In the long shadow of Halabja
A report from Pugwash Iraq’s first international conference Thirty-seven years ago, on 16 March 1988, Iraq’s military forces hit the Kurdish town of Halabja with artillery rockets and napalm bombs, followed by sustained bombing runs releasing chemical weapons. Between three and five thousand people perished, and many thousands more suffered life-altering injuries. Almost all civilians, an estimated three-quarters of them women and children. Genetic defects resulting from their exposure to mustard and nerve agents meant that even today, their offspring too have inherited these chromosomal anomalies, making them transgenerational victims of chemical warfare. To remember the massacre, Pugwash Iraq organised …