Why don't you guys ever post articles like this?

[Corey]

Note: not in it's entirety.

THE GREAT TERROR

by JEFFREY GOLDBERG

In northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocidal war on the Kurds‹and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.

The New Yorker

Issue of 2002-03-25 - Posted 2002-03-25

In the 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 for Israel in the nineteen-fifties, a middle-aged man named Muhammad came up from his own cellar and saw an unusual sight: "A helicopter had 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 check 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 animals 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. "It 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."

Across the city, other families were making similar decisions. Nouri Hama Ali, who lived in the northern part of town, decided to lead his family in the direction of Anab, a collective settlement on the outskirts of Halabja that housed Kurds displaced when the Iraqi Army destroyed their villages. "On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to die," Nouri told me. "The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could see them." People were dying all around, he said. When a child could not go on, the parents, becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. "Many children were left on the ground, by the side of the road. Old people as well. They were running, then they would stop breathing and die."

Nasreen's family did not move quickly. "We wanted to wash ourselves off and find water to drink," she said. "We wanted to wash the faces of the children who were vomiting. The children were crying for water. There was powder on the ground, white. We couldn't decide whether to drink the water or not, but some people drank the water from the well they were so thirsty."

They ran in a panic through the city, Nasreen recalled, in the direction of Anab. The bombardment continued intermittently, Air Force planes circling overhead. "People were showing different symptoms. One person touched some of the powder, and her skin started bubbling."

A truck came by, driven by a neighbor. People threw themselves aboard. "We saw people lying frozen on the ground," Nasreen told me. "There was a small baby on the ground, away from her mother. I thought they were both sleeping. But she had dropped the baby and then died. And I think the baby tried to crawl away, but it died, too. It looked like everyone was sleeping."

At that moment, Nasreen believed that she and her family would make it to high ground and live. Then the truck stopped. "The driver said he couldn't go on, and he wandered away. He left his wife in the back of the truck. He told us to flee if we could. The chemicals affected his brain, because why else would someone abandon his family?"

As heavy clouds of gas smothered the city, people became sick and confused. Awat Omer was trapped in his cellar with his family; he said that his brother began laughing uncontrollably and then stripped off his clothes, and soon afterward he died. As night fell, the family's children grew sicker‹too sick to move.

Nasreen's husband could not be found, and she began to think that all was lost. She led the children who were able to walk up the road.

In another neighborhood, Muhammad Ahmed Fattah, who was twenty, was overwhelmed by an oddly sweet odor of sulfur, and he, too, realized that he must evacuate his family; there were about a hundred and sixty people wedged into the cellar. "I saw the bomb drop," Muhammad told me. "It was about thirty metres from the house. I shut the door to the cellar. There was shouting and crying in the cellar, and then people became short of breath." One of the first to be stricken by the gas was Muhammad's brother Salah. "His eyes were pink," Muhammad recalled. "There was something coming out of his eyes. He was so thirsty he was demanding water." Others in the basement began suffering tremors.

March 16th was supposed to be Muhammad's wedding day. "Every preparation was done," he said. His fiancée, a woman named Bahar Jamal, was among the first in the cellar to die. "She was crying very hard," Muhammad recalled. "I tried to calm her down. I told her it was just the usual artillery shells, but it didn't smell the usual way weapons smelled. She was smart, she knew what was happening. She died on the stairs. Her father tried to help her, but it was too late."

Death came quickly to others as well. A woman named Hamida Mahmoud tried to save her two-year-old daughter by allowing her to nurse from her breast. Hamida thought that the baby wouldn't breathe in the gas if she was nursing, Muhammad said, adding, "The baby's name was Dashneh. She nursed for a long time. Her mother died while she was nursing. But she kept nursing." By the time Muhammad decided to go outside, most of the people in the basement were unconscious; many were dead, including his parents and three of his siblings.

Nasreen said that on the road to Anab all was confusion. She and the children were running toward the hills, but they were going blind. "The children were crying, 'We can't see! My eyes are bleeding!' " In the chaos, the family got separated. Nasreen's mother and father were both lost. Nasreen and several of her cousins and siblings inadvertently led the younger children in a circle, back into the city. Someone‹she doesn't know who‹led them away from the city again and up a hill, to a small mosque, where they sought shelter. "But we didn't stay in the mosque, because we thought it would be a target," Nasreen said. They went to a small house nearby, and Nasreen scrambled to find food and water for the children. By then, it was night, and she was exhausted.

