When and where does A lost son returns to Iraq killing fields (AP)?”
HALABJA, Iraq – Six families nervously awaited the DNA tests on the young man who returned from Iran. They wondered: Could this be their son who was just an infant in 1988 and somehow lived through a deadly chemical attack by Saddam Hussein’s regime? There was absolute silence as the judge announced the lab results. The man, who called himself Ali, was deemed to be the sole surviving child of 58-year-old Fatima Mohammed Salih, who had lost her husband and all her other six children in the poison gas clouds that covered the mostly Kurdish city of Halabja. For the first time in more than two decades, they embraced. “I’m in a dream,” said 21-year-old Ali Pour as he comforted the weeping woman. The reunion Friday in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region was the rarest of artifacts from Halabja: a moment of joy from the day the city became an open cemetery for an estimated 5,600 people killed when lethal gas was dropped by Saddam’s military. It was part of Saddam’s brutal 1987-88 campaign to crush
