Chemical Weapons: As Trial Begins, Poison Attack Haunts Kurds

NY Times ^ | August 21, 2006 | EDWARD WONG

[Pharmboy]

Max Becherer/Polaris, for The New York Times
A cemetery in Sewsenan, a Kurdish village in northern Iraq, holds the remains of nearly 70 people killed
in a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein’s military forces on March 22, 1988.

SEWSENAN, Iraq, Aug. 18 — When death came to this village, it had a sweet smell, like perfume.

“People wanted to inhale it,” Robitan Hama Amin said.

So went Mr. Amin’s memory of the first encounter between the Kurds of this mountain redoubt and Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons.

The attack came at dinnertime on March 22, 1988. Mr. Amin had just sat down with his wife and seven children in their home of mud and stone when Iraqi fighter jets began the bombing.

“I was totally blinded, I couldn’t see anything,” Mr. Amin, 80, said on a recent afternoon as he crouched on a dirt hill near the village mosque, dressed in baggy olive pants and a gray turban. “Everybody tried to escape. People vomited. Their skin burned. Some people lost their minds.”

He clenched his fists. “I’d like to put a rope around the neck of Saddam Hussein myself and drag him through all the Kurdish villages,” he said.

Mr. Amin and hundreds of thousands of others who suffered under Mr. Hussein’s northern military campaign of 1988, called Anfal, will have their first taste of retribution on Monday, when Mr. Hussein is to stand trial in Baghdad, accused of trying to annihilate Kurds.

It is the first time Mr. Hussein and six co-defendants will be tried for the large-scale killings that were a hallmark of his rule and that President Bush has cited as justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Hussein and a top aide, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, commander of the north at

[Pharmboy]

Wait a minute--is the Times admitting that Saddam not only had but used WMD??