"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 UK and USA have been arming and supporting Iraq during its war with Iran. Between 1985 and 1989, private companies from the USA had exported the following biological agents to Iraq after obtaining licenses from the USA Department of Commerce:
Other exports had included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, production facilities and equipment for filling warheads with chemicals. During the 1990s United Nations inspectors would find and remove these substances from Iraq while USA president Bill Clinton would criticise Iraq for "developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons".
Shortly after the gas attack, the USA increases its economic ties to Iraq.
One month after the attack, the UK offers Iraq over $400 million in export credits (underwritten by UK tax payers) to buy machine tools. The machine tools are sent secretly to Iraq via Jordan by the UK company, Matrix Churchill. Another company, Astra, supplies $150 million worth of propellant. These deals had been negotiated with the full knowledge of the UK government which had not informed the UK Parliament. Some deals had been negotiated personally by the UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. An enquiry by Lord Justice Scott concludes that "ministers had deliberately misled Parliament, but had not intended to mislead Parliament."
The gassing of the Kurds is hardly reported in Western media. In 2003, when the USA and UK want to change the Iraqi regime, photographs of the gassed Kurds are published in several newspapers in the UK and the event is discussed in the USA without mentioning USA involvement.
 |
| Iraq uses poison gas on Halabja, a Kurdish village, killing 6,000 men, women and children. At the time Iraq was a USA client state. Between 1985 and 1989, private companies from the USA had exported biological agents to Iraq after obtaining licenses from the USA Department of Commerce (including Bacillus anthracis, the cause of the often fatal disease, anthrax and Histoplasma capsulatum, a disease that attacks lungs, brain, heart and spinal chord). Other exports had included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, production facilities and equipment for filling warheads with chemicals. |
