'Never going to happen again'

International | IRAQ: The highest-ranking U.S. official to visit postwar Iraq, Powell also gets a firsthand glimpse of Saddam's prewar terror—and promises to work to keep history from repeating | Priya Abraham

Pelair Shukri's eyesight grows dimmer every year. He's 53, but the decline isn't middle-age farsightedness. Chemicals from a 1988 mustard-gas attack are burning through the cells in his eyeballs. About 100,000 Kurds died when Saddam Hussein trained his chemical weapons on them for supposedly aiding the enemy during the Iran-Iraq war. Mr. Shukri was one of the fortunate ones. He survived.

From his Michigan home he watched television images of Secretary of State Colin Powell standing over a mass grave in the border village of Halabja, where 5,000 Kurds died from the attacks. Mr. Shukri was 40 miles away when bombs also dropped on his unit of 700 Kurdish fighters.

Mr. Powell is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since major combat ended in May, and the first secretary of state in the country in 50 years. His two-day trip took him from Baghdad to the northern city of Kirkuk before stopping in Halabja, where the leaders of the Kurds' two main parties and Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer joined him at the graveside ceremony. "What I can tell you," Mr. Powell told family members of the victims, "is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again."