Before Syria, the U.S. was complicit in a 1988 chemical weapons attack in the Middle East
The Reagan administration helped locate the targets
On the morning of March 16, 1988, seven years into the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi aircraft appeared in the sky over Halabja. Just 10 miles from the Iranian border, the Kurdish city of 75,000 in northern Iraq had grown accustomed to being on the front lines of not only that war but also the Kurds’ own revolt against the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
The city braced for an artillery bombardment. The Iranians and the Kurdish freedom fighters had successfully pushed Hussein’s military into retreat from a Iraqi military outpost nearby, and the residents knew it would draw retaliation.
Shortly before 11:00, the Iraqi Army began firing artillery shells into Halabja from the highway, while the Air Force began dropping napalm bombs on the town. For three hours, while many of the city’s residents hid in crude, homemade shelters, the aircraft steadily blanketed Halabja with the flammable gelling agent, igniting fires nearly impossible to extinguish.
But as evening approached, and that campaign came to an end, another — even more terrible — one began.
Iraqi MiG and Mirage aircraft began dropping bombs filled with mustard gas on Halabja. According to regional Kurdish rebel commanders, Iraqi helicopters helped coordinate as many as 14 bombings with seven or eight aircraft in each over the course of five hours. Eyewitnesses described clouds of white, black, and then yellow smoke billowing upward and rising about 150 feet in the air.
For some, death came quickly.
“It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me,” said Kaveh Golestan, an Iranian photographer who arrived shortly after the bombing. “You went into a room, a kitchen and you saw the body of a woman holding a knife where she had been cutting a carrot.”
They were the relatively lucky ones.
Others described a drawn-out, gruesome picture in which people’s eyes turned red, they vomited a green liquid and displayed deranged behavior before collapsing to the ground.
One survivor of the attacks, who goes by the name Kherwan, told Radio Free Europe that from the moment one hears the words “gas” or “chemicals” shouted, “that is when terror begins to take hold.”
“It is a situation that cannot be described — birds began falling from their nests; then other animals, then humans. It was total annihilation,” said Kherwan. “Whoever was able to walk out of the town, left on foot. Whoever had a car, left by car. But whoever had too many children to carry on their shoulders, they stayed in the town and succumbed to the gas.”
Death toll estimates range from 3,200 to more than 7,000 in addition to the 10,000 who were injured in the massacre that came to known as “Bloody Friday.”
Initially, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency blamed Iran for the attack and, later, the State Department instructed its diplomats to say Iran was partially to blame. In part, that was because the U.S. backed Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. It was also because the U.S. could not be seen as being complicit in such a monstrous atrocity from which some of the most horrific images since the Vietnam War made their way around the world.
Early images showed school-aged children alongside the road, collapsed as they tried to escape, green fluid running from their mouths; mothers who had fallen on their infants as they tried to carry their babies to safety; and the elderly, who could not keep pace with the encroaching gas clouds. Later, the photos were of the massive piles of bodies gathered by the survivors who returned to Halabja.
To anyone else, it was clear that it was Iraq all along. Saddam Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid — who would come to be known as “Chemical Ali” for his role in the attacks — was heard on a tape obtained by Human Rights Watch addressing the ruling Baath Party. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons!” he said of the Kurds. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them.”
Officially, through the United Nations and other global organizations, the international community condemned Saddam Hussein’s regime for the chemical attacks on Halabja, while much of the world’s largest powers did little more than attempt to isolate Saddam Hussein and punish Iraqis through sanctions throughout the 1990s.
While some international actors insisted that the use of any chemical weapon is considered a clear violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, officials at the State Department and the White House did their best to look the other way, suggesting that there were technical nuances when it comes to sovereign nations and what happens within their own borders. One Reagan administration official told The New York Times, “‘There’s nothing in international law that prohibits that.”
It was only after the U.S. and its coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 that the Kurds of Halabja would see any justice for al-Majid’s genocidal actions. More than 20 years later, “Chemical Ali” was condemned by an Iraqi court to death by public hanging in January 2010 for orchestrating the Halabja massacre. He never expressed remorse at his trial, insisting his actions were designed to protect Iraq’s security.
For the Kurds, however, closure would not come until they closed the circle of how such an atrocity could take place. In short, it was more than just “Chemical Ali” who was responsible.
“We owe it to ourselves, to the victims to take up really a more in-depth look at actually what happened, how it happened,” Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told the BBC in a 2011 documentary.
Some countries took Talabani’s call seriously. On December 23, 2005, a Dutch court sentenced Frans van Anraat, a businessman who sold chemicals to Saddam Hussein’s regime, to 15 years in prison for aiding in the genocide of Halabja. And both the Iraqi government and victims of the attacks have sued more than 20 companies they say were directly involved in providing chemicals to the regime.
For its part, the U.S. has long denied its role in the chemical attacks on Halabja, often saying that its ally never announced it would use chemical weapons. But now-declassified intelligence shows that members of the Reagan administration knew Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin in four prior major offenses against Iran — all of which relied on satellite imagery, maps and other intelligence provided to Iraq by the U.S.
As Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, told Foreign Policy, “The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. He added: “They didn’t have to. We already knew.”
