Kaveh golestan halabja massacre

1988 chemical attack in Iraqi Kurdistan

The Halabja massacre (Kurdish: کیمیابارانی ھەڵەبجەKêmyabarana Helebce) took place in Iraqi Kurdistan on 16 March 1988, when thousands of Kurds were killed by a large-scale Iraqi chemical attack. A targeted attack in Halabja, it was carried out during the Anfal campaign, which was led by Iraqi military officer Ali Hassan al-Majid. Two days before the attack, the city had been captured by Iran as part of Operation Zafar 7 of the Iran–Iraq War. Following the incident, the United Nations launched an investigation and concluded that mustard gas and other unidentified nerve agents had been used against Kurdish civilians. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency initially blamed Iran for the attack, though the majority of evidence later revealed that Iraq had used the chemical weapons to bolster an ongoing military offensive against Iran, pro-Iranian Kurdish fighters, and ordinary Halabja residents.

To date, the Halabja massacre remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated region in human history, killing between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injuring 7,000 to 10,000 more. Preliminary results from surveys of the affected areas showed increased rates of cancer and birth defects in the years since the attack took place.

In 2010, the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal officially defined the Halabja chemical attack as a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people during the time of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. That same year, it was also formally condemned by the Parliament of Canada, which classified it as a crime against humanity. Al-Majid, who was captured during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was put on trial and found guilty of ordering the attack; he was

At the tender age of 13, Jassem Ghazbanpour began photographing the daily life of people in the province of Khuzestan, in southwest Iran. By 16, he was recording images in the field for the Iranian forces during the Iran–Iraq war of 1980-88. His home city, the inland port of Khorramshahr, lay only ten miles from the besieged city of Abadan. Ghazbanpour covered the gruesome aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attack on Halabja, Iraq. He went on to document the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan.

His photographs were published in Time magazine and other international publications; they captured war’s hard living, from fighters on the move to survival in underground bunkers. As a member of Iran’s Arab minority, Ghazbanpour had access other photographers lacked. He remained a freelancer, thereby safeguarding his independence. He belongs to the generation of Iranian war photographers who followed in the footsteps of iconic black and white photographer Kaveh Golestan (1950–2003).

Ghazbanpour never left war reporting, but he began to narrate it in different ways, by following families or by documenting the writing and graffiti on walls, especially in Khorramshahr. He brought that same intimacy and storytelling to the photographs of home life in Iran.

L'atac químic a Halabja (en kurd: Kîmyabarana Helebce کیمیابارانی ھەڵەبجە), també conegut com la Massacre de Halabja o Divendres Sagnant, va ser una massacre contra el poble kurd el 16 de març de 1988, els darrers dies de la guerra Iran-Iraq, a la ciutat kurda de Halabja, a l'Iraq. L'atac va ser part de la campanya d'Al-Anfal, al nord d'Iraq, així com un intent de repelir l'operació Zafar 7. Va tenir lloc 48 hores després de la caiguda de la ciutat en mans de l'exèrcit iranià. Una investigació mèdica de les Nacions Unides (ONU) va concloure que es va utilitzar gas mostassa, juntament altres agents nerviosos no identificats.

Entre 3.200 i 5.000 persones van ser assassinades i entre 7.000 i 10.000 més van resultar ferides de gravetat, la majoria civils. Els resultats preliminars de les enquestes a la regió afectada van mostrar un augment de la taxa de càncer i malalties congènites en els anys posteriors a l'atac. L'atac va ser definit per l'Alt Tribunal Penal Iraquià com una massacre genocida contra el poble kurd a l'Iraq, essent l'atac amb armes químics més gran perpetrat contra població civil de la història.

L'atac de Halabja ha estat reconegut com un esdeveniment diferent del Genocidi Anfal dirigit contra el poble kurd pel règim de Saddam Hussein. L'Alt Tribunal Penal Iraquià va reconèixer la massacre de Halabja com un acte de genocidi l'1 de març de 2010, una decisió aplaudida pel Govern Regional del Kurdistan. L'atac també va ser condemnat com un delicte contra la humanitat pel Parlament de Canadà. El 2010, l'oficial iraquià Ali Hassan al-Majid va ser declarat culpable d'ordenar l'atac i va ser sentenciat a mort.

Antecedents

La regió kurda de l'iraq (al nord del país) va ser una zona de batalles importants durant primera etapa de la guerra entre l'Iran i l'Iraq, amb les milícies del Partit Democràtic del Kurdista

I was at a Holiday Inn just off a Los Angeles highway when the Gulf War started.

We were on holiday in the US for the first time, and I was looking forward to everything that a nine-year-old who lived in Sweden dreamt of: Disneyland, seeing Kindergarten Cop before any of my friends, a pair of Levi 501s. But as soon as the first cruise missiles had landed in western Iraq, visible to us through green-hued night vision footage, we spent most of that holiday at the hotel glued to CNN’s 24hr broadcast.

It wasn’t the first time there was a war in an area where I had family members, but those other wars weren’t shown on TV – they were barely mentioned on the news other than through faraway radio signals that every now and again could be separated from the static. For the first time, the war on TV was fought in what, to us, seemed like real time.

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The aerial footage that the Pentagon allowed CNN to broadcast during the Gulf War was presented as unmediated reality (even though it was, in reality, highly censored), which created a simulation of war without bloodshed or human casualties. A simulation which insisted on the superiority of the American military possessing the ability to eradicate its enemies from its God’s-eye vantage point. The fact that CNN used the actor James Earl Jones, known for voicing Darth Vader, to intone the channel’s tagline, ‘This is CNN’, reinforced the artificial, cinematic quality of the war. W. J. T. Mitchell states that American media and politicians wanted to portray the conflict as a ‘war of faceless enemies marching in anonymous ranks to be vaporized by superior weapons from a safe distance’.1 The American technological advantage was such that the war could barely be said to have taken place at all.2 Even as it was starting, this ultramodern war was already won.

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Darth Vader’s voice may have been intrinsically interwoven with the Western coverage of the war, but Star Wars also provided inspiration f