Muhannad Mahmoud Shawqi
In the collective memory of peoples, there are moments when cities transcend their geography and become enduring symbols—bearing witness to the cruelty of history and testing the conscience of humanity. The Kurdish city of Halabja stands as one of the most painful of such moments in the modern history of the Middle East; a moment in which spring mingled with the scent of death, and within a few hours, the city’s sky was transformed into the stage of a crime that shook the world, yet remained in Kurdish memory as an open wound that has never healed.
On the morning of March 16, 1988, as the Iran–Iraq War was nearing its final stages, vast areas of Iraqi Kurdistan had become battlefields between the Iraqi army, Iranian forces, and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. In those days, the city of Halabja had fallen out of Iraqi army control after Iranian forces entered it as part of a military operation known as “Operation Zafar-10” in March 1988. This development prompted the Iraqi leadership to make a retaliatory military decision against the city and its civilian population.
The tragedy began with intensive aerial and artillery bombardment, followed by waves of chemical attacks. Military studies and survivor testimonies indicate the use of a mixture of toxic gases, including mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin and tabun—substances that cause paralysis of the nervous system and suffocation within minutes. Survivors described those moments as filled with a smell resembling rotten apples, before people collapsed motionless in streets, homes, and gardens.
The attack on March 16, 1988, resulted in the deaths of approximately five thousand civilians within a matter of hours, while more than ten thousand others suffered severe injuries, suffocation, and chemical burns. The consequences of the crime did not end there; suffering persisted for many years due to cancers, congenital deformities, and respiratory diseases that affected thousands of survivors.
However, the tragedy of Halabja was not an isolated incident in the troubled history of relations between the Iraqi state and the Kurdish people. Rather, it came as the culmination of a long series of repressive policies practiced against the Kurds over decades. Since the 1960s, Kurdistan regions witnessed repeated waves of forced displacement and village destruction, particularly during the conflict between the Iraqi government and the Kurdish movement led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani between 1961 and 1975. Following the Algiers Agreement of 1975 between Iraq and Iran, the Kurdish revolution collapsed at that time, paving the way for more hardline policies by the Iraqi authorities.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, these policies took on a more systematic character through forced Arabization programs in areas such as Kirkuk, Khanaqin, and the Nineveh Plain. Thousands of Kurdish families were displaced from their lands and replaced by Arab families as part of a demographic plan aimed at altering the population composition of oil-rich regions. Human rights reports indicate that thousands of Kurdish villages were completely destroyed during those years, while their inhabitants were forced to relocate to collective settlements or to other parts of Iraq.
Within this context came the Anfal campaign, carried out between 1987 and 1988 under the leadership of Ali Hassan al-Majid, later regarded as one of the bloodiest military campaigns in modern Iraqi history. According to reports by Human Rights Watch, the campaign resulted in the killing of approximately 180,000 Kurds and the destruction of more than four thousand villages in the Kurdistan Region, in addition to the arrest of tens of thousands and the disappearance of many in prisons and detention centers.
Although the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 opened a new political chapter in Iraq, culminating in the adoption of the Iraqi Constitution in 2005, which recognized the Kurdistan Region as a federal entity, relations between Baghdad and Erbil have remained marked by recurring political and economic tensions. Among the most prominent of these are disputes over the management of oil and gas and the distribution of financial revenues, issues addressed in Articles 111 and 112 of the Iraqi Constitution.
In recent years, these disputes have intensified through financial decisions that have directly affected the region’s population, particularly regarding delays or cuts in the Kurdistan Region’s share of the federal budget and public sector salaries. Many Kurdish leaders have viewed these measures as a form of economic pressure or financial blockade, while the federal government maintains that they are tied to legal disagreements over oil management and revenues. This crisis has recurred since 2014, following the suspension of the region’s oil exports through Baghdad, and escalated sharply after the Kurdistan independence referendum in 2017 and the subsequent political and economic measures taken by both sides.
Nevertheless, the memory of Halabja remains more than a historical incident; it represents a symbol of the suffering of an entire people across multiple phases of political and military conflict. The image of a father embracing his child in one of the city’s streets after the chemical attack has become one of the most powerful human images in the history of modern warfare, bearing witness to a tragedy that was not merely a military event, but a crime against humanity.
Today, decades after that catastrophe, Halabja stands as a rebuilt city that still carries in its collective memory the scars of those dark days. Each year, on March 16, Kurds commemorate the anniversary not only to mourn, but to affirm that memory is not merely a recollection of the past—it is also a continuous call to protect humanity from the recurrence of such crimes.
Halabja, with all the pain and history it embodies, reminds the world that peoples may be targeted by force, but they are not defeated as long as they preserve their memory. Cities whose voices were once choked by gas can, over time, transform into moral voices calling for justice and dignity.
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