OSAM ALTAEE

The old Kurdish woman

I have 5 Aunts and 3 Uncles they loved me very much. I was very attached to them I liked to go to their houses very much, they all lived in the same city. The husband of one of my Aunts husband was like a Mayor of the city. This meant he was some one who was well known to all the residents of the city and the local administration of the government. So he represented a link between the government and people of the city. He had the authority to sign legal papers for many proposes for local people, like if they needed legal assistance with the government, or for occasions like marriage, registering new births, and evidence of residency, this sort of work.

One day I was at my grandfather’s house on my summer holidays, I heard that there was an old Kurdish woman at my aunt’s house. So I went to see her. I had never before seen a Kurdish person because I live in the south of Iraq and they live in the north. She was old woman, hardly speaking any Arabic. I learnt that our army had destroyed her house, her village, killed all the males of her family and took her with other females to cities in the south of Iraq. They put her in my Aunties house until they found her another place somewhere else.

She told us every thing that happened there and for that I hated our army. As I grew older I found out more and more of what was happening to the younger women of the Kurdish villages, they were being brought south like the old lady and men were taking them sometimes for white slavery, occasionally for marriage, but always because they wanted to make use of them. These women had no say in their lives and could be forced to do anything. Like this Saddam kept the Kurds in order, by the threat of this cruelty and humiliation. This practice carried on right until Saddam was overthrown. We do not know what has happened to all these poor women.

So the world was watching while Saddam was committing atrocities in the Kurdish villages, you could switch on a TV anywhere in the world and see innocent men, women, children, babies and old people dead in the street, the places deathly quiet. Now what did the powerful nations of the world do? nothing, they did nothing at all. But I knew about these things, and I was determined that I would never be a part of things such as this.

Bloody Friday
Chemical massacre of the Kurds by the Iraqi regime

Halabja-March 1988

Halabja: Symbol of Hussein's Inhumanity

In 1988, Halabja, with a population of about 80,000, was a battlefield in the Iran-Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had started in 1980. Just before March 16, local Kurds and Iranian Revolutionary Guards had passed through the city.

Local officials and the Iranians would not let people leave the city. They figured there was no military use to the city and that Iraq would not bomb a population center.

They were wrong.

Iraqi forces shelled the city, and aircraft dropped conventional bombs there. On March 16, the chemical weapons attacks began.

Eight Iraqi aircraft began dropping chemical bombs over the city, Kurdish officials said later. The chemical bombardment continued all night with flights of seven or eight aircraft releasing weapons on the city and roads leading out of it. The attacks continued through March 19.

"In the streets and alleys of Halabja, corpses piled up over one another," according to information on the Kurdistan Democratic Party–Iraq Web page: "Tens of children, while playing in front of the their houses in the morning, were martyred instantly…. The innocent children did not even have time to run back home. Some children fell down at the threshold of the door of their houses and never rose again."

Before the attack on Halabja, Saddam Hussein launched chemical strikes on 20 small villages in 1987. But the scale of the attack on Halabja was unlike anything that happened before.

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