Posted on 03/17/2003 8:29:22 PM PST by ganeshpuri89
By Anthony Loyd
After Saddam Hussein's notorious chemical gas attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja in 1988, Mahmoud Fatah didn't know if his family was alive or dead. Our reporter tells the extraordinary story of his quest to find them.
THERE WERE FEW second chances in Halabja. The very word has become synonymous with the worst excesses of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime, and a justification for the imminent invasion of Iraq. Whole families died in each other’s arms on March 16, 1988, in the worst documented chemical attack since the Second World War, succumbing to a combination of blistering and blood and nerve agents that seeped through the city’s shattered streets after a devastating seven-hour air and artillery bombardment on the Kurdish populace. Once they lost consciousness, few of the victims who became separated from their families in the carnage of fire, rubble and swirling chemical mists saw each other again. Blinded parents forced to abandon children choking on pulmonary fluid; cellars clogged with contorted bodies; black skin, blisters and bleeding eyes: the accounts of survivors, even 15 years later, are so appalling that after a short time you block out the details and merely nod dumbly at the rhythm of their words.
This is the story of a 56-year-old man whom I met on Sunday afternoon, sitting by a grave in a cemetery in the city. He had two sick young women with him, and most of his family are dead. But it is the story of a second chance. It is unusual, and about as happy a story as there is in Halabja.
MARCH 16, 1988: THERE WERE more than 150 Kurds jammed together in Faiq Arif’s capacious cellar in the Kani Ashqan quarter of Halabja. A rich man, Arif and his extended family, friends and neighbours had all sought shelter in his basement just after the first Iraqi airstrikes began at 11.15am. Among them was Mahmoud Fatah, a bulldozer driver and former guerrilla fighter. With him were his mother Rana, sister Shamsa, wife Galawezh, and his children; sons Shivan, 5, and Kurdawan, 4; and daughters Mardin, 7, and two-year old Azhin.
A day earlier, in one of the last advances of the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian Revolutionary Guard units had entered the Kurdish city. It is cupped to the north, east and south by gentle green foothills that rise suddenly to the snow-capped mountain border with Iran, and flanked to the west by a lush alluvial plain. Halabja’s 70,000 Kurdish population initially rejoiced at the Iranians’ arrival, though the fighters included wild-eyed teenagers, heavily indoctrinated and armed only with clubs and knives.
Since the previous year the Kurds had suffered heavily in Saddam Hussein’s infamous al-anfal operations against Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas. Thousands were already dead or missing as the Iraqi Army ravaged its way through separatist Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. Most Kurds hated the Baathist forces, and many had actively colluded with the Iranians in the eight years of the Iran-Iraq conflict. However, in Halabja there was little time for “liberation” celebrations; the late-morning airstrikes of March 16 sent people scurrying for cover. “We must have been in the cellar for about six hours,” Mahmoud recalls. “The bombardment outside was very heavy. Then, just after 5.30pm, some people in the cellar began to notice a strange smell. I couldn’t smell anything, but I took my daughter Azhin in my arms and went out to see what was its cause, telling the others to remain.”
In the streets Mahmoud saw hundreds of people running, others staggering and falling. There was total panic, and shouts to evacuate above the cacophany of screaming. Parts of the city were on fire, and flames licked high into the fading light of dusk. Mahmoud saw one of his brothers among the scrum, handed little Azhin to him and ran back to the cellar for the rest of his family.
He had been outside for little more than 15 minutes, but as he walked down the cellar steps he noticed that the darkness was completely silent. There was not a murmur. A breeze had blown a bank of gas down the cellar steps. “The smell of gas was thick in the dark,” he says. “All 150 people were silent, many already dead, though some were moving. I was scrambling over bodies trying to find my family.”
Lighting a match, he found his mother. “She was unconscious, and there was saliva pouring from her mouth. I started to panic. I was trying to find my wife and children but my vision began to fail. Water started coming out of my nose, and my throat was closing.” Mahmoud fled alone, blundering up the steps and collapsing unconscious in a street. Waking hours later to the sense of a cool breeze, he realised that he was totally blind. He staggered around the empty streets for a while, tripping over bodies, before meeting a child who could still see.
The boy led him by the hand to the hills, from where he was evacuated by Iranian troops to a hospital inside Iran. It was 43 days before Mahmoud’s vision returned. Weeks later he heard that Azhin was still alive. She was still in Iraq, living with his brother near the town of Darband-i-Khan, 38 miles (60 kilometres) southeast of Sulaimaniyah. But the rest of his family — mother, sister, wife, daughter and sons — were missing, apparently dead.
Mahmoud spent the next four years in a constant search through Kurdish refugee camps in Iran hoping to discover them. He found no trace.
ABDUL SOFI MUHAMMAD was a Kurd living in Sanandaj, western Iran. He had a wife and children of his own, but was moved by the plight of a terrified and very sick girl, an orphan from Halabja, whom he saw at an Iranian hospital in his home town. The child was about seven years old and had been blinded in the gas attack. She suffered severe skin blistering and breathing difficulties, together with an almost total amnesia which allowed her to remember nothing but her first name: Mardin. In the summer of 1988 Abdul adopted the child and took her home to his family.
Though later that year her sight returned, the little girl appeared backward and confused. Occasionally she would speak of memories of a house. Rather than awaken her sense of tragedy, Abdul chose instead to tell her that she was his daughter, and that she had been in an accident.
But in 1997 the comfortable charade came to an end. Abdul was arrested by the Iranian authorities and charged with being a member of an Iranian opposition group, a crime punishable by death. In his cell on death row he sat down to write Mardin a letter.
