Halabja

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time. Jeff and I have both been to Halabja a few times and got some great pictures. It is a village a couple hours away from us that is infamous for the terrible atrocity that happened there on March 16, 1988. The 21st anniversary just happened last month and it was all the television stations were covering. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Chemical weapons (CW) were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, killing thousands of people, most of them civilians (3,200-5,000 dead on the spot and 7,000-10,000 injured[1]). Thousands more died of horrific complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.[2]

The incident, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) defined as an act of genocide, was as of 2008 the largest-scale chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history."

The story we've heard here is that Sadaam flew a plane over the city and released an apple smelling gas over the city which caused people to come out of their homes and breathe in deeply because it smelled good. While people were out of their homes he flew a second plane over and released a chemical weapon that instantly killed thousands and wounded thousands more. The pictures we've seen of the destruction, which I will not post here but you can google the images, are so horrific.

This is a graveyard in Halabja. The number of lines on the stones tell you the number of bodies buried in that grave. Most families were buried together.


This is the largest mass grave in the area. They recently uncovered another mass grave that had several thousand bodies in it.


This is a close up of the headstone.


Halabja is also the birthplace of Klash, the shoes that we have been selling here to help fund heart surgeries.

Before we got involved with PLC, I didn't know much about the Kurds and I certainly had never heard about all of the terrible crimes that were committed against them in the 80's. It's not pretty, but I think it is important for everyone to know about the Kurds and about their history. They are some pretty incredible people, at least we think so! Our next door neighbor has been making bland Kurdish food for me since she found out I was pregnant and keeps bringing food to us. She calls me her daughter and is always wanting to take care of us.