What Happened at Halabja?
The only verified Kurdish civilian deaths from chemical weapons occurred in the Iraqi village of Halabja, near the Iran border, where at least several hundred people died from gas poisoning in mid-March, 1988. We know that Iran overran the village and its small garrison of Iraqi troops; what is contested is who was responsible for the deaths–Iran or Iraq–and how large the death toll was. The best evidence is a 1990 report by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. [2] It concluded that Iran, not Iraq, was the culprit in Halabja. Lead author Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, has described his group’s findings: “The great majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their extremities. That means that they were killed by a blood agent, probably either cyanogen chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity to produce these c