SHIVAN WAS ALIVE: JUST. Very ill, the five-year-old boy was mute. He had no idea who he was, and unlike his sister Mardin could not even remember his name. He regained consciousness in an improvised hospital in Rania, 90 kilometres northwest of Sulaimaniyah.
“Many relatives came to see their children there,” he remembers, “but I had no one. The nurses told me I could not speak because I was so afraid. After some weeks my health improved, though I had blanks in my thoughts and a very bad speech impediment. I was confused and sad that no one was visiting me.”
Shivan absconded from the clinic one day in the summer of 1988, and wandered away to a nearby mosque, confused and looking for his family. He was found by Najmaddin Khidr Sewaddin, who took pity on the boy and brought him home to live with his wife and seven children in Rania.
This family was honest with Shivan, telling him that he was an orphan from Halabja. Since he could remember nothing of his past, not even his name, because of the effects of severe trauma and chemical contamination, they called him Bakhtiar Ali Saleh.
“They loved me as their own son,” Shivan says. “But as time passed I wondered more about my origins and if any of my family could still be alive.” Last year Shivan, by then a 19-year-old labourer, approached a local newspaper in Rania and told them his story.
“I LOVED MY ‘FATHER’ Abdul Safi Muhammad,” Mardin says, “and was very sad after he had been arrested. Then we heard he had been sentenced to death. The family went to the prison in Sanandaj to visit him the day before he was to be executed.”They were forbidden to see the captive. Instead they were permitted an exchange of letters. Abdul’s hastily written words for Mardin were simple and shocking. “He wrote that he loved me as a daughter but that I was not actually his daughter. He said that indeed I was an orphan from Halabja, and that after his death I should return there to see if any of my relatives remained alive. The next day he was hanged.”
Leaving Sanandaj with one of her adopted brothers, Mardin travelled into Iraq to Sulaimaniyah, where she registered herself with a refugee tracing agency. Almost immediately they found a possible trace based on her first name and approximate age.
Mahmoud had ended the lonely quest for his family in Iran, and since 1991 had returned to his home in Halabja, where he was living with Azhin. With the passage of time the father and daughter had given up all hope of finding any other family members alive, and accepted that they were the only survivors.
In April 1997 he was working in a garage when a car pulled up with local staff from the tracing agency inside. There was a young woman with them. As she stepped towards him Mahmoud burst into tears. He recognised the daughter he had given up for dead, last seen in a cellar nine years before.
“He knew immediately that Mardin was his daughter and she that Mahmoud was her father,” remembers Fatima Fatah, 65, who watched the meeting.
“Much of it was silent. Their faces changed colour several times and they were weeping without speaking. It was one of the strongest things I have seen.”
FIVE YEARS LATER there was no similar spontaneous recognition or emotion when Mahmoud and his two daughters saw Shivan. Instead the mood was cold and detached.
“After I had been interviewed by the paper and told them my story, many people from Halabja came to visit me in Rania, hoping I was their lost son,” Shivan says. “It annoyed me after a while. None of them was a relative.”
In Halabja, Mahmoud had seen the story too. In June 2002 he travelled to Rania to visit the young man named Bakhtiar. Mahmoud took Mardin with him, as well as two childhood photos of Shivan, found in the family’s Halabja home long after the chemical attack.
“I felt nothing for him, nor him for me,” Mahmoud remembers of their meeting. The photographs failed to jog any memory in Shivan, and the two men spoke in an awkward, almost hostile, fashion for 40 minutes before parting.
But when he left Rania, Mahmoud took with him an updated photograph of the young man and showed both sets of photos to a physiology expert in Sulaimaniyah. After analysing the faces with a computer, he told Mahmoud there was a 70 per cent chance that Bakhtiar was his son. Two weeks later Bahktiar travelled to Halabja. His memory began to stir. Though there were no precise images in his mind, he was emotionally disturbed by meeting Mahmoud and the two girls again. They left together for Tehran, to visit a genetic clinic in the Iranian capital.
Two genetic samples were taken from each man’s saliva and joint fluid. They also underwent cranial measurements. The results came four hours later. The two men were called into an office. The doctor sitting before them was succinct: “Your test results match. You are father and son.”
“I measure that moment as the happiest in my life,” Mahmoud says. “Shivan and I began to cry. There were people in the hospital stopping what they were doing and coming to look at us. What a moment. What joy. The coldness between us disappeared in an instant. Fourteen years after I lost him, my son returned to me.”
THERE ARE FEW second chances in Halabja, and even fewer happy endings. Shadows from the family’s experience will not go away. I meet Mahmoud beside the grave of his sister and niece. They were the only bodies from the cellar positively indentified. He is sure that his wife Galawezh is dead, but still holds some hope that his missing son Kurdawan, who would now be 19, may have survived and be living in Iran or northern Iraq, ignorant of his past.
And his returned children are sick. Shivan still has blank moments, migraines, slow responses and a damaged respiratory system. Azhin has a permanent cough, while Mardin continues to suffer blistering and bruising.
None is married: all look palid and frail. It is unlikely that any of the family will live to their full life expectancy, and, probably later this week, they face another war.
“But do we care?” Mahmoud asks. “I was lost in Iran for four years believing all but Azhin were dead. Nine years later my other daughter returns to me from the grave: fourteen years later my son. To have lost then found again gives me only delight.”
"In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near."President Bush in his speech tonight
Chemical Ali's Evil Handiwork in Halabja with weapons they DO NOT HAVE [wink, wink] =========
In Halabja, ~238 miles northeast of Baghdad, the grave
of the dead from Saddam Hussein's mustard gas and nerve agents.
5,000 murdered in this attack.
Dead children, previously playing in Halabja
Victims of Saddams' WMD in March 1988.
As for the surviving victims? Whatever strength they have, whatever compassion they find, I hope they find peace in life.
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