh Mahmoud in 1919.
What exactly Soane was doing in the region disguised as a Persian is not known. He had worked for a British bank in Iran for some years, but then set out on his odd journey, described in his memoir, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise. It is possible that his trip had some official purpose (the British did hire him six years later for his expertise in Kurdish affairs), but he had a deep love for the Middle East, living there most of his life and converting to Islam. I prefer to think that he undertook his trip purely out of curiosity and the desire
to lose himself utterly and completely in another world. I also marvel at his linguistic skills, as almost everyone he met, including Adela Khanoum, took him to be what he claimed: a Persian from Shiraz.
Soane described Adela Khanoum as being strong willed, urbane, and “of pure Kurdish origin,” with a “narrow, oval face, rather large mouth, small black and shining eyes, [and] a narrow slightly aquiline hooked nose”—a description borne out by his photos of her. When the two of them first met, she was wearing a skullcap smothered with gold coins, gold wrist and ankle bracelets, seventeen rings, and a necklace of large pearls alternating with gold fishes. Soane admired her greatly, and she remains a legend in Kurdistan today.
The last of Adela Khanoum’s mansions was destroyed in the 1988 attacks, and Halabja has no more public or Persian-styled gardens, or historic Jaf monuments. But miles away, beyond the southwestern edge of the Shahrizur, rises a grand castle built in the 1860s by the last paramount Jaf leader, Muhammad Pasha, father of Adela Khanoum’s husband. Perched on a hill outside the town of Kalar, with sweeping views of the surrounding plains, the palace is one of the few remaining physical testaments to the once-widespread power of the Kurdish tribes.
KEVIN, GINNY, DILDAR, and I went to visit Aras Abid Akram, a tall and thin man in his early thirties, who was dressed entirely in black. Given to quick, jerky movements, Aras was a sort of celebrity in Halabja, as he had lost twenty-two family members, including ten siblings, in the chemical attacks. He had been interviewed over a thousand times, or so he said. None of the interviews had done much good, he shrugged, as the foreign journalists, human rights workers, and aid organizations had all come and gone, doing nothing to alleviate Halabja’s suffering. In fact, it had gotten to the point where most people in the town didn’t even want to speak to foreigners anymore.
We would be three more guilty parties, I thought, with a pang of helplessness.
Aras lived on a quiet street, in a solid old family home with thick walls, stone floors, and a small garden filled with flowering rosebushes and a huge satellite dish. In his living room hung photos of his handsome parents and a romanticized shot of his many brothers and sisters, the latter wearing long white dresses that seemed straight out of the 1920s. Another photo, also of Aras’s family, showed about a dozen disheveled bodies strewn haphazardly down a dirt alley.
The morning of March 16, 1988, had begun calmly enough, Aras said, as his wife served tea. He had gone to a neighborhood hospital to help bury dead soldiers, victims of the Iran-Iraq War then raging around the city. But since the peshmerga had helped the Iranians enter Halabja the day before, he, like most residents, was expecting an Iraqi counterattack. At about ten A.M., he noticed two Iraqi planes circling overhead, and around noon, five more planes arrived, flying low and dropping small conventional bombs. One landed near the hospital, injuring Aras in the leg, and he limped out to take refuge in a neighbor’s basement, along with his mother, one sister, and others.
The bombing continued unabated for hours. Then, at about three P.M., a vaguely pleasant smell of garlic and apples drifted into the basement, causing immediate panic, as many knew what it meant and rushed toward the door. Some were vomiting, some felt sharp pains in their eyes as they stepped outside to see animal and human bodies already slumped everywhere. White clouds of chemicals clung to the ground, and people streamed out of basements. Because of his injured leg, Aras stayed behind, along with a few neighbors, one of whom gave him a wet turban to wrap around his face. He hugged his mother and sister tightly before they left, certain that he would not leave the basement alive.
But hours passed without further incident, and around eight P.M., Aras and a neighbor wrapped their turbans tightly around their mouths and stepped outside. The neighbor immediately went blind—temporary blindness being one of the effects of mustard gas. Stumbling in the dusk, they slowly made their way forward, tripping over bodies every few feet. Some alleys were so packed with bodies that they couldn’t pass; they had to back up to try another way. They headed toward a village on the outskirts of the city, a trip that usually took fifteen minutes. On that night, it took five hours. Around them bumped other blind people and disoriented animals. Finally, at about one A.M., they reached the village and rested for a few hours, desperately hungry and thirsty. At five A.M., the Iraqi planes returned, flying low and dropping more chemical bombs.
Later, Saddam Hussein would claim that it was the Iranians who had dropped the chemical bombs, a claim initially bolstered by U.S. intelligence reports, which accused both sides of using chemical weapons. But Iran’s alleged involvement has never been substantiated, and the thousands of Halabja survivors—like Aras—speak only of seeing Iraqi warplanes overhead.
