Halabja : 35 years later!
Time flies. It wasn't yesterday, but I still remember the first I heard the news on shortwave radio.
Saddam had used chemical weapons again, but this time targeting civilians in IrQi Kurdistan.
Reports were mentioning some horrifying scenes of people lying dead on the allys and pathways, door fronts or in their homes.
US and UK did everything in their power to prevent the UN to condemn the Saddam regime and put the blame first on Iran, then under pressure, changing the UN resolution to condemn both sides using chemical weapons.
Even 10 years later, long after operation Desert Storm and massive bombing campaign that followed, the no fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan and occasional bombing of Saddam military operating there, a team of reporters from American TV channel CBS went to visit the place.
The 60 minutes team visited Halabja, met with the locals and went to see the graves. The people were desperate, 100s of people were still suffering from the aftermath of the chemical attacks. Without any help, they were suffering and dying.
Even the ground water was contaminated, partially because of the clean up operation, but also from the corps of the victims leaking deadly chemicals into the ground water that people used for drinking and farming.
The short 20 minutes or so that the CBS team used in their broadcast went missing during the lies of post 9/11, when suddenly US started to scare the world of the danger of Saddam with his WMDs and Collin Powell went to the UN and showed the world what he claimed being enough Anthrax to kill thousands of people in the most horrifying way.
What they didn't say was that Powell was one of Reagan's men working with Saddam's army to coordinate their attacks against Iranian and Kurdish forces. He was probably aware of fhd usage of a cocktail of chemical weapons given to Saddam by German chemical companies, with the help of French and Italian scientist and American helicopters and Soviet chemical bomb canisters. But Powell didn't say anything about those, he was quiet for 15 years and never ever told anyone how much help and Support Saddam received from Americans, French and Britta to fight the barbarian army of Iranians. Because after all Iran was the enemy, not Saddam.
35 years have past, none of those who provided those deadly weapons to Saddam were prosecuted nor named or shamed.
Saddam is gone, and once again, Iran is the target of the US and the memory of those victims of chemical attacks against Halbja and over 30 Iranian sites that no one even care to remember, are all gone.
US is now the savior of the free world, standing up alongside other NATO nations against the new enemy from the east, Putin and his friends Lukashenko and Reisi with the hint of help from China.
America is the source of good, and only grumpy old men like me remember the dirty history of men who are acting like they are the moral guardians of our world.
And for people of Halabja, no one really cares.
#Halabja #ChemicalAttacks #Hisgory #Iraq #Saddam #Reagan #Iran #PersianGulf #NeverForget #NeverForgive
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