HALABJA, Iraq: Tears streamed down Fakhradeen Saleem's face on Wednesday as he watched television images of Saddam Hussein's government crumbling in Baghdad.
Listening to his devastating story of loss at the hands of the Baathist administration, it was not hard to see why.
The softly-spoken teacher, 54, took nearly two hours to explain what happened in this run-down northern Iraqi town on March 16, 1988, a date etched in the memory of millions of Kurds.
On that day Iraqi warplanes roared over the town, dropping chemical weapons including nerve agents which killed 5,000 people in the dying days of the war against neighbouring Iran.
Three of Saleem's seven children died of the agents they breathed in. He buried Sangar, a son of six, and Nigeen, a daughter of eight with his own hands before going with the rest of his family to the cemetery, where they lay down expecting to die.
During the panic in Halabja, his eldest daughter took away his infant son, but to this day he does not know if they survived.
"Every now and again people who lost each other that day come back to Halabja from Iran and elsewhere. I keep hoping that one day it will be me."
At the cemetery a second daughter died quietly in her sleep, but the rest of the family survived. The 10-year-old Hawreen was buried by a friend in his garden and reinterred by Saleem three years later.
Among his children, only Tara, a daughter who is now 27, and Bafreen, another daughter of 19, are known to have survived the attack, for which Saddam will be forever despised by Iraq's Kurdish minority.
I am in Irbil in Kurdistan northern Iraq. Someone explained the history of this place to me today. The mountains here are bare and devoid of trees. They used be forested. Covered with trees. There used to be so many trees in Irbil that you couldn't see around corners. Now it looks like Kansas or really more like parts of Montana.
The reason is that Saddam cut down all of the