“So from this last evidence, it seems that chemical weapons affect DNA, carrying over into the next generation,” Dr. Baban said. “These disorders have led to a distortion of the structure of our entire population. Men are divorcing their wives because they can’t give birth. The number of our young people is decreasing.”
Nearly one-third of the deaths in Halabja were now caused by cancers and less than 10 percent by infectious diseases, figures more in line with industrialized nations than with a rural society, Dr. Baban said. Halabja had fourteen times the rate of miscarriage and five times the rate of colon cancer of Chemchemal, a comparable city nearby that had not been bombed by chemicals. Congenital abnormalities in Halabja were also four to five times greater than in the postatomic populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dr. Baban estimated that about forty thousand adults and children in Iraqi Kurdistan were in need of prioritized health care due to exposure to chemical weapons and perhaps biological agents, which may also have been used in some attacks. However, little of that prioritized care was being delivered, largely because of the dual constraints of international and Iraqi economic sanctions. The United Nations did not allow Iraq to import advanced diagnostic equipment, as its parts could be used for more nefarious purposes, and Hussein effectively blocked many of the Kurds’ medical supply requests, such as surgical gloves and cancer medicines.
“The U.N. is providing all communities with the same medicines, and making no extra provisions for areas with widespread diseases,” Dr. Baban said. “It’s very disappointing.”
Dr. Baban was also disappointed that the Kurdish doctors’ study had thus far failed to be published in final form or given the sort of worldwide attention that he felt it warranted. He’d sent the completed research to Dr. Gosman at the University of Liverpool in early 2000, but she was having trouble getting it published, for reasons that were unclear. Perhaps it wasn’t rigorous enough? I wondered.
Yet even if that were the case, why weren’t more studies being conducted? The paltry amount of international attention being paid to the effects of Iraq’s chemical attacks was appalling. After the Halabja bombing, thousands of victims had received immediate treatment in Iran, a nation seldom given credit in the West for that humanitarian aid, self-interested though it undoubtedly was. The Iranians ferried the Iraqi victims across the border, gave them atropine injections to counter the effects of nerve gas, and cared for the sickest in hospitals. But upon returning to Iraq, most of the chemical victims received no advanced health care at all. Until the Halabja Medical Institute began its study, no large international research or aid organization had collected data on the bombings’ effects or tried to address the medical needs of its survivors. Fourteen years after the fact, the West had finally conceded that the attacks had indeed taken place, but few soil or water samples had ever been taken, and no investigations conducted to determine exactly which weapons had been used or whether harmful agents still lingered in the environment. If for no other reason, such research should be conducted for the world’s self-interest, to gain knowledge in the event of possible future chemical attacks.
LEAVING ARAS ABID AKRAM and his wife, Kevin, Ginny, Dildar, and I traveled on to the Halabja Hospital, where we met Dr. Adil Karem Fatah. A naturally elegant man with a gentle if nervous manner, long tanned face, and prematurely graying hair, Dr. Adil had been helping to publicize the city’s high incidence of disease since 1996. His efforts had carried a stiff personal price—because of his frequent contacts with foreigners, extremists were accusing him of spying for the United States and threatening his life. Shortly after I left Iraq, the threats got so bad that Dr. Adil fled to Syria to seek asylum, not returning until after the war.
Dr. Adil took us on a tour of the hospital. Built by a Swedish aid organization in 1999, it was simple but multistoried and very clean, painted in greens and whites with shiny floors. It was also surprisingly empty. I had steeled myself for the visit, expecting to see dozens of heartbreaking cases, but for the most part, the victims of the chemical attacks weren’t there. They had chronic illnesses that were best treated on an out-patient basis, Dr. Adil explained, reminding me that we were visiting fourteen years after the fact—a detail that I sometimes forgot, as Halabja’s suffering still felt so palpable.
We did see one man with painful patches of an angry red skin disease and a young child with a severe cleft palate, who probably wouldn’t live out the month. And outside the hospital, we met an older child with a cleft palate who had already had seven operations and still needed two more. His young mother, whose first child had died of the same malformation, hugged her son close as she spoke of neighbors who had advised her not to bother trying to save her child, as he would never make it, they said.
While Kevin and Ginny filmed the patients, Dr. Adil took me to see a different kind of Anfal victim—a young woman whose chest and arms were covered with third-degree burns. She’d tried to commit suicide by setting herself on fire.
“She’s luckier than many because she didn’t burn her face,” Dr. Adil said as he gave her an injection to ease her pain. “But there will be many complications. She will have a hard life—with internal problems, with social ones. Her family might abandon her. Her skin will contract. We have very few plastic surgeons here.”
In the last six or seven years, suicide through burning had become alarmingly widespread in Iraqi Kurdistan, he went on. One study, conducted by the Women’s Information and Cultural Center in Suleimaniyah, estimated that between 1991 and 2000, about fourteen hundred women had tried to burn themselves to death. The victims were usually young village women suffering from depression, perhaps over forced marriages, cruel husbands, or desperate economic situations—in other words, from traditional tribal customs, coupled with the general breakdown of Kurdish society post-Anfal. And treating burn patients, a long and costly process anywhere, was especially difficult in Iraq. Dressings, ointments, and the mesh necessary for skin grafts weren’t readily available, and hospital salaries were too low to retain the dedicated staff needed to care for the victims.
