"We heard the planes overhead and the sky filled with red. There were two smells: apple and onion. It burned the skin. We had a car but we couldn't use it. We would have been driving over dead bodies. We just ran towards the mountains."
I was listening to a survivor in Halabja a town near the Iranian border famous for the massacre that occurred here. In 1988 during the Iraq-Iran war, Sadaam dropped chemical weapons over the town killing over 5000 civillians. Sadaam had previously used chemical weapons on Kurdish villages but this was the largest and most well known attack. It has become a symbol of the Kurdish people's pain.
Friends of friends put me in contact with Bari, a really sweet, young Kurdish guy that spoke english. Kurdistan is not really the type of place you go wandering around on your own without knowing where your going. I was very grateful that he could show me around for a couple days. I wanted to get into the countryside. He had friends in Halabja 50km south of Souleymaniye. We stayed with them.
The family that hosted us had been there when the attacks happened. I was worried that talking about it might bring up memories to painful. But they wanted to talk about it. They want everyone to know what happened to them.
"We fled to Iran where we lived until the Kurdish uprising and then we came back. No one helped us rebuild we did it ourselves. One of the gases made people crazy. Some people in this town are still not quite right. We have respiratory problems. "
I saw this man (in the photo) working in one of our hosts garden. I asked if his burns had been from the attack--cluster bombs were used as well as chemical agents. Yes. Would it be impolite to ask for his photo? No. We want people to see.
It must be difficult to walk around every day, your face a visceral reminder of a whole town's, a whole people's pain.
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Jennifer Chase Photography
washington DC photographer
www.jenniferchasephoto.com
