HALABJA, Kurdistan Region - Returning home from Friday prayers on a warm April day, 59-year-old Tahir Karim looks through a photo album from his youth. It is a gallery that starts off filled with colorful flowers, smiles, and hope for the future, but makes a sharp turn to death, frowns, and despair following March 16, 1988.
On that fateful day, the bombardments and aerial strikes at first seemed like any other for the population of Halabja, a border city that had borne the brunt of the Iraq-Iran war for eight years. But the bombs the Iraqi army rained down carried chemical weapons that killed thousands. The tragedy came to define the city and is the main symbol of Kurdish oppression under the rule of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Karim lost eight immediate family members in the attack. He is one of the survivors known as a “Halabja orphan.” Yet, that was just the beginning of his struggles. He would soon find himself forced back into the Iraqi army, reluctantly fighting for the regime that had massacred his entire family.
The calm before the storm
After graduating from Sulaimani’s School of Teachers in 1984, Karim was drafted into the Iraqi army to fight in the war against Iran. He served in the army for around two and a half years, until he deserted from the service as he did not wish to fight for the oppressor’s regime any longer.
“I had no choice but to desert because I did not see it as a fair war,” Karim told Rudaw English last Friday.
He returned to Halabja in 1987 to live with his family.
In the early morning of March 13, 1988, Iranian forces started to heavily bombard the city of Halabja. The Iraqi army was moved into the mountains to fight the Iranian incursion. By the afternoon of March 15, all Iraqi troops had withdrawn from Halabja and the city fell into the hands of the Iranian forces.
At around noon on March 16, the sound of Baathist jets dropping missiles echoed deafeningly throughout the entire city, before abruptly going quiet a few hours later.
“When a jet bombards, there are two loud bursts. Once when the missiles drop, and again when the missiles explode. That afternoon, we felt like the missiles did not explode,” said Karim.
“It was like a normal day, but at the same it was not. It was a quiet day, but not quiet at the same time. It was a calmness that would be followed by a great crime.”
Unbeknownst to Karim and the people of Halabja, the jets were dropping a lethal cocktail of mustard and nerve gasses.
Karim was unable to recognize the odd scent, but from his time in the Iraqi army he knew it was not gunpowder. The realization kicked in when he began experiencing breathing difficulties. Panting, he ran to his family who were sheltering in a bunker, shouting, “It is chemical!”
In search of a breath, he started running with no direction, before falling to his knees and fainting nearly 60 meters away from his house. He would remain unconscious until March 18.
I thought they were asleep
When Karim woke up, he was still lying where he had fallen.
“I had no memory of what happened,” said Karim, “I thought I had been in the plains just a few hours before and I was now coming home.”
In addition to damaging physical health, exposure to mustard gas increases the probability of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological issues.
With blurry vision, he started making his way back home, where he encountered the bodies of three children lying in the street. He did not recognize them, but would later find out that they were the children of the neighbors and relatives who were in the bunker.
“For whatever reason, they had left the bunker. They had come out, but were unable to cross the street. Unfortunately, they would spend their final moments and lose their lives there,” he said.
When he reached the bunker, Karim recalls seeing his family members lying on the floor and slumped against the walls. He thought they were simply asleep and held onto the denial that anything was wrong until he saw his father.
Karim’s father had been a tailor, working in Halabja’s bazaar. He would go to his small shop in the mornings, come home for lunch in the afternoon, and then go back to the bazaar every day.
“I asked myself ‘Why did my father not go to the bazaar?’ I went to wake him up. I thought he might have fallen asleep and nobody was there to wake him up. I went to him and tried to wake him up several times, but he would not answer,” he said.
“I did not realize that all the bodies around me were dead.”
Perplexed, he ran out of the bunker. He recalls vaguely seeing one of his neighbors, Haji Mahmoud, and calling out to him for help. The neighbor, with a look of terror on his face, ran away and did not answer the call, adding to Karim’s confusion.
Karim next moved towards the house of his grandfather, an elderly man who usually spent most of his day home, in hopes of gaining some clarity about what had happened.
“He opened the door, and I started talking to him. ‘Where were you? Where are you going?’ he asked me. I told him I came from home to visit you. ‘What about your family?’ he asked. I told him they were asleep at home… ‘What do you mean by sleep? Have you gone crazy?’ he replied… ‘They are not asleep. They are all dead.’”
In a state of disbelief and despair, Karim was unable to sleep for days and remembers losing control of his body, unconsciously walking to different places before being stopped by his grandfather and brought back to the house.