Will it never end? I thought dejectedly. Here it was, fourteen years after the Anfal, and yet the campaign of death was still continuing.
ON A HILL just above Halabja sloped the city cemetery, offering magnificent views of the surrounding plains, valleys, and mountains. Straddling the Iran-Iraq border to the east rose the great wall of the Hawraman range, home to the Hawraman people, known for their distinctive dialect and handicrafts, whom I would visit in Iran.
Ansar al-Islam had seized two Iraqi Hawraman villages, Biyara and Tawela, to use as their headquarters, and desecrated the region’s centuries-old Naqhsbandi Sufi tombs and shrines. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Biyara had served as an important religious center, attracting believers from all over the Islamic world. Then, as now, bearded men had congregated in this isolated, stunning land in the name of religion. But the first group had come for peace, the second, for war.
Many of the victims of the chemical attacks were buried in the cemetery, in mass graves amid thistles and wildflowers, with a never-completed commemorative arch falling apart in the background. One mass grave, created out of a napalm bomb crater, contained fourteen hundred bodies, and another, eight hundred, of which only two had been identified—Jalal Hussein and Bahar Hussein. Aras Abid Akram’s family had its own mass grave as well, with twenty-two names neatly handwritten in white on black.
BY A LUCKY COINCIDENCE, I ran into British journalist Gwynne Roberts a few days later at the Palace Hotel. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Gwynne had been covering Kurdistan since 1974. In fact, it was his reporting on Halabja that had first brought Dr. Gosden to Kurdistan, which in turn led to the founding of the Halabja Medical Institute. Gwynne had also secretly entered Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, when it was still under Baathist rule, to collect soil samples, which had been analyzed by Porton Down, Britain’s armed forces chemical weapons laboratory, to less
than conclusive results. He had collected more soil and water samples from Halabja in 2000—a complex process necessitating the help of many others—but these had never been analyzed. To do so was wildly expensive, ranging in cost from $1,000 to $50,000 per sample, and only governments had equipment sensitive enough to measure small amounts of chemical weapons agents. Gwynne had approached the Swedes, the Dutch, the British, and the U.N. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague for help, but all had turned him down.
Why that was, he and I could only speculate. Did it have to do with the United Nation’s refusal to release the names of companies that had supplied chemicals to Iraq—many during the Iran-Iraq War—on the grounds that this would end the cooperation they got from the companies in tracking down Saddam’s weapons supplies? Was there perhaps intensive lobbying going on to prevent potential political embarrassment?
By the time the Iraq war of 2003 began, the names of the chemical companies were no longer secret. In December 2002, Iraq delivered a twelve-thousand-page weapons declaration to the United Nation’s Security Council that included the names of dozens of foreign companies that provided most of the chemicals and equipment for Iraq’s chemical weapons program prior to the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations insisted that it would not make the list public, but it was leaked to the press. On it were thirty-one foreign major suppliers, including fourteen from Germany, three each from the Netherlands and Switzerland, and two each from the France, Austria, and the United States (Alcolac International of Maryland and the Al Haddad trading company of Tennessee, both now defunct).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Safe Havens
KARIM AGHA, TRIBAL CHIEF, SAT AT ONE END OF HIS LONG summer guesthouse, surrounded by an oval of empty Louis XIV–style chairs. A tall, thin, and slightly stooped man in his seventies, he was dressed in a dark gray shal u shapik and a black-and-white turban. Prominently hanging behind him was a glossy, poster-sized photograph of PUK president Jalal Talabani.
Jumping up as we arrived, Karim Agha greeted us warmly and escorted us to chairs beside his own. Servants glided in with tea in tulip-shaped glasses, followed by platters piled high with fruit. One of Karim Agha’s sons hovered in the background, to ensure that all went smoothly. As is the custom in many powerful Kurdish families, he never sat down in his father’s presence.
“Each tribe has its own way of life,” Karim Agha said, settling in contentedly after the initial pleasantries were over. “Each tribe is like a family.”
His tribe was the Hamawands, who until about 1925 were the most famous fighting tribe of southern Kurdistan, despite also being one of the smallest. Originally from Persia, they settled in the Suleimaniyah area in the early eighteenth century, where they supported the Babans against the Ottomans until the emirate ended in 1850, and then terrorized the entire region between Baghdad, Mosul, and Kermanshah, Iran.
E. B. Soane, the Englishman who traveled in disguise through Kurdistan in 1909, gives a vivid account of meeting the tribe:
[F]rom every gully in the hill-sides horsemen came galloping down. Handsome men these Hamavands. As they rushed along, their silk head handkerchiefs of many colours streamed behind them; their long tunics, covering even their feet, rose and fell with the horses’ action. The stirrups of many were inlaid with silver, contrasting with the scarlet upturned shoes. . . . As they approached near, each one ostentatiously opened the breech of his rifle and emptied it of cartridges, then slung it on his back, thereby announcing at once their friendly intentions.
