Free Republic

Saddam's nephew finds sanctuary in Syria By Con Coughlin in Baghdad (Filed: 18/05/2003) A leading member of Saddam Hussein's family has been discovered living in Damascus under the protection of the Syrian government after fleeing Iraq last week, The Telegraph can reveal. Fatiq al-Majid, one of Saddam's nephews, entered Syria last Monday after leaving Iraq at the al-Rabie'a checkpoint, which is under the control of American troops. Majid was given a Syrian visa and made his way to Damascus, where he is now living in exile. Majid confirmed his presence in Damascus when contacted by telephone by The Telegraph last...

THE HAGUE,(Reuters) - A Dutch businessman accused of selling chemicals to Iraq knowing Saddam Hussein would use them for poison gas attacks went on trial in the Netherlands on Monday on charges of complicity in war crimes and genocide. Frans van Anraat, 63, is charged with supplying thousands of tonnes of agents for poison gas used by Saddam's military in Iraq's 1980-1988 war against Iran and against its own Kurdish population, including an attack on the town of Halabja in 1988. Prosecutor Fred Teeven told a pre-trial hearing that Van Anraat continued to supply chemicals after the Halabja attack, which...

One of Saddam Hussein's closest aides, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, died of cancer, a website run by members of Iraq's former ruling Baath party says. His death was first announced by the Baath party on Friday, but no details were given then. He had leukaemia. Douri, 63, was the most senior figure in the former regime still at large. The US had offered a $10m reward for information leading to his capture. In recent years he was accused of financing insurgent groups in Iraq. The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says the Americans regarded Douri as their most wanted man, after...

Vienna - Iran, and not Saddam Hussein, was responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites, said a lawyer for the deposed Iraqi dictator in comments published on Tuesday. Issam Ghazzawi, who was part of Saddam's defence team, told the daily Die Presse that "Iran is responsible for the murders of the Kurds" killed by poison gas in 1988. The lawyer was quoted as saying: "Iraq did not possess poison gas at this time." Ghazzawi reportedly said that Iran also was responsible for the mass killings of Shiites who rose against Saddam in 1991. More than...

NOTE: See Kyle's photos in today's print edition. Friends in the USA: These pictures are from a mission to Halabja, Iraq, we took on Feb. 16, 2005. This is where Saddam Hussein gassed his own people in 1988, killing 5,000 men, women and children. The citizens there treated us as heroes. They wanted our autographs and many pictures made with them. I want you to look ... real green grass, real trees and even snow on the mountaintops. This was the prettiest place we have seen in Iraq. It was over a five hour ride each way on the convoy....

<p>A Netherlands court has opened a pretrial hearing in the case of a Dutch businessman charged with complicity in genocide by selling chemical weapons ingredients to ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.</p> <p>Frans van Anraat appeared Friday in a Rotterdam courtroom. The 62-year-old defendant is accused of exporting tons of chemicals that Iraq used to make weapons over a four-year period beginning in 1984.</p>

Sixteen years after the Kurdish town was hit by a poison gas attack, a man alleged to have supplied the chemicals could be brought to justice. By Amanj Khalil in Sulaimaniyah (ICR No. 95, 27-Dec-04) Alwan Ali has daily reminders of the horrific day in 1988 when she lost seven members of her family members following a chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Even now, 16 years on, she still has difficulty breathing and trouble with her eyesight. But for Alwan and thousands of others, closure on the issue could be just around the corner, following the December...

KurdistanObserver.com The Halabja- Falluja Paradox By: Dr. Nazhad Khasraw Hawramany Dec 1, 2004 For an uninformed outsider the names of cities like Halabja and Falluja might be just exotic names for foreign cities like many similar other names all over this planet. For us Kurdistanis and Iraqis, these names have very deep and different meanings, because we are acquainted with the events and stories attached to those cities. It simply tells the story of Kurds and Arabs in Iraq, the story of decades of suffering and genocide on one side and of human cruelty and disregard of human lives on...

On March 16, 1988, 5,000 residents of Halabja, a Kurdish city in eastern Iraq, were killed and 10,000 injured when Saddam Hussein's army attacked with chemical weapons -- perhaps the largest-scale use of such weapons against a civilian population in modern times. That morning, Iraqi Air Force planes bombed the city with a lethal chemical cocktail of mustard gas and sarin, tabun and VX nerve agents. Two days ago, the man accused of overseeing the attack, Gen. Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, appeared before a judicial tribunal in Baghdad. He is likely to go on trial next...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Prosecutors said on Tuesday they will charge a Dutch chemicals dealer as an accomplice to genocide for supplying Saddam Hussein with lethal chemicals used in the 1988 chemical attack on a Kurdish town that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians. Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office said the suspect, who was arrested in Amsterdam on Monday, will face charges ''for violating the laws of war and involvement in genocide.'' Prosecutors said Frans van Anraat, a 62-year-old chemicals dealer, had been a suspect since 1989, when he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the...

