Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Ozeti
THE GREAT TERROR
In northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocidal war
on the Kurds-and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.
By JEFFER GOLDBERG
mE NEW YORKER
Issue of 2002-03-25
Inthe late morning of March 16,1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles
from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city
was home to roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to ordinary life. Like most of
Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the
peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name means "those who face death."
A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her family's house, preparing food, when she saw the
helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam's soldiers to
retreat. Iranian Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi counterattack was imminent.
Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand
artillery shelling, and even napalm.
"At about ten o'clock, maybe closer to ten-thirty, I saw the helicopter," Nasreen told me. "It was not attacking, though. There were
men inside it, taking pictures. One had a regular camera, and the other held what looked like a video camera. They were coming very
close. Then they went away."
Nasreen thought that the sight was strange, but she was preoccupied with lunch; she and her sister Rangeen were preparing rice,
bread, and beans for the thirty or forty relatives who were taking shelter in the cellar. Rangeen was fifteen at the time. Nasreen was
just sixteen, but her father had married her off several months earlier, to a cousin, a thirty-year-old physician's assistant named
Bakhtiar Abdul Aziz. Halabja is a conservative place, and many more women wear the veil than in the more cosmopolitan Kurdish
cities to the northwest and the Arab cities to the south.
The bombardment began shortly before eleven. The Iraqi Army, positioned on the main road from the nearby town of Sayid Sadiq,
. fired artillery shells into Halabja, and the Air Force began dropping what is thought to have been napalm on the town, especially the
northern area. Nasreen and Rangeen rushed to the cellar. Nasreen prayed that Bakhtiar, who was then outside the city, would find
shelter.
The attack had ebbed by about two o'clock, and Nasreen made her way carefully upstairs to the kitchen, to get the food for the
family. "At the end of the bombing, the sound changed," she said. "It wasn't so loud. It was like pieces of metal just dropping without
exploding. We didn't know why it was so quiet."
A short distance away, in a neighborhood still called the Julakan, or Jewish quarter, even though Halabja's Jews left fur Israel in the
nineteen-fifties, a middle-aged man named Muhammad came up from his own cellar and saw an unusual sight "A helicopter hï:d come
back to the town, and the soldiers were throwing white pieces of paper out the side." In retrospect, he understood that they were
measuring wind speed and direction. Nearby, a man named Awat Omer, who was twenty at the time, was overwhelmed by a smell
of garlic and apples.
Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into the house by the wind. "At first, it smelled
bad, like garbage," she said. "And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs." Before she went downstairs, she
happened to cheek on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. "The bird was dying," she said. "It was on its side." She
looked out the window. "It was very quiet, but the animais were dying. The sheep and goats were dying." Nasreen ran to the cellar.
"I told everybody there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air."
The people in the cellar were panicked. They had fled downstairs to escape the bombardment, and it was difficult to abandon their
shelter. Only splinters of light penetrated the basement, but the dark provided a strange comfort. 'We wanted to stay in hiding, even
though we were getting sick," Nasreen said. She felt a sharp pain in her eyes, like stabbing needles. "My sister came close to my face
and said, 'Your eyes are very red.' Then the children started throwing up. They kept throwing up. They were in so much pain, and
crying so much. They were crying all the time. My mother was crying. Then the old people started throwing up."
Chemical weapons had been dropped on Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force, which understood that any underground shelter would
become a gas chamber. "My uncle said we should go outside," Nasreen said. "We knew there were chemicals in the air. We were
getting red eyes, and some of us had liquid coming out of them. We decided to run." Nasreen and her relatives stepped outside
gingerly. "Our cow was lying on its side," she recalled. 'lt was breathing very fast, as if it had been running. The leaves were falling
off the trees, even though it was spring. The partridge was dead. There were smoke clouds around, clinging to the ground. The gas
was heavier than the air, and it was finding the wells and going down the wells."
The family judged the direction of the wind, and decided to run the opposite way. Running proved difficult. "The children couldn't
walk, they were so sick," Nasreen said. "They were exhausted from throwing up. We carried them in our arms."
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