March 16, 1988—a day when the very air turned against its people. In the Kurdish town of Halabja, nestled in the mountains of northern Iraq, an unthinkable horror unfolded. It was not war in the traditional sense, not a clash of armies on some far-off battlefield. This was something altogether more sinister. This was the moment when a government, in a deliberate act of malice, poisoned its own people.
The backdrop was the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War, a conflict that had already claimed countless lives and devastated entire regions. As Kurdish Peshmerga fighters allied themselves with Iran, the regime of Saddam Hussein sought retribution in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The decision was made: Halabja would be annihilated—not with bullets, not with bombs, but with invisible, insidious death.
It began in the early afternoon. Iraqi aircraft soared overhead, and at first, the attack seemed routine—a series of conventional airstrikes. But then came something different. A strange mix of white, black, and yellow smoke spread across the town, creeping into homes, clinging to clothing, curling through streets like a ghostly shroud. The scent in the air was sweet, sickly, almost fruity—an unsettling hallmark of certain chemical agents. And then, the dying began.
Five thousand people perished almost instantly. Men, women, children—their lives extinguished in moments. Some dropped where they stood, frozen in time as though death had struck mid-step. Others convulsed, gasping for breath as the lethal cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents ravaged their bodies. Ten thousand more were injured, many left with lifelong scars—physical, mental, generational.
It was a crime of almost unimaginable cruelty. Yet it was not random. This was part of something far larger: the Anfal campaign, Saddam Hussein’s brutal attempt to eradicate Kurdish resistance once and for all. Halabja was simply the most infamous act in a systematic slaughter that saw over 100,000 Kurdish men, women, and children massacred, entire villages wiped from the map.
And what of the world’s response? At the time, it was muted at best, shamefully indifferent at worst. There were political calculations to be made, alliances to be protected, excuses to be whispered. It would take years for the truth to be fully acknowledged, for justice to even be contemplated. But history remembers.
Today, as we mark another year since that terrible day, we remember the lives lost, the families shattered, the generations altered forever. We reflect on the resilience of the Kurdish people, who endured the unthinkable and still stand. And we remind ourselves—forcefully, urgently—that such horrors must never, ever be allowed to happen again.
