In 1988 the Iraqi army launched a ferocious attack on Kurdish communities south of the Turkish border. Fleeing towards Turkey, the villagers of Kureme found their route blocked by Iraqi soldiers and were captured. The male villagers were put in front of a firing squad – yet six survived to tell their story.
Iraqi planes attacked some 70 Kurdish villages with poison gas in the Bahdinan region of Kurdistan, just south of the Turkish border. MOHAMMED ALI AHMED was semi-conscious for days after inhaling the toxic fumes.
After Iraqi jets gassed Kurdish peshmerga strongholds in the Gara mountains, 99 men from Guze village were rounded up and executed. AISHA HAJI SALAM describes how her two sons were taken from her and never seen again.
Peshmerga in the far north of Kurdistan fled with their families towards Iran to escape poison gas attacks. When his leader Masoud Barzani told him it was impossible to send support units, commander AMIN HUSSEIN AHMED realised there was no escape.
The Iraqi military launched poison gas attacks south of the Turkish border to crush the peshmerga army of Masoud Barzani. AHMED KHALID AHMED witnessed the first chemical attack in Bahdinan. He describes the panic that swept through the village.
Yazidis who fought the government of Saddam Hussein were shown no mercy. ALI HAWER BAKO, a communist peshmerga, lost 27 of his extended family in the 1980s after they surrendered to the authorities.
When clouds of poison gas drifted across the Gara mountains families from Guze village were driven to acts of desperation to survive. Numb with exhaustion and despair, SALEEM HASSAN SALEEM was prepared to abandon his baby child in an icy river.
When the Iraqis gassed villages just south of the Turkish border, close-knit Kurdish communities fragmented. SHUKRI HASI ABDULLAH, who was from Guze village in the Gara mountains, says it was everyone for himself.
