The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
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 seven 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 young 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 34-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 US government knew – with poison gas. More than sixty officers of the US 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 US 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 US 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 Hilterman of Human Rights Watch was to say fifteen years afterwards. The US 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 his 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.
More than 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 US 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