Upon the recommendation of his grandfather and other surviving relatives, Karim surrendered himself to Iranian forces in Halabja a few weeks later, in hopes of seeking treatment in the neighboring country.
In Iran, Karim was sent to a Kermanshah hospital and then spent 22 days in a hospital in Tehran, before eventually deciding to leave the hospital.
He recalls meeting people from Halabja in Iran who would tell him that others have seen members of his family alive after the attack, but Karim, who had personally seen the dead bodies of his parents and all six siblings, knew that was not the truth.
On September 6, 1988, Saddam Hussein’s regime announced a general amnesty for all Kurds, promising safe passage and a return home for all who had left in hopes of escaping the dictator’s reign of terror.
Karim, like thousands others, was eager to return home, to start anew and bring an end to the most agonizing six months of his life. However, the road would prove to be much thornier than he had anticipated.
We were lied to
Trick amnesties and false promises were tactics repeatedly used by the Baath regime throughout its genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds.
When he arrived at the border back from Iran, Karim was captured and forced back into the Iraqi army where he would serve another three years.
“When you have no other options… you have to comply with their orders, otherwise they’ll kill you,” he said.
Karim stayed awake for nights on end, filled with sorrow and rage as he had to endure the cruel imposition of fighting for a regime that brutally killed his entire family.
Frustrated, Karim and his friend Azad tried to escape from the military camp, heading towards Saudi Arabia, in September of 1990.
The two walked all night, eventually reaching a building they presumed to be Saudi, but was in fact an Iraqi military post.
“As they [soldiers] came towards us, my friend had the physical stamina, but I do not have the stamina to run because I have been exposed to chemical weapons. I have difficulty breathing after a short walk. He [Azad] ran away and crossed the border, but when he saw I was captured he reluctantly returned, because he knew if he ran away, I would be hanged,” Karim recounted.
Karim and Azad were violently punished, including electrocution, by the Iraqi army and were imprisoned for nearly two months for attempting to desert.
Wishing for death, Karim recalls having a breakdown in front of Lieutenant Abdulsalam, one of the military officers who interrogated him after he was captured and turned out to be a guardian angel in disguise.
“I told him ‘I am tired of you, the Iraqi army, Saddam Hussein, the government, Iraq, everything.’ He told me that ‘This statement will take you right to the grave… You are young. I hope you change this statement because it will ruin your life’.”
Abdulsalam changed the statements of Karim and Azad. He told the investigative board that the two had been looking for the post of a different nearby Iraqi brigade. The statement led to the case being closed and ultimately saved the lives of Karim and Azad.
“He was a good man,” said Karim.
New beginnings
In February 1991, Karim surrendered himself to the US army, who transferred him to Saudi Arabia, where he would remain for the next four years.
He had a strong asylum case and met with American representatives in Saudi Arabia and migrated to the United States in 1995. He moved to Falls Church, Virginia, where he worked as a butcher.
Karim came back to Halabja to get married and start a family in 1999.
He gained US citizenship in 2001, but chose to permanently return to Halabja in 2008. He said he did not want to lose his identity and wanted to raise his children with Kurdish values.
“If I stay in the US for the rest of my life, I would become a citizen of that country, an American citizen. My children would be US-born. My children then would not say that they are a Muslim Kurd from Iraq. They would say ‘I’m an American.’ At that point, I lose my identity. I have lost myself,” he said.
He now lives with his wife and seven children in the house where his grandfather delivered the devastating news of his family’s death to him in 1988.
Traumatized
Similar to thousands of other survivors, Karim still suffers from severe health problems caused by the chemical attack, including irritation in his lungs, leading to coughing and shortness of breath.
His exposure to the gas and all that he endured has also taken a toll on his mental health. He has difficulties sleeping at night and has anger issues.
“I see a lot of things in my dreams. I also abruptly wake up several times at night on a regular basis. Early on in my marriage, my wife used to tell me that she was scared of how I was abruptly waking up at night,” he said.
Karim finds some solace in tending to his modest garden in Halabja with the help of his children.
Between 3,200 and 5,000 people lost their lives in the chemical attack on Halabja, according to a 1992 report by Human Rights Watch. The attack was part of the Anfal campaign, the codename for Hussein’s genocide that killed around 182,000 Kurds.
The Garmiyan phase of the campaign in southern Kurdistan Region began on April 14, 1988, and every year on that date, Kurds commemorate the tragedy of the Anfal genocide.
Video produced by Aland Qaradaxi
