Lmst

On #ThisDayInHistory in 1988, the Iraqi state and #ChemicalAli used #MustardGas to kill 5,000 #Kurds in #Halabja as a part of the #AlAnfal campaign of #KurdishGenocide. Over 100,000 were killed and 80% of the settlements in #IraqiKurdistan were destroyed by the #Baathist régime.

#Gaza has several villages that have seen an #Oradour-sur-glane, several villages that have seen a #Meensel-Kiezegem, several #Halabja, ... all types of war atrocities humanity has seen in the past 85 years, and what happens to health- and aid-workers has never been seen in human history before.
Western nations could have prevented this from happening, but they chose complicity in the #genocide .
#Israel
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241213-the-plan-is-just-to-kill-personal-testimonies-of-israels-genocide-in-gaza/

Wczoraj miała miejsce 36 rocznica największego ataku z użyciem gazu bojowego od czasów I Wojny Światowej.

Nie był on przeprowadzony na cele wojskowe, a na ludność cywilną, a dokładnie Kurdów zamieszkujących Halabdżę, miasto w Irackim Kurdystanie.

Ataku dokonała armia iracka z rozkazu Saddama Hussaina, który chciał zdusić kurdyjski ruch niepodległościowy.

Zginąć mogło nawet 5,000 osób, a drugie tyle zostało rannych.

Na zdjęciu, mieszkańcy Syryjskiego Kurdystanu, Rożawy, oddają hołd zamordowanym.

#Halabja #IraqiKurdistan

March 16 is a painful anniversary for the Kurds
The memory of the killing of 5000 children, a woman, an old man and a man without a right
The memory of killing those innocent lives with cold blood.

١٦ اذار ذكرى مؤلمة للكورد
ذكرى قتل ٥٠٠٠ طفل وامراة وعجوز ورجل بدون حق
ذكرى قتل تلك ارواح البريئة بدم بارد.

#AlanMiste #AlanMistê
#Halabja #Helebce #halabça
#حلبجة #مجزرة_حلبحة

#Helebce
#Halabja

Read more about Erdogans alleged use of chemical weapons here👇🏻
https://medyanews.net/enlisting-meps-in-call-to-investigate-chemical-weapons/
RT @nvillumsen: Never again, #Halabja. 35 year ago Saddam killed 5.000 Kurds in a chemical attack.

Yesterday Xoşnav Ata visited the European Parliament to call for an independant OPCW investigation into the killing of his two nieces and 109 other kurds allegedly by chemical weapons by Erdogan.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/nvillumsen/status/1636450128511811584

Never again, #Halabja. 35 year ago Saddam killed 5.000 Kurds in a chemical attack.

Yesterday Xoşnav Ata visited the European Parliament to call for an independant OPCW investigation into the killing of his two nieces and 109 other kurds allegedly by chemical weapons by Erdogan.

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/nvillumsen/status/1636422797458063377

"Giftgasanschlag gegen #Kurden – Völkermord mit deutscher Beihilfe in Halabja?"

"Am 16. März 1988 ließ Saddam #Hussein die kurdische Stadt #Halabja im Nordirak mit Giftgas bombardieren. Innerhalb weniger Stunden sterben 5.000 Menschen, Zehntausende werden verwundet."

https://www.swr.de/swr2/wissen/der-giftgasangriff-auf-halabja-voelkermord-mit-deutscher-beihilfe-100.html

We start the days of action against the use of chemical weapons, mourning the dead of the #Halabja massacre, where Saddam Hussein murdered thousands of people with german-made poisonous gas.
#DefendKurdistan #WeSeeYourCrimes

Heute vor genau 35 Jahren wurden 5000 Kurd:innen in #Halabja durch ein Giftgasangriff der irakischen Armee ermordet. Die deutschen Firmen, die für die irakische Giftgasproduktion mitverantwortlich waren, blieben straffrei.

Vor 35 Jahren wurden etwa 5000 Kurd"innen - Männer, Frauen, Kinder - in #Halabja im Irak eiskalt mit Giftgas ermordet.
Dabei auf Saddam zu zeigen ist verlockend, doch etwas zu einfach... Auch deutsche Firmen und der BND hatten die Finger im Spiel.
https://www.medico.de/halabdscha-14658

Beim Giftgasangriff Saddam Husseins auf das kurdische #Halabja wurden Tausende ermordet. Offene Wunden und die Erinnerung an dieses Leid blieben bis heute, 35 Jahre später. Dieses Verbrechen lehrt: Menschenrechtsverletzungen der Diktatoren dürfen nicht ungesühnt bleiben. 🙏

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/cem_oezdemir/status/1636255528098709505

