Photo by Taton Moïse on Unsplash
“Bombs could fall anywhere, any time of the day.
They were a nuisance we got used to. In our
dug-out shelters we felt safe, until that haunting
winter twilight when the muffled explosions
deceived us. We came out thinking we’d survived
the bombs but a chalky-yellow powder settled
on our skin, smelling of sweet apples at first,
seemed safe to breathe in. People were going crazy -
laughing, buckling at the knees, twisting, running
to the water source, blinded bumping into trees.
Villagers from the region came to our aid. They said
my son looked strange, as if his eye color had split
out, his face was blistered, blackened. He groaned
like a calf faced with the knife. I was still blind when he
died, could not see him, did not say goodbye.”
The chemical attack at Halabja is a chilling moment in Middle Eastern history. 5,000 Kurdish civilians were casualties in this chemical bombing carried out by the Iraqi regime during the First Persian Gulf War. By this point, the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein had become second-nature as had the Western powers inclination to ignore the atrocities of Baghdad's chemical weapons program. The First Persian Gulf War, the longest conflict in the 20th century, a largely forgotten war in the collective memory of the Western public and which spanned 1980 to 1988 was a time where the West’s hyper-realist Cold War politics and its alliance with Saddam Hussein trumped human rights and the need to clamp down on the use of chemical weapons in warfare.
The condemnation of Assad’s chemical attacks in Ghouta, Douma and Idlib is urgently required in the wake of these horrifying war crimes. The rightful emphasis on the need to uphold human rights is absolutely critical lest military actors conduct atrocities with impunity. However, the calls for regime change and rightly punishing President Bashar Assad regime for utilising chemical warfare stands in stark contrast to the startling silence which accompanied the murderous deployment of chemical weapons by Saddam (our ally during the Iran-Iraq War) for years against Iranian and Kurdish civilians and soldiers.
In parallel to the war of aggression against Iran, Saddam launched Operation Anfal (The Spoils of War). The campaigns from 1986-1989 were characterised by mass summary executions and a mass disappearance of many tens of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages; en-masse deportations; the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers upon the demolition of their homes; and, perhaps most notoriously, the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, against the town of Halabja as well as dozens of Kurdish villages, killing many thousands of people, mainly women and children.
Declassified CIA documents detailing the tacit support for Saddam's atrocities were released during the aftermath of the Ghouta chemical attacks in Syria conducted on 21 August 2013 and shed light on the Western powers own twisted history in the multi-generational conflict for the Greater Middle East.
In the wake of the Idlib chemical attack on 4th April 2017 and a devastating attack in Douma on 7th April 2018, revisiting Saddam's use of chemical weapons is harrowing. The former Iraqi president's use of chemical weapons and the atrocities committed by the Iraqi military during the 1980s dwarfed the alleged chemical attacks of President Al-Asad. Western actors, states and corporations who made a profit from selling chemical materials and weapons have yet to be held to account for supporting the most devastating chemical attacks in history and Saddam's Chemical Weapons Program.
The CIA estimated that Iran suffered more than 50,000 casualties from Iraq's use of several chemical weapons, though current estimates suggest 100,000 perished. 250 Kurdish towns and villages were exposed to chemical weapons. 3,500 - 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children were killed and a further 7000-10,000 were wounded at Halabja. The numbers should not distract from the severity of the incidents in Syria as every life lost in war is a tragedy. However, the numbers churned out by Saddam Hussein's military machine tower over the numbers killed by chemical weapons in Syria.
Not including the thousands who died in the years after, The 5,000 dead at Halabja represented the deadliest deployment of chemical weapons in modern history. The Western powers did nothing to prevent these atrocities, nor were there any repercussions for Saddam and his regime, that is until Baghdad threatened oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in 1991 (three years after the Halabja chemical attack).
It was only after the Second Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991, once Saddam no longer suited Western security-economic interests, once Western and regional leaders realised the damage of arming such a volatile wildcard in the pursuit of short-term agendas, that the bombings began, the demonisation in mainstream media began, the sanctions (which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) began, that successive U.S administrations began to suddenly care about Iraqi men, women and children's human rights (as demonstrated by our detention centres/torture chambers in Iraq, our brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq, and the U.S - British invasion which acted as a catalyst for the spread of Salafi-jihadist terror groups across the Middle East).
The frequent revolts by Kurdish, Sunnis and Shiites alike, which culminated in the genocidal slaughter of the Al-Anfal campaign and the butchering of 150,000 Iraqis (predominantly Shiite) in 1991 following the First Gulf War, serve as a reminder of Saddam's chilling record. Saddam cruelty and his wars of aggression in Kuwait (1990) and Iran (1980 - 1988) made him numerous enemies at a regional and international level. These military defeats were married to botched government policies in the 1990s to secure the loyalty of rural areas at the expense of the urban classes produced socio-economic ruin, a black market economy, and rampant unemployment.
Saddam's carefully constructed tribal relationships and networks of patronage ensured the concentration of political and economic power. It is fair to argue that Saddam's Iraq would have descended into civil war if his regime had existed following the Arab Spring. While Blair and Bush's dire policies shaped the conflicted post-2003 Iraq of today, Saddam's 'U-turns, blunders and megalomanic whimsies...wreaked havoc on the region and the world, but above all on Iraq itself.' Saddam's legacy remains potent and powerful and his impact upon Iraq's diverse communities both harrowing and profound, much like Bashar's legacy will likely impact Syria in the decades to come. Nonetheless, while Saddam's removal was entirely welcome on humanitarian grounds, the decision of Blair and Bush to invade without an effective strategy and initiate military operations unsuited for sustained and savage guerrilla and urban combat was fool-hardy.
Bashar Assad and President Vladimir Putin, like multiple actors, have committed horrendous crimes in the Syrian War. They are primarily responsible for Syria's descent into chaos. Yet they are not the only ones responsible for the country's collapse. To ignore the Western powers and its regional allies agendas in the region and simply look through the lens of human rights and liberal values without considering other narratives and different perspectives is inviting tragedy.
Assad’s Douma, Ghouta and Idlib chemical attacks must be condemned, however, the Western powers historic and contemporary claims to support human rights in the Middle East must be treated with the utmost scepticism. The Western powers have turned a blindeye crimes equal in their horror to those conducted by Bashar Assad. Our policymaking in the First Persian Gulf War and our alliance with Saddam Hussein was perhaps the most grotesque example of this. President Assad's regime, the Kremlin's client, has without a doubt committed atrocities and war crimes in the Syrian War.
Saddam and 'Chemical' Ali eventually faced justice for their murderous policies, and Bashar al-Assad will eventually meet justice for his crimes, the question should remain: where were the missiles and air-strikes against Saddam when he was murdering tens of thousands of men, women and children with chemical weapons and conducting genocide? Where now are the air-strikes and missiles targeting Saudi Arabia for using cluster bombs (illegal under international law) and pushing Yemen towards famine? Where is the condemnation for Israeli Defence Forces shooting down dozens of unarmed protestors in Gaza with sniper-fire and shell-fire?
The Western powers turned a blind eye to the genocidal Al-Anfal campaign and over thirty chemical attacks against Iranian civilians, including medical facilities and hospitals. The historical amnesia in the upper echelons of power across Western capitals, no doubt motivated by geo-politics and strategic manoeuvring, reeks of political opportunism absent concrete solutions for the Syrian War.