Bakhtiar, Nasreen's husband, was frantic. Outside the city when the attacks started, he had spent much of the day searching for his wife and the rest of his family. He had acquired from a clinic two syringes of atropine, a drug that helps to counter the effects of nerve agents. He injected himself with one of the syringes, and set out to find Nasreen. He had no hope. "My plan was to bury her," he said. "At least I should bury my new wife."

After hours of searching, Bakhtiar met some neighbors, who remembered seeing Nasreen and the children moving toward the mosque on the hill. "I called out the name Nasreen," he said. "I heard crying, and I went inside the house. When I got there, I found that Nasreen was alive but blind. Everybody was blind."

Nasreen had lost her sight about an hour or two before Bakhtiar found her. She had been searching the house for food, so that she could feed the children, when her eyesight failed. "I found some milk and I felt my way to them and then I found their mouths and gave them milk," she said.

Bakhtiar organized the children. "I wanted to bring them to the well. I washed their heads. I took them two by two and washed their heads. Some of them couldn't come. They couldn't control their muscles."

Bakhtiar still had one syringe of atropine, but he did not inject his wife; she was not the worst off in the group. "There was a woman named Asme, who was my neighbor," Bakhtiar recalled. "She was not able to breathe. She was yelling and she was running into a wall, crashing her head into a wall. I gave the atropine to this woman." Asme died soon afterward. "I could have used it for Nasreen," Bakhtiar said. "I could have."

After the Iraqi bombardment subsided, the Iranians managed to retake Halabja, and they evacuated many of the sick, including Nasreen and the others in her family, to hospitals in Tehran.

Nasreen was blind for twenty days. "I was thinking the whole time, Where is my family? But I was blind. I couldn't do anything. I asked my husband about my mother, but he said he didn't know anything. He was looking in hospitals, he said. He was avoiding the question."

The Iranian Red Crescent Society, the equivalent of the Red Cross, began compiling books of photographs, pictures of the dead in Halabja. "The Red Crescent has an album of the people who were buried in Iran," Nasreen said. "And we found my mother in one of the albums." Her father, she discovered, was alive but permanently blinded. Five of her siblings, including Rangeen, had died.

Nasreen would live, the doctors said, but she kept a secret from Bakhtiar: "When I was in the hospital, I started menstruating. It wouldn't stop. I kept bleeding. We don't talk about this in our society, but eventually a lot of women in the hospital confessed they were also menstruating and couldn't stop." Doctors gave her drugs that stopped the bleeding, but they told her that she would be unable to bear children.

Nasreen stayed in Iran for several months, but eventually she and Bakhtiar returned to Kurdistan. She didn't believe the doctors who told her that she would be infertile, and in 1991 she gave birth to a boy. "We named him Arazoo," she said. Arazoo means hope in Kurdish. "He was healthy at first, but he had a hole in his heart. He died at the age of three months."

I met Nasreen last month in Erbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. She is thirty now, a pretty woman with brown eyes and high cheekbones, but her face is expressionless. She doesn't seek pity; she would, however, like a doctor to help her with a cough that she's had ever since the attack, fourteen years ago. Like many of Saddam Hussein's victims, she tells her story without emotion.

During my visit to Kurdistan, I talked with more than a hundred victims of Saddam's campaign against the Kurds. Saddam has been persecuting the Kurds ever since he took power, more than twenty years ago. Several old women whose husbands were killed by Saddam's security services expressed a kind of animal hatred toward him, but most people, like Nasreen, told stories of horrific cruelty with a dispassion and a precision that underscored their credibility. Credibility is important to the Kurds; after all this time, they still feel that the world does not believe their story.

A week after I met Nasreen, I visited a small village called Goktapa, situated in a green valley that is ringed by snow-covered mountains. Goktapa came under poison-gas attack six weeks after Halabja. The village consists of low mud-brick houses along dirt paths. In Goktapa, an old man named Ahmed Raza Sharif told me that on the day of the attack on Goktapa, May 3, 1988, he was in the fields outside the village. He saw the shells explode and smelled the sweet-apple odor as poison filled the air. His son, Osman Ahmed, who was sixteen at the time, was near the village mosque when he was felled by the gas. He crawled down a hill and died among the reeds on the banks of the Lesser Zab, the river that flows by the village. His father knew that he was dead, but he couldn't reach the body. As many as a hundred and fifty people died in the attack; the survivors fled before the advancing Iraqi Army, which levelled the village. Ahmed Raza Sharif did not return for three years. When he did, he said, he immediately began searching for his son's body. He found it still lying in the reeds. "I recognized his body right away," he said.

