Dedicated Group Hopes to Prove Chemicals Killed Kurds

NY Times ^ | 6/24/06 | Elisabeth Rosenthal

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For 18 years, Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx has tended the sealed jars containing strands of hair and scraps of clothing he gathered from a dead woman's body.

Collected in Halabja, one of many Kurdish towns in northern Iraq that were attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's army in 1988, the jars have been stored in a blue plastic drum in his lab ever since, waiting.

Now, as prosecutors prepare to try Hussein in Baghdad on charges of genocide against the Kurds, Heyndrickx, who has retired as director of the toxicology lab at the State University of Ghent, would like the material to be analyzed. "May I insist these proofs are mentioned at the trial?" the doctor asks.

He is one of a small group of doctors, scientists and Middle East experts who have studied chemical weapons use by Iraq against its Kurdish citizens in the 1980's. They are dusting off evidence and attempting to collect new data in an effort to define the scope of a distant tragedy that is only now coming under scrutiny in court.

But proving that the victims died from chemical weapons is a daunting task: all the firsthand proof was gathered nearly 15 years ago, and many records have been lost or destroyed. The attacks occurred in remote areas where little testing was available.

"Unfortunately, we'll never know how many people were killed or exposed," said Dr. Joanne al-Talabani, who for the past three years has visited the area to study the long-term health problems of Kurdish children exposed in the attacks, including scarred lungs and eyes as well as birth defects. "There are no medical records from that time — none. Most people can't remember: they were delirious, running, in shock."

The study of chemical weapons is an arcane, imperfect corner of forensic science

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Interesting read, like an episode of Bhagdad CSI