The Kurdish victims caught unaware by cyanide (original) (raw)

Its Arabic signs, not yet erased, offer 'Greetings, love and prosperity to the President-leader Saddam Hussein' and 'Death to the aggressors.' The skin of the bodies is strangely discoloured, with their eyes open and staring where they have not disappeared into their sockets, a greyish slime oozing from their mouths and their fingers still grotesquely twisted.

Death seemingly caught them almost unawares in the midst of their household chores. They had just the strength, some of them, to make it to the doorways of their homes, only to collapse there or a few feet beyond. Here a mother seems to clasp her children in a last embrace, there an old man shields an infant from he cannot have known what.

The first group of Western reporters to visit Iran's new conquests in the Gulf war, we had been equipped with gas masks and hastily instructed in their use. What confronted us in Halabjeh, once home to about 100,000 people, 25 kilometres inside Iraq , was the grisly reason for that precaution.

Eleven victims are strewn across a tiny courtyard. Others, upon hearing the planes, must have rushed to their cellars in the belief that they would be safe there from high explosives. But what the Iraqi Mirages dropped was, the Iranians say, cyanide.

'One bomb holds a hundred litres,' said Dr Sayyid Furutan, 'and on a cold day the vapour can quickly spread 500 metres. These people had no chance,' he said, pointing to the remnants of a cyanide container.

In other parts of the town, said Dr Furutan, nerve and mustard gases were also dropped. 'You can save the victims of nerve gas if you treat them quickly, and we saved many,' the doctor said. Mustard gas, which burns the skin and lungs, claimed many victims.

We visited some of the milder cases in the hospital at Bakhtaran in western Iran. The more serious ones have been transported to Tehran, where the Azadi stadium has been set aside for them, and to other cities. The Iranians put the number of chemically dead and injured at several thousand - all Iraqi Kurdish civilians except for a handful of Iranian soldiers who could not get their gas masks on in time.

It all happened, according to the accounts of Iranian officials and Kurdish victims, last Wednesday afternoon. At 2.30 on that day, Iraqi resistance to the latest Iranian offensive finally ceased and their soldiers evacuated Halabjeh. The Iranian offensive, mounted by Revolutionary Guards with air force cover, had begun three days earlier.

The Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr Jaavar Larijani, said it was intended as 'punishment' for Iraq 's war of the cities. 'Brother Shafi,' a commander, said it was a way of disproving recent speculation that Iran has lost its ability to deal powerful blows to the enemy.

'We fought for three days against a superior force,' said an Iraqi general, Ali Hussein Owein. 'But we were cut off without supplies from the beginning.' He was one of several high-ranking officers in a group of 1,200 prisoners on display near Bakhtaran. The Iranians thousands more.

Iran's territorial gains further weaken Iraq 's grip on the Kurdish north. Local partisans there are mounting bigger and bigger operations, with Iranian help.

Our helicopter took us almost to the eastern shores of the Darbandkhan dam, which the Iranians have Made their new front line.

Our helicopter took us almost to the eastern shores of the Darbandkhan dam, which the Iranians have made their new front line. The Iraqi defenders have withdrawn to the opposite shore. Twelve kilometres to the south and well within artillery range is Darbandkhan barrage, which supplies electricity to Baghdad.

It is hard to conceive of any explanation for the chemical bombardment of Halabjeh other than the one which Iranians and Kurds offer - revenge, and on a scale proportionate to the Iranian victory.

Most of the inhabitants remained in the town when the Iranians came in on Wednesday afternoon. But some, familiar with Baathist practices already applied to hundreds of Kurdish villages, were afraid.

'I wondered what they were all doing,' said Nazem Kaximi, an Iranian journalist, 'hiding in the tobacco factory after we had entered the town without a shot being fired.' He discovered the answer at 6.30 that evening when Iraqi Mirages swooped on the town, unleashing their deadly cargo.

As artillery continues to rumble round the hills, Halabjeh stand silent and deserted except for a few chickens scrabbling for what they can find and a dazed old man, absent during the bombing, who has come back in search of his family.

It is likely to remain so until the war is over - or until the Revolutionary Guards push even deeper into Iraqi Kurdistan.