What happened in Kurdish Halabja?

[CHIMO]

The truth of what happened in Halabja had always been hidden from the public, and many who knew exactly what happened in this Kurdish village in the second half of March 1988 disputed the western media coverage of the story.

It is a fact that key Kurdish leaders aided by the CIA and the Israeli Mossad have used a wide network of public relations companies and media outlets in the west to manipulate and twist the truth of what happened in Kurdish Halabja in 1988 in favour of the Kurdish political parties.

In 1993, an organisation was established in Israel called The Kurdish Israeli Friendship League founded by a Jewish Kurd called Moti Zaken, who originally immigrated from Zakho, Iraq, and worked closely with the American Zionist lobby in the US.

"And it is an especially crucial issue right now. We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world should not tolerate him. But why? Because that is the last argument the US has for going to war with Iraq."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/ECD352BE-6B8F-449F-8F97-C7AB0DC08A94.htm

[Warpy]

1. Most of the sites you find with Google are Kurdish sites

and they all blame Saddam Hussein. However, the Iraqi forces were known to use mostly mustard gas, and the corpses lacked the blistering around eyes, noses, and mouths that one would effect to find with that agent, along with the telltale drools of blood from damaged lung tissue. They did present with the cyanosis you'd expect from Iranian cyanide gas, though.

What we do know for certain is that both sides were in the area, both sides had been using poison gas, and that Halabja had changed hands several times during the immediate period. The fighting was centered around that town, and it was intense, with both sides throwing everything they had.

The reason poison gas has largely been abandoned as a battlefield weapon is that you never know where it is going to drift, and it's been known to drift back toward your own forces. This may be part of what happened to Halabja; or neither side may have trusted the villagers and thought they had been aiding the enemy and destroyed the village as policy.

The whole truth is probably something that won't surface until all the major players, including the Bush family, are dead and dust.

[jman0]

2. War College report link here (pdf file)

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/appb.pdf

Several years ago i was in a debate at the old CNN message boards and i found this report on the us marine corp website. It's been moved and a bit surpressed since.
Anway i brought up this report, done by the Boston War College as a US source that contradicts the conventional thinkning that Iraq gassed the Kurds (Halabja) and there were 5000 dead.
If you read the report i linked, it states that Iran is suspected of this, because Iraq didn't have those chemicals, and also states that 5000 dead is unlikely.

But anway one of the posters at the CNN Iraq board took it upon himself and was able to contact one of the authors of the report, wondering if he changed his mind about it since UN weapons inspections learned more about Iraqi CW programs, but the author stated that he stood by his report, that Iran probably gassed the Kurds at Halabja, not Iraq. The author didn't believe the Iranian's necessarilly gassed non-combatants intentionally.



EDIT: See page 2 of the pdf file, 3rd paragraph

[0007]

3. ...and the U.S. blames Saddam?

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/ECD352BE-6B8F-449F-8F97-C7AB0DC08A94.htm

According to the War College reconstruction of events, Iran struck first taking control of the village. The Iraqis counter-attacked using mustard gas. The Iranians then attacked again, this time using a "blood agent" - cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide - and re-took the town, which Iran then held for several months.

Having control of the village and its grisly dead, Iran blamed the gas deaths on the Iraqis, and the allegations of Iraqi genocide took root via a credulous international press and, a little later, cynical promotion of the allegations for political purposes by the US state department and Senate.

Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, closely studied evidences of "genocide in Halabja" has described his group's findings:

"The great majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their extremities. That means that they were killed by a blood agent, probably either cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity to produce these chemicals. But the Iranians did deploy them. Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds."

Pelletiere's report also said that international relief organisations that examined the Kurdish refugees in Turkey failed to discover any gassing victims.

After 15 years of support to the allegations of HRW, the CIA finally admitted in its report published in October 2003 that only mustard gas and a nerve agent was used by Iraq.

The CIA now seems to be fully supporting the US Army War College report of April 1990, as a cyanide-based blood agent that Iraq never had, and not mustard gas or a nerve agent, killed the Kurds who died at Halabja and which concludes that the Iranians perpetrated that attack as a media war tactic.

Despite the doubt cast by many professionals as well as the CIA's recent report, and after years of public relations propaganda made for the Kurdish leaderships by the assistance and support of the Israeli Mossad, the issue of genocide has been marketed to the international community.

In a telephone interview with the Village Voice in 2002, Stephen Pelletiere said: "There is to this day the belief - and I'm not the only one who holds it - that things did not happen in Halabja the way Goldberg wrote it.

"And it is an especially crucial issue right now. We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world should not tolerate him. But why? Because that is the last argument the US has for going to war with Iraq."

Professor Mohammed al-Obaidi is the spokesman for the People's Struggle Movement (Al-Kifah al-Shabi) in Iraq, and works as a university professor in the UK. He was born and educated in al-Adhamiyah district in Baghdad. He is writing a book about Halabja.

[Djinn]

4. Given the US's reaction at the time

and their refusal to denounce Saddam I still think was was his doing, otherwise the official line would have just been "the evil Iranians did it" instead of "shh don't mention it and quickly send over some more chem's"

[MADem]

5. Any gas that was delivered

...was delivered by helicopter. Who made the helos? Bell Helicopter International, Inc, headquartered in the great state of Texas. How did the Iraqis get the helos? Foreign military sales...a lot of the leftovers that were originally intended for the deposed Shah.

Back then, we were all about keeping Iran in check, and Saddam was OUR boy to do that. Now, he's persona non grata, but back then, he was "our thug" and we were happy to let him do his dirty work, and who knows, we might well have suggested courses of action to him.

And we could have given two shits about the Kurds. We would have sacrificed every last one of them to keep Iran contained in the post-Shah environment.

[jman0]

6. someone should post a poll

Asking DUer's if they believe Saddam gassed the Kurds (when people say that, they are generally refering to Halabja).
I suspect that people here believe it.