[#Halabja thread 16/16]

I conclude here with a powerful response to Edward Said’s Halabja denial by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist and founder of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, also published in the London Review of Books in 1991 (as a response to Said): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/edward-said/edward-said-an-american-and-an-arab-writes-on-the-eve-of-the-iraqi-soviet-peace-talks

Letters
Vol. 13 No. 7 • 4 April 199I
It is a great pity that Edward Said tarnishes his excellent article about the criminal folly of Desert Storm (LRB, 7 March) by mentioning the unsustainable claim that the gassing of the Kurdish civilian population of Halabjah in March 1988, in which some five to six thousand people died, was an Iranian rather than an Iragi atrocity. This piece of disinformation was propagated by the Pentagon at a time when the US was massively supporting Irag in its war with Iran, a policy continued, as Said points out, until 2 August last year, and reflected, as I write, in the current paradoxical US attempts to preserve Saddam Hussein against the less palatable alternative forces fighting against him in Basra and Kurdistan.
I had the opportunity, in the aftermath of Halabjah, to interview a number of the Kurdish survivors, who had been flown by the Iranians to London for treatment. Their

accounts of what had taken place were clear and consistent: the chemical weapons had been delivered by Iragi Sukhoi 22 fighter-bombers. The survivors I saw were all extensively burned by mustard gas, for which the Iragis had a production plant at Samara.
The same plant manufactured the nerve gas which was almost certainly responsible for most of the deaths at Halabjah. The US defence analysts who disputed this did so on the extraordinary and unsustainable grounds that the Halabiah deaths were caused by blood gases (cyanide) and that Irag did not possess such weapons. Their version of events is refuted not only by my own observations but by the UN investigators, by the UK pathologist who saw victims in Tehran not long after the gassing occurred, and by the team from the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights who interviewed Kurdish refugees in eastern Turkey.
Halabjah represented a turning-point in the history of warfare as significant as
Hiroshima. It was the first time that chemical weapons had been used on such a scale against a defenceless population and the first

against a defenceless population and the first time that nerve gas had ever been used. It was a clear breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological weapons (to which Irag had been one of the early signatories). That Irag was allowed by its Western backers to get away with such an atrocity has undoubtedly compromised subsequent attempts to demilitarise in the Middle East or to negotiate an effective new chemical weapons treaty at Geneva. That Iraq's chemical weapons capability was provided by Western European technical support, and that the US turned a blind eye to its use, contributes one more twist to the spiral of disaster which led the world into Desert Storm and which that savage campaign has merely added to. But in condemning Western imperialist goals in that war, there is no need to try to wash the bloody stains from the Iragi dictator's record.
Steven Rose
Open University, Milton Keynes

[#Halabja thread 15/16]

Remember the people of Halabja today. Remember the #Kurds, #Assyrians, and #Yazidis who were murdered and displaced during the Anfal #genocide. Spare a thought for others whose oppression is being exploited to justify Western warmaking and continues unabated.

For more on all of the above, see this book by Joost Hiltermann: https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Poisonous_Affair.html?id=5JGldonhk6wC

[#Halabja thread 14/16]

Those who are caught between genocidal regimes and western imperialists are starved for solidarity. Their plight is either weaponized by warmongers who don’t actually care if they die, or ignored. Or worse, they’re mocked as State Department stooges or imperial propagandists—a smear that originates in easily ignored ideological margins, but permeates into activism, journalism, and academia more than you might think. The people of Halabja—& so many others—deserve better.

[#Halabja thread 13/16]

Bringing up a young Twitter rando’s thread might seem odd, but its content is salient. The claim that “Halabja was a tragic but defensive move by Iraq” is the more “respectable,” less conspiratorial version of Halabja denialism—one that muddies the waters rather than constructing a dubious alternative theory that Iran did it.

Don’t believe me? Here it is in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 2007: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276361?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

A screencap of the JSTOR abstract of the article described and linked above. The article is titled “US lying about Halabja: justifying the invasion of Iraq” by Sharat G. Lin in the journal Economic and Political Weekly.

[#Halabja thread 12/16]

The second person deleted the thread after pushback (and they IDed as a minor in their bio at the time so I’ve redacted the screencap), but it hinged on a claim that the Anfal campaigns were justified because they happened amid a defensive war. The liberal application of the concept of “manufactured consent”—so often a starting point for genocide denial—is familiar.

[#Halabja thread 11/16]

Now, as it is, those folks are too opportunistic to know anything about Halabja, so they don’t talk about it (also, since the alternative is usually blaming it on Iran, it doesn’t fit their rigid framework and doesn’t serve them). But once in a while you get takes like this:

#Halabja

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