Halabja is a name that triggers a variety of emotions in all Kurds. Indeed, it is one word that may best capture the true depth and depravity of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people living within Iraq’s borders. On March 16, 1988, an estimated 5,000 civilians were killed and 10,000 injured when Iraqi air forces attacked Halabja with mustard gas and other chemical weapons. This crime is the most infamous and perhaps the most brutal incident of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to eliminate the Kurdish nation. I awoke at 4:45 AM. While the sky was pitch black, the oppressive...

Voigt on America – September 17, 2004 Saddam Hussein’s Genocidal Campaign against the Kurds Steven T. Voigt, Esq. Recently, I have spent considerable time reading about the horrible crimes committed by Saddam Hussein against his own people. As I study accounts of the years of terror under Saddam’s dictatorship, I am horrified and saddened. Saddam’s reign was terrible. Many people suffered from his evil acts, but the Kurds, a distinct people with their own language and culture who live in northern Iraq, were particularly brutalized. My thoughts and prayers go out to these people. They have lost so much, but...

Dozens of bodies have been discovered in a mass grave near the town of Halabja in northern Iraq, the head of a Kurdish anti-chemical weapons campaign group said on Thursday. The burial site -- crammed with dozens of men, women and children in ragged clothes -- was discovered Tuesday during construction on a road between the villages of Abu Obeida and Djellila, said Aras Abed. Abed himself lost 11 members of his family when ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces dropped chemical bombs on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. "The three common graves at this site near Halabja...

THE men and women of Halabja, the little town on Iraq's northeastern frontier devastated with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's air force, have no doubt what the ex-dictator's fate should be: a fair trial right here, on the very spot where his darkest deed was carried out. Halabja, deep in Iraq's Kurdish enclave, near the mountain border with Iran, was close to the military frontline between the two warring countries when it was attacked on March 16, 1988, by squadrons of Iraqi fighter jets. Five thousand of its people died in that bombardment and its aftermath; 10,000 more were wounded....

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Saddam in the dock wows the town he gassedBy Nicholas BirchTHE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished July 6, 2004 HALABJA, Iraq -- Hama Kerim, a 51-year-old notary in this town where Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds to death in 1988, describes seeing the deposed dictator in a courtroom last week as the second-best day of his life.     "Nothing can beat the sight of Saddam being dragged out of his hole by U.S. troops" in December, he said in an interview yesterday.     Mr. Kerim described the carnival atmosphere that descended on the town when the trial began last week. Despite warnings...

Iraqi scarred by gas attacks would like to host `Chemical Ali' trialBY MARK MCDONALDKnight Ridder Newspapers HALABJA, Iraq - (KRT) - Nobody's sure what kind of nerve gas was in that first bomb, the one that flattened the House of Charity mosque. It collapsed the dome and toppled the minaret, and within minutes hundreds of townspeople were twitching and blistering to death in the dust of Mokhtar Street.Some 5,000 people - more than half of them children - were doomed to die in Halabja on that warm Wednesday morning on March 16, 1988. On that day, Saddam Hussein's air...

Lakhdar Brahimi is United Nations Special envoy in Iraq. He is an Arab chauvinist and anti-Semitic. He was pro-Saddam when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Algeria from 1991 to 1993 and Under-Secretary-General of the League of Arab States from 1984 to 1991. Not only did Brahimi endorse Saddam Hussein and remain a close ally to him, he also denied that Saddam Hussein, the glory of Arab Leader as he described him, had ever used chemical weapons. Brahimi announced on French radio that "The great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed...

The legacy of a mass murderer.A field outside Baghdad THE DEAD DON'T TALK in Iraq but their graves do. In northern Iraq, a grave was unearthed last July with several thousand bodies, mostly women and children. From the bullet holes in the top of the skulls, it was clear the deaths weren't natural. The victims had been shot from above while kneeling or after being forced into a mass grave. They had personal household items with them like baskets. They had their clothes on. These were clues that helped identify their hometown and led to the conclusion they'd been compelled...

<p>IN Iraq on Good Friday, I thought of the film "The Passion." I am a Christian. The film brought me close to tears. But not for quite the reason Mel Gibson intended.</p> <p>Watching the grotesque suffering on the screen, my thoughts were less of Christ than of what human beings do to one another. I didn't really see the Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago. I saw Auschwitz, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Gulag . . .</p>

Sixteen years ago today, 5,000 innocent Iraqi civilians perished under a barrage of mustard gas; nerve agents sarin, tabun and VX; and possibly cyanide. The brutal attack, launched by their own government, earned Saddam Hussein the dubious distinction of becoming the first world leader in modern times to have used chemical weapons on his own people. The victims of the attack were residents of Halabja, 150 miles northeast of Baghdad and just south of the Iranian border. Three-quarters of them were women and children. The chemical attacks on what has come to be known as "Bloody Friday" were the most...