Remembrance and reconciliation

Iraq | Arabs, Kurds come together over a brutal moment in Saddam's regime | Edward Lee Pitts

HALABJA, Iraq – Baghdad powerbrokers struggled last week to hammer out a new constitutional government, but outside the capital, the country’s ethnic leaders bridged a longstanding political divide—at the site of the largest chemical-weapons attack in modern history.

Arab and Kurdish leaders from eastern Diyala province, long struggling to rule an ethnically diverse area near the Iranian border, together traveled to Kurdistan where Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons 17 years ago. The attack on Halabja—now installed in the annals of WMD history—killed more than 5,000 and wounded more than 10,000.

The 20 Iraqis, split evenly among Arabs and Kurds, drove to the site April 22 with several U.S. humvees in tow as security. Halabja is a shell of its former self, but many residents still remember the day in 1988 when Saddam’s Air Force, then in its eighth year fighting the Iran-Iraq War, dropped napalm on the city. Residents fled to their cellars, expecting aerial bombardments. Instead paper fell from the aircraft (testing wind direction and speed) before a sulfur-sweet smell enveloped its 80,000 inhabitants. Halabja survivors said they first smelled apples in the air, or garlic, or rotten eggs. Within minutes their animals—first birds, then livestock—were dead and many people were blind, some for good. It was the beginning of a six-week campaign of poison-gas attacks in the region that today has left thousands of Iraqi Kurds incapacitated.