Soane also writes of the Hamawands’ alert dark eyes, directness, haughty pride, and “hostile manner that even among friends they cannot always control.” All but the latter still applied to the Hamawands today as represented by Karim Agha.
“In 1847, the Ottoman Empire occupied our land, they controlled the whole area,” Karim Agha began his history. “We were the only tribe that did not bow down to them—we fought them. But after losing many people, the Turks with the support of other tribes made a large attack against us and we fled to Iran. But still we considered this our land, and we came back in groups of fifteen on horseback to fight them. We disrupted many caravans, we inflicted heavy losses. Finally they sent delegates to make peace, and we came back. But then the fighting began again, and we went to Iran again. Four times we went to Iran and four times we came back.
“A representative of the Sultan came to negotiate. We sent two hundred horsemen to greet him, and after five days of entertaining them, he captured all two hundred. He said, ‘All this year, you have broken negotiations, now we will break you.’ The families of the two hundred horsemen surrendered—seven hundred people—and they sent some to Adana in Turkey and some to Libya in North Africa. Many became sick and died on the way. . . . The year was 1889.
“My father and his family were sent to Libya. They sent them there to become farmers. But they refused to become farmers. They said, ‘We are going back to Kurdistan,’ and they escaped from the desert to the mountains.
“The Arab tribes helped them get to Egypt and across the Suez Canal, through the Sinai Desert and Syria. They went mostly at night, by the stars, and fought many battles. It took them nine months, most going on foot. Women and children on foot walking through the desert—Rommel needed tanks and airplanes to make it through! And in 1896, after seven years in Libya, they came back to Kurdistan.”
Documented by historians, this astonishing story summed up the Kurds’ doggedness. Nothing could keep them from the land they loved, which was so central to their identity. As one well-educated Kurdish deputy minister said to me, “Whenever we Kurds leave our land, we are lost. Without it, the Kurds are nothing.”
Coffee is served to Karim Agha
Translating Karim Agha’s story for me was Nizar Ghafur Agha Said, a disheveled-looking man in a rumpled brown suit. An old friend of Karim Agha, Nizar spoke good English, as he had lived in the United States for over twenty years. He was now in Kurdistan to test the waters for a possible move back. In the United States, Nizar was just one more struggling foreign-born businessman, but in Iraq, he was a member of a distinguished family, with many connections. His grandfather was Piramerd, a beloved Kurdish poet famed for his originality and long life, dying in 1950 at age eighty-seven. Piramerd had written a well-known poem about the Hamawands and their earlier marauding ways: “Terror of highwaymen, bribes to the escort, pilfering at night. . . .”
KARIM AGHA WAS not the first agha I had met. In the Dohuk governorate, my host Majed had introduced me to Muhammad Agha, chieftain of the Sharifani, a subtribe of the Kocher, and to two Yezidi aghas. The Sharifani agha, an educated man of about forty, wearing khak, a turban, and ultrashiny leather shoes, had hoped to study medicine, but was forced to become agha at age sixteen, because of his father’s untimely death. His agha responsibilities were twofold, he said—working as the representative of his clan, and as an adviser to his people.
The two Yezidi aghas could not have been more different. Nejem Agha Qaidi, chieftain of Al-Qaidi, was an uneducated older man with a grizzled face, thick glasses, ratty red cardigan, and baggy pants. He seemed deeply depressed. His tribe had been forcibly moved out of their eight villages and into the small, poverty-ridden collective town of Sharia during the Anfal, losing not only their homes and farmlands, but also their holy shrine, which could not be rebuilt elsewhere, as it had to be erected over sacred graves.
In contrast, Shaikh Shamo, agha of a Haveri subtribe, was a buoyant, round-faced man who ran several successful businesses, including hotels and lotteries, and had two wives and many children. He reigned over the much larger collective town of Khanik, population about three thousand, and invited me to a sumptuous lunch, which we ate standing up, together with about a dozen other men, all of us crowded around a table groaning with heaping platters of food. Everyone except my translator and I wore a red-and-white turban and ate with his fingers.
In Diana, off the Hamilton Road, I met Delawar Muhammad Ali, the big and friendly
agha of the Majel tribe, who hated to be addressed by his title; he felt it distanced him from people. Uneducated but perceptive, Delawar struggled to understand the changing world around him. “In some ways, being an agha is easier for me than it was for my father because people have more money now,” he said. “But in some ways, it is harder because there are many more people, more problems, and bigger problems. My father did not have an Anfal.”
The agha was once the all-powerful Kurdish leader. Whether in charge of a small clan of a few hundred or a large tribe of many thousands, he made all major decisions for his group, while often extracting oppressive taxes. He usually had multiple wives and many children, and owned vast tracts of land and many thousands of animals. Sometimes the aghas’ greed and cruelty created much deep resentment among their followers, but many aghas were greatly respected. Some were loved.
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