Halabja: never again
The Joint Committee on Kurdistan
The Kurdish Observer
"Like figures unearthed at Pompeii, the victims of Halabja were killed so quickly that their corpses remained in suspended animation. There was the plump baby whose face, frozen in a scream, stuck out from under the protective arm of a man, away from the open door of a house that he never reached.
Nearby, a family of five who had been sitting in their garden eating lunch were cut down - the killer gas not even sparing the family cat or the birds in the tree, which littered the well-kept lawn.
The Iraqi bombers first struck last Wednesday, dropping the chemical agents relentlessly and leaving behind the groans of the mustard gas victims, the trail of refugees and the haunting wax work figures frozen by cyanide vapour.
Halabja was once a prosperous market town surrounded by green pasture on the shore of Dar Bandikhan lake, overlooked on three sides by the snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan."
The Times - Tuesday March 22 1988 | 
