Halabcheh is a city in Iraq’ s Sulaymaniyah Governorate that was chemically bombed by the Ba’ athist government during the imposed war.

Halabcheh is one of the cities of Iraqi Kurdistan, 10– 15 kilometers from the Iranian border, near Paveh and Marivan and 225 kilometers northeast of Baghdad.⁠[1] Lake Darbandikhan lies southeast of the city; the town of Khormal is to its northeast, and Dujailah is five kilometers northwest of it. The latter had previously been a military area.

During the imposed war, the villages of this region were destroyed as a result of Saddam’ s policy of restricting the activities of Kurds opposed to his government. With a population of about 60,000, Halabcheh was a center of activity for opponents of the Ba’ athist government, particularly the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Jalal Talabani, and Islamic forces supportive of Iran.

From mid-1987, Iran conducted operations on the northwestern front. A series of operations— Karbala-10, Fath-5, Nasr-4, 7 and 8, Beit-ol-Moqaddas-2 and 3, and finally Operation Valfajr-10— were carried out along the Mawat axis in Iraqi Kurdistan.⁠[2] The Kurds opposed to Saddam cooperated with Iran in Operation Valfajr-10, whose objective was the capture of Halabcheh, Dujailah, and Khormal.⁠[3] Iran captured seven border villages and 30 square kilometers of Sulaymaniyah Governorate and advanced toward Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq, capturing the Darbandikhan water reservoir (dam). This reservoir supplied hydroelectric power to most of northeastern Iraq and Baghdad.

On 13 March 1988, Iranian forces, with the assistance of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces, captured Halabcheh. The Iranian operation took place while Saddam’ s government, under the command of Ali Hassan al-Majid, had been attempting since early that year to suppress the Kurds opposed to the regime and had called its attacks on defenseless people and their plunder the Anfal operation.⁠[4]

To compensate for its inability to confront Iran and the people of the region, Iraq attacked Halabcheh with chemical bombs from noon on 15 March 1988.⁠[5] Fifty Iraqi aircraft, each carrying four 500-kilogram chemical bombs, attacked the city.⁠[6] Initial estimates put the number killed in Halabcheh and the surrounding areas at 4,000 to 5,000, and because of chemical contamination, burial of the bodies took three to four weeks.⁠[7]

Following this brutal action, a large number of Iraqi Kurds fled to Iran; 30,000 people were settled in Kermanshah and Kurdistan Provinces, 6,000 in Kerman, and others in camps in other cities.⁠[8] One month earlier, 5,000 residents of villages around Sulaymaniyah had also been forced to leave their homes because of Iraq’ s extensive chemical bombardments and entered Iran through the Sardasht and Baneh border areas, settling in camps in Kurdistan and Bakhtaran (Kermanshah) Provinces.⁠[9]

After news of this human catastrophe was released, Iranian commanders mobilized their resources to treat the injured and transfer residents to safe areas. Chemical-defense teams also established several emergency units to prevent an increase in casualties. Using the transport capabilities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Army Aviation helicopters, and vehicles from Iran’ s border provinces,⁠[10] the people were transferred to safe locations inside Iran.⁠[11]

From 21 March 1988, Iran sought to draw the attention of international forums and organizations to this humanitarian catastrophe. Correspondence between Iranian officials and their counterparts in various countries, as well as the dispatch of footage of the Halabcheh chemical bombardment, helped publicize the catastrophe, while Iran simultaneously called for international assistance in treating the chemical casualties.⁠[12] From 20 March 1988, at the invitation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the first group of foreign media reporters arrived in the region to broadcast images of the Halabcheh bombardment and the scattered bodies of residents in the cities, villages, and surrounding heights.⁠[13] The broadcast of the scenes by television networks in many countries, publication of reporters’ photographs and accounts, and the dispatch of some chemical casualties to several European, Asian, and American countries quickly turned the massacre of the people of the Halabcheh plain into the world’ s leading news story. Several medical teams from different countries traveled to Iran, and medical and pharmaceutical assistance was sent to Iran by some international organizations, including the Red Cross and Mé decins Sans Frontiè res, as well as by several countries. The Islamic Republic’ s success in attracting world public attention led, for the first time, to the UN Secretary-General, the European Parliament, the European Economic Community, and many governments condemning Saddam’ s government and representatives of the UN Secretary-General being sent to Iran to investigate the use of chemical weapons.⁠[14]

On 9 May 1988, UN Security Council Resolution 612 was unanimously adopted. The resolution expressed concern over and condemned the use of chemical weapons by both countries and called on the parties to the conflict to refrain from using such weapons. However, the resolution did not identify Iraq as the user of chemical weapons; rather, Iran was implicitly accused of using them.⁠[15] The reason for the accusation was reportedly that in some areas wind had carried chemical gases used against Iranian forces toward the Iraqis, causing minor injuries to some of them. The Ba’ athist government had presented these cases in the media as evidence of Iran’ s use of chemical weapons.

The international dimensions of the Halabcheh catastrophe were overshadowed and forgotten because of subsequent events and developments in the war, until, following the US military attack on Iraq and the collapse of the Ba’ athist government in 2003, the perpetrators of the Anfal operations and the chemical bombardment of Halabcheh were tried. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’ s cousin and the principal perpetrator of the chemical attacks, was sentenced to death; Saddam was also one of the defendants in the case and was executed on 30 December 2006 before the Anfal court issued its verdict, on charges of killing Iraqi Shiites.⁠[16]

After the chemical bombardment, Halabcheh was depopulated because of severe contamination. Its residents rebuilt the city three kilometers from the site of the incident and named the new city New Halabcheh, while the bombed city, which is now uninhabited, was called Old Halabcheh.⁠[17]