The summer sun in Iraq is blisteringly hot, and a corpse would be unidentifiable three years after death. I tried to find a gentle way to express my doubts, but my translator made it clear to Sharif that I didn't believe him.

We were standing in the mud yard of another old man, Ibrahim Abdul Rahman. Twenty or thirty people, a dozen boys among them, had gathered. Some of them seemed upset that I appeared to doubt the story, but Ahmed hushed them. "It's true, he lost all the flesh on his body," he said. "He was just a skeleton. But the clothes were his, and they were still on the skeleton, a belt and a shirt. In the pocket of his shirt I found the key to our tractor. That's where he always kept the key."

Some of the men still seemed concerned that I would leave Goktapa doubting their truthfulness. Ibrahim, the man in whose yard we were standing, called out a series of orders to the boys gathered around us. They dispersed, to houses and storerooms, returning moments later holding jagged pieces of metal, the remnants of the bombs that poisoned Goktapa. Ceremoniously, the boys dropped the pieces of metal at my feet. "Here are the mercies of Uncle Saddam," Ibrahim said.

[mosaik]

well for starters, because that happened 15 years ago and there is serious doubt as to whether or not it was actually Saddam who dropped the gas.

if any new "iraq is evil" articles were being written right now i'm sure i would post them - but all the good journalists in the world are busy hating your government for now.

remember me? i'm the equal-opportunities government hater. i don't like saddam, either.

[liam]

hollow minds, why the hell would anyone wanna save saddam. He kills his own. Now what if your whatever started killing people you knew in your city or town. Or what if you weren't allowed to say anything negative about something. Or say you lived in Iraq and did say something negative about saddam, and then people come in and either kill you, cut out your tongue, or they strap you down and force you to watch your sister or your daughter or whoever get raped. And thats why most Iraqi's fight this war, because if they don't they're family will be killed.

[mosaik]

Liam, Iraqis are fighting this war because the amerikans are trying to take their homes.

Read the reports coming out of iraq. your troops are viewed as the enemy, not liberators. i challenge somebody to find a report, any report, that paints a different picture.

As for dissent in amerika...



It looks like dissenters in amerika had better start watching their backs.

[liam]

WHAT?! Oh yeah find me one picture of an american takin an iraqi's home. The only reason we're viewed as the enemy is because Al-Jazeera TV paints us that way. Iraqi's get two channels run by the government making Saddam the nicest person in the world. Now some, mostly on the borders of Iraq, get more channels from the bordering countries and know exactly how Saddam is, and then there are those with satellite TV but those are only few and must have direct connections into the Regime.

[theo]

Liam, Iraqis are fighting this war because the amerikans are trying to take their homes

what about the iraqi republican guard taking over iraqi civilian homes?

p.s. please spell america right, its fucking annoying.

[faninor]

Liam, television is just different in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia also has about 1 channel and it's almost constantly about the Qur'an. If people in Saudi Arabia want real news and entertainment, they get satellite TV (it's not hard to find there, satellite receivers are very common in Saudi Arabia, like air conditioners). You can see though Iraqi television, I'm pretty sure they can too.

[faninor]

Read the reports coming out of iraq. your troops are viewed as the enemy, not liberators. i challenge somebody to find a report, any report, that paints a different picture.

About that challenge . . .

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030321-023627-5923r
Fifth paragraph:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

Whether or not the stories about chopping people up are true, those Iraqi people on the videotape see the US as liberators, not as the enemy.

[Venom]

Most Iraqi's (except the Republican Guard and the higher ups) do see the US as liberators. Notice now that the fall of Basra looks closer people are rising up against Saddams troops there? The reason you don't see everyone saying they want us there is because if they do they will be killed. After Saddam's body is seen and it is known that he is dead I GUARANTEE you will see tons of Iraqi's praising the US. Right now they voice their "opinions" under the duress of Saddam and his followers.

[Narbus]

Liam, Iraqis are fighting this war because the amerikans are trying to take their homes.

Read the reports coming out of iraq. your troops are viewed as the enemy, not liberators. i challenge somebody to find a report, any report, that paints a different picture.

Yesterday on NPR (national public radio) they reported capturing Iraqis whose Saddam-loyalist commanders were physically putting guns to their heads and forcing them to fight. If they were so hell bent on fighting the great beast that is America, why the guns?

