Tehran – On March 16, 1988, the town of Halabja in northern Iraq experienced an unspeakable horror. It was the day when Saddam Hussein unleashed the most deadly chemical attacks in history on his own people. A conflict has been spurred by Western support.
Many Western companies were subsequently charged in various courts for supplying the Baasist regime with deadly agents used in brutal campaigns.
At the time, the town was ruled by fighters from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) which had an alliance with Iran against Saddam’s Baasist regime. As a result, the attack regime framed the event as a traditional assault targeting Iranian rebels.
Subsequent UN investigations concluded that mustard gas and other unidentified nerve agents had been deployed against civilians. The US Defense Agency initially attributed the attack to Iran in support of its allies in Baghdad. However, growing evidence revealed that Iraq has used chemical weapons to intensify military attacks on Iran, rival Kurdish fighters and Halabja civilians.
On June 20, 2010, Baghdad’s highest Iraqi Criminal Court recognized the chemical bombardment of Halabja as an act of genocide, rather than a mere crime against humanity. Saddam’s defense minister Ali Hussein Majid, known as the infamous “chemical ali”, others were found guilty of orders and coordination of gas attacks, killing more than 5,000 civilians and injured another about 10,000.
Kurdish historians argue that the Arab League convened a meeting a week after the tragedy, but deliberately ignored the event, possibly because they feared retaliation from the Saddam regime and its Western supporters.
The role of Western companies in genocide
After the tragedy, especially after the Saddam regime was overthrown, the courts were held in the Iraqi Kurdistan region where Western companies were discovered to play a central role in enabling genocide campaigns.
It was clear that Saddam Hussein had ordered genocide, but he did not do it alone. Saddam was given the consent and willingness to support hundreds of hundreds of the largest companies in Europe, some of whom deliberately chose to benefit from the murder and long-term suffering of innocent children and families. In fact, the Bath regime in Iraq has acquired the ability to produce gas and chemical bombs with the help of Western countries.
German multinational company TUI AG was one of those European companies. Other German companies involved in the supply of the Ba’athist regime were Karl Kolb Gmbh & Co. It was KG Scientific Technical Supplies. Another company that made money from Genocide was Hebergerbau AG in Germany.
There were other companies from France, the Netherlands, Canada, the Soviet Union, the United States, and several other Western countries involved in providing the highest concentrations of deadly substances ever used to civilians.
Double Standards for Western Provinces
Several studies show that Iran was attacked 387 times with chemical bombs, missiles and artillery shells when Iraq imposed war between 1980 and 1988. Over 1,000 tons of sulfur mustard gas was used by the Baasist regime against Iranian forces and unarmed people. On June 28, 1987, Iraqi fighters dropped a mustard gas bomb in rural areas of Saldasht County, Iran, in western Azerbaijan. Two separate bombings in four residential areas killed 130 people and injured as many as 8,000.
It was Iran that played a major role in bringing tragedy into the spotlight. Crossing the border, Iranian troops went to Halabja to support civilians there. All still-existing video footage and photographs of the massacre handed over to the court were filmed by journalists who were accompanying Iranian forces in a hurry to help suffering civilians on the other side of the border.
Iran’s Islamic Republic played a major role in compiling evidence on genocide and warning the world of the dangers of chemical weapons. Iran also contributed to the signing of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Treaty, which banned the use of chemical weapons, and to ban the large-scale development, production, stockpiling or movement of chemical weapons or their precursors.
As the main victim of the Saddam regime’s chemical artillery bombardment imposed during the war, Iran has constantly criticised the Western government for its duplication in dealing with weapons of mass destruction.
The West shamefully targeted poor Iraqi people with enormous sanctions following the Saddam administration’s invasion of Kuwait. The United States and its allies starved Iraqi people for about 13 years before overthrowing the Saddam administration and occupying the country in 2003.
The same western state shamelessly imposed inhuman sanctions on Iranian states based on allegations of human rights abuses and for its peaceful nuclear programmes and defensive missiles.
Furthermore, the western provinces, particularly Germany and France, protect against infamous anti-Iranian terrorist groups, such as the Mohahedin organization of Iranian people, also known as MKOs or MEKs, with thousands of innocent Iranian blood.
It is also worth mentioning that despite all claims about defending human rights, the US and its western allies are embarrassingly targeting the livelihood and health of ordinary Iranians through medical and food sanctions.