Hours later, Aras and fourteen other injured civilians were loaded into a car by peshmerga and Iranian soldiers and transported to Iran. He was taken to a hospital where he awoke to hear a baby crying. “That sound was like a shock to me,” he said. “I thought, Where are my mother and father? Where are my sisters and brothers? I had to go back.”
Leaving the hospital that same day, and back in Halabja the next, he found hundreds of bodies still lying in the street. His house—the same house we were in now—was completely empty, with plates and silverware laid out as if for a meal. A neighbor directed him to a nearby basement. There Aras found his grandmother dead on the stairs, two other family members dead down below. He blacked out and, when he came to again, found himself back in Iran.
Aras couldn’t go on. His wife, a large and pretty woman with a big maroon bow perched at the back of her head, had been watching him intently. How can they go through this over and over again, I wondered, as Aras abruptly asked, “Is that enough?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room.
The silence left in his wake seemed unbearable. As during many interviews in Kurdistan, I didn’t know where to put my eyes, or what to do with my limbs.
Later, I asked Aras why he kept submitting himself to the painful process of remembering. “People are scared here, I’m scared here,” he said. “I’m wanted by the Iraqi government for talking so much. But I want the pain of Halabja to be heard around the world.”
While Kevin and Ginny continued filming Aras and his wife, and our peshmerga picked roses from the garden, happily sticking the big pink puffs into their cummerbunds, I went out into the street and gazed up and down the dirt thoroughfare. The only signs of life were two bony cows ambling along and a few women gossiping in doorways, their covered heads bent closely together. Keeping a damper on things was the boxy, well-guarded headquarters of the IMK on the corner. Our translator Dildar had pointed it out upon our arrival, and implored us not to make too much noise or otherwise call attention to ourselves. Unhappy that so many foreigners were visiting Aras, the IMK could make trouble for him later.
Taking two peshmerga with me, I went to explore a nearby street that had been especially hard hit in the bombing attacks. Half-destroyed houses filled the otherwise empty blocks—great piles of rubble in which children were playing, amid possible lingering contamination. One of the buildings housed a semi-intact basement, and as I peered down into the claustrophobic space, filled with rubble and plastic bags blown in by the wind, I felt as if I would gag. It was easy enough to imagine suffocating inside the room now, let alone back then.
BEFORE AND AFTER meeting Aras, I talked to dozens of other Halabja survivors and read a sheaf of autobiographical stories compiled by a doctor some years before. Their accounts of the attacks differed in small ways regarding the timing and sequencing of events, but all described the strange smells, the difficult breathing, the vomiting, the panic, the squealing animals, the mass exodus, and the countless, countless bodies. One woman spoke of hearing no noise at all when she emerged from her shelter. Another spoke of seeing her entire family blown to bits en route to Iran. A third described seeing dozens of screaming people trapped in a basement, their faces pressed hard against the windows, afraid to come out. “It was like judgment day in the Quran
,” she said. And many told of losing their sight for three or four weeks, or more, and of losing loved ones to the noxious fumes. “I saw people lying on the ground, fluttering their legs and hands and dying,” wrote one man. “And I saw people laughing hysterically,” the effect of the nerve gas.
TO LEARN MORE about the long-term effects of the chemical bombings, I visited Dr. Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist, and one of Kurdistan’s best-known doctors. A reserved and thoughtful man of about sixty, Dr. Baban was the Kurdish coordinator of the Halabja Post-Graduate Medical Institute (HMI), which was founded in 1999 by a coalition of Kurdish doctors, Dr. Christine Gosden of the University of Liverpool, and the Washington Kurdish Institute, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. With initial funds provided by the U.S. State Department, U.K. Department for International Development, and other sources, the institute was working to document cases and treat patients affected by the chemical bombs dropped not only on Halabja—by far the most devastated site— but also on about 280 smaller targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. For the Kurdish doctors, such a liaison prior to the Iraq war of 2003 had taken much courage, as they were involved in a project whose findings could be used against Saddam Hussein in a war-crimes tribunal, and his agents could be anywhere.
Welcoming me into his Suleimaniyah home, Dr. Baban spread out a raft of papers on a coffee table, the results of a one-year study, undertaken with funding from the HMI. Traveling by car, bicycle, mule, and foot, about twenty doctors and paramedics had fanned out over the Kurdish countryside, to survey two thousand households. And in those areas where chemical bombing had occurred, the medical team found increased incidents of: (1) eye disorders such as blindness, conjunctivitis, and continuous watering of the eye; (2) skin damage such as constant irritation and patches of deeper or lighter pigmentation; (3) respiratory disorders, including asthma, shortness of breath, and chronic lung fibrosis; (4) gastrointestinal disorders; (5) heart attacks and strokes; (6) neuromuscular disorders; and (7) cancers, including skin, colon, and stomach cancers, and leukemia and lymphoma. In addition, the medical team found increased rates of congenital abnormalities in children born to parents who had been exposed to the chemicals, and increased rates of infertility, sterility, and miscarriages.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 27