On March 16, 1988, the small Kurdish town of Halabja became the site of one of the deadliest chemical weapons attacks in history. In less than an hour, Iraqi aircraft dropped bombs filled with sarin nerve gas and mustard gas over the civilian population. When the clouds cleared, approximately 5,000 people lay dead or dying in the streets.

The Anfal Campaign

Halabja did not occur in isolation. It was part of the Anfal campaign—a systematic assault on Iraqi Kurdish communities that lasted from February to September 1988. The campaign was ostensibly a military operation against Kurdish guerrillas who had sided with Iran during the war. In reality, it was a campaign of genocide targeting the civilian Kurdish population.

The term 'Anfal' comes from the eighth chapter of the Quran, a chapter dealing with the spoils of war. Iraqi officials applied the term with grotesque irony to what was essentially a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Over the course of eight months, an estimated 150,000 to 180,000 Kurdish civilians were killed.

The Chemical Attack

Halabja, located near the Iranian border, had been under the control of Kurdish peshmerga fighters allied with Iran. When Iranian forces briefly entered the town as part of their own offensive, Iraqi command made the decision to use chemical weapons. The attack was not a spontaneous act by a rogue commander—it was a deliberate policy decision, approved at the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

Survivors and eyewitness accounts describe the horror. The gas clouds moved slowly over the town, turning the sky brown and red. People in the streets collapsed within minutes. Those indoors died as the gas seeped through windows and doors. Families found death together in their homes. The fields outside the town were strewn with the bodies of residents who had tried to flee.

The medical toll was immediate and catastrophic. A Kurdish doctor who treated survivors described patients with lungs filled with fluid, bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and writhing in agony as their nervous systems were attacked by nerve gas. Many of those who initially survived died in the hours and days that followed.

The World's Silence

One of the most striking aspects of the Halabja attack was the international response—or rather, the lack of it. The United States, which was aligned with Iraq in the war against Iran, downplayed the chemical attack. Some American officials even suggested that Iran, not Iraq, might have been responsible. This false narrative persisted for months.

The UN condemned the use of chemical weapons in general terms but took no action specifically against Iraq. France, Germany, and other nations that had supplied Iraq with chemical weapons precursors said nothing. The world's silence was deafening.

This silence sent a message: there would be no international consequences for using chemical weapons on civilians. It was a message that Saddam would remember, and that would haunt the Middle East for decades to come.

The Precedent

Halabja established a precedent that would reverberate through modern history. It demonstrated that a state could use weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population and escape international punishment. It showed that chemical weapons could be deployed not just tactically but strategically, as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

For the Kurds, Halabja became a symbol of betrayal—by the international community, by Iran (whose invasion of Iraqi territory had drawn the retaliatory chemical attack), and by the great powers that had enabled Iraq's chemical weapons program in the first place.

The survivors of Halabja carried lifelong injuries. Many suffered from chronic respiratory problems, cancer, and psychological trauma. Children born to mothers exposed to the gas had higher rates of birth defects. The chemical attack's legacy extended across generations.

Halabja was not an aberration in the Iran-Iraq War; it was the culmination of the war's logic. When the international community tolerated Iraqi chemical weapons use, when the US tilted toward Iraq, when the world treated the war as a regional conflict of little consequence to global order, it created the conditions for escalation. Halabja was the endpoint of that escalation.