[Johnny]

Saddams an asshole. I wanna kick him in the balls

[Corey]

if any new "iraq is evil" articles were being written right now i'm sure i would post them - but all the good journalists in the world are busy hating your government for now.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/Wor ... 30321.html

They are educated. They aren't required to veil themselves. They can work. But these four women from Iraq say they were missing two crucial things in their homeland — freedom and dignity.

http://www.house.gov/lantos/caucus/Test ... 112002.htm

The Kurds recognize the United States as a defender of democracy and freedom wherever it takes root. With America's comprehensive military protection from Saddam's genocidal regime, our hard-won experiment in democracy can succeed and become an example to all people in the Middle East.

http://www.iraqfoundation.org/news/2002/ldec/3_cbo.html

''We come to the U.S. because we were persecuted by Saddam. We left our families. We became U.S. citizens,'' Albadran said. ''But whatever the FBI can do to make us safe, why not help?''

http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/ir ... survey.htm

People in Iraq, with surprising candor, told researchers that they will support a U.S.-led war against Iraq if it brings "normalcy" to their country, the International Crisis Group said in a December 4 report entitled "Voices from the Iraqi Street."

[mosaik]

i can still get you ten stories for every one you can find - the educated know what your empire is trying to do.

do you really fail to see what the end result will be? Saddam is toppled and amerika occupies. They don't set up some free elections, drop a big pile of gold in the middle of baghdad and then wave goodbye and hop on their transports.

they stick a big ole amerikan flag in the middle of baghdad and go about collecting "thier" oil to finance their next war.

smart iraqis know this. that's why they oppose the war. that's why they fight.

note about anti-saddam articles: what's the point? do i have to convince any of you that saddam is bad? i think you government has done that already. i want to open your eyes and make you see that your government is just as bad as his.

[Bandalero]

right......

and we'll invade every other country with oil right? considering that venezuela was extremely vunerable with the mass protest down there yu would have thought that we would have invaded and taken it for ourselves right? since your accusing the US that this war is about oil, that seems reasonable according to you doesn't it?

[Corey]

i can still get you ten stories for every one you can find - the educated know what your empire is trying to do.

So? Yours are more valid than mine?

[mosaik]

reno you are deliberatley missing the point. i have never, ever, never, ever said that the war was about oil.

it's about politiks and power. not oil. but the oil is a bonus, with the added wealth you'll be back at war all the sooner.

[Bandalero]

i can still get you ten stories for every one you can find - the educated know what your empire is trying to do.
they stick a big ole amerikan flag in the middle of baghdad and go about collecting "thier" oil to finance their next war.

smart iraqis know this. that's why they oppose the war. that's why they fight.

ok, i thought that's the picture you were painting with this. but ok, you assumption is that it's about power and money, considering that dick cheyney's Haliburton bowed out of the running for the re-construction of Iraq. as in they have just denied a sure 600 million dollars. politics...in case your wondering this isn't a popular vote and this guy barely won this past election if he even won it at all. how many of his supporters are for this war, and look at the margin of victory, i'm sure those people aren't going to vote for him again. so much for political gain huh?

power? what more power can you weild in the world then the US president? this isn't about power at all, it's about HELPING people who are getting pushed around by a nut job with an army. sure people might die because of it, but think about it, 1.5 million innocent people did die because Sadamn wanted them dead during his regime. now you tell me why you want to keep this guy in office? that you would just rather stand put and watch people go mssing or dead. tell me why you would want to do that.

[liam]

i can still get you ten stories for every one you can find - the educated know what your empire is trying to do.

do you really fail to see what the end result will be? Saddam is toppled and amerika occupies. They don't set up some free elections, drop a big pile of gold in the middle of baghdad and then wave goodbye and hop on their transports.

they stick a big ole amerikan flag in the middle of baghdad and go about collecting "thier" oil to finance their next war.

smart iraqis know this. that's why they oppose the war. that's why they fight.

note about anti-saddam articles: what's the point? do i have to convince any of you that saddam is bad? i think you government has done that already. i want to open your eyes and make you see that your government is just as bad as his.

Christ, OUR government is pretty screwed up but its one of the best around. We may be a bucnh of gun happy lunitics but this is one of the best places to live so back off bitch.

Second whoever said that we're taking iraqi oil to finance our next war was just wrong because any oil that is purchased the money is going to IRAQI's.

[mosaik]

all government is bad. yours is no better then iraqs

[Venom]

all government is bad. yours is no better then iraqs

Have we gased 5,000 of our own citizens? Have we allowed terrorist camps to thrive inside our borders? Have we killed thousands of our own citizens for speaking out against the government? Are we using our own citizens are human shields in war time? Shall I go on??