Sardasht is a city in West Azerbaijan Province that was bombed repeatedly during the Iran-Iraq War. The most significant attack came on June 28, 1987, when the city was hit with chemical weapons.

Sardasht is one of the counties of West Azerbaijan Province in northwestern Iran. It borders Piranshahr to the north, Mahabad to the northwest, Bukan to the east, Kurdistan Province to the south, and Iraq to the west, sitting 30 kilometers from the Iraqi border.⁠[1] The people of Sardasht are Sunni Shafiei Muslims and speak Sorani Kurdish with a Mokriani dialect.⁠[2]

According to the 2016 census, the county’ s population stands at 118,849.⁠[3]

Before Islam, Sardasht was located on the northwestern side of the present-day city, beside a natural spring, and was known for a time as “ Neyuzehro”. It had solid walls and towers, traces of which can still be found. Local folklore holds that Sardasht was the birthplace of the Prophet Zoroaster (pbuh), and that the city’ s name itself derives from “ Zoroaster”, later changed to Sardasht following the Arab conquest of Iran.⁠[4]

Because of its long-shared border with the Ottoman Empire in earlier centuries, Sardasht served as an entry point for invading forces or those fleeing the Ottoman and Iraqi governments. World War I was one of the darkest chapters in the city’ s modern history, when a large number of Sardasht’ s residents were massacred by forces from both the Allied and Central powers.⁠[5]

After the victory of the Islamic Revolution, several opposition political parties began pushing for Kurdish autonomy and tried to assert control over Kurdish cities and regions.⁠[6]

Sardasht’ s proximity to Iraq and its forested surroundings gave separatist and anti-revolutionary groups, particularly the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and Komala, a convenient base of operations. They established political offices, prisons, and affiliated centers in the area, including in the Alwatan forests and the Dolatu region. On August 24, 1979, they attacked the Sardasht Gendarmerie Regiment, seized the border garrison, and looted its equipment.⁠[7]

Following Imam Khomeini’ s order on August 18, 1979, to liberate Kurdish cities, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Army, and Basij forces entered Sardasht on September 6 of that year under the command of Mostafa Chamran, then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. They managed to disarm the city and restore a degree of calm.

On October 7, 1979, fighting broke out again. A group of IRGC members travelling toward Kermanshah to rotate shifts walked into an anti-revolutionary ambush. Thirty were martyred, eight survived, and the rest went missing. It was widely reported that the garrison commander at the time had betrayed them, refusing to provide an escort or send reinforcements.⁠[8]

As the situation in Sardasht deteriorated, a special delegation from the provisional government met in November 1979 with anti-revolutionary leaders in a village near the city. The talks reached no agreement, and two days later, the opposition forces attacked the city garrison again, reigniting the conflict.⁠[9] Ali Sayyad Shirazi, then commander of western operations, and Mostafa Chamran subsequently led numerous operations in an effort to liberate the city.⁠[10]

Despite those efforts, Sardasht remained under anti-revolutionary siege until May 1982, largely due to the policies of then-President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and sustained pressure from opposition groups.⁠[11] In May 1982, an operation to open the Baneh– Sardasht Road was carried out, and after three years, the city’ s siege was broken.⁠[12]

Before Iraq’ s full-scale invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, it had already bombed the Sardasht border area twice — once on June 4, 1979, and again on July 9, 1980.⁠[13] During the war itself, Iraqi aircraft bombed Sardasht 73 times, and Iraqi artillery shelled the city on numerous other occasions.⁠[14]

In May 1981, the Iraqi army, in coordination with the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, bombed the Dolatu Prison, located in the village of Dolatu in the northwest of Sardasht, along the Iraqi border. The Democratic Party had been holding around 280 detainees there for months, including IRGC members, Basij fighters, Army and Gendarmerie personnel, Kurdish Peshmerga, and political opponents. The joint strike led to the martyrdom of 80 prisoners and the injuries to more than 100 others.⁠[15]

After Sardasht was freed from separatist control, the next phases involved opening road access to other cities and then clearing the surrounding heights and in-between areas. To achieve these goals and counter Iraqi aggression, a series of operations were carried out in the Sardasht region throughout the Iran-Iraq War,⁠[16] including the liberation of Rabat township in September 1982 (15 kilometers from Sardasht on the road to Mahabad),⁠[17] Operation Jahad in June 1983 in western Sardasht,⁠[18] Operation Shahid Ahmad Safarzadeh in April 1984 in the Malkari forest area between Sardasht and Mahabad,⁠[19] Operation Nasr 5 in June 1987 in the southwest of Sardasht,⁠[20] and Operation Nasr 7 in July 1987, 12 kilometers south of the city.⁠[21]

The chemical bombing of Sardasht stands as one of the most devastating events of the entire war. On June 28, 1987, the Baathist regime sent six military aircraft to strike the city with mustard gas bombs, hitting four densely populated areas inside the city and two points on its outskirts.⁠[22] It was the first time since World War II that a residential city had been subjected to a chemical attack. IRGC units, the Army, government agencies, and medical centers were wholly unprepared for what had happened, and treating the wounded became a real challenge. More than 100 residents of Sardasht were martyred, and hundreds more were injured.⁠[23]

In 2002, the indifference of international organizations and human rights bodies led to the founding of an NGO called the “ Association for the Defense of the Rights of Sardasht’ s Chemical Victims”. The organization worked to document the stories of victims and survivors in hopes of bringing global attention to the tragedy.⁠[24]

On June 28, 2005 — the anniversary of the attack — one of the city’ s streets was named after Hiroshima in memory of the atomic bombing. Shortly after, as a gesture of solidarity, the Japanese named one of Hiroshima’ s streets after Sardasht.⁠[25] Over the course of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, 658 people from this county were martyred.⁠[26] A memorial to the martyrs of the Sardasht chemical bombing stands at the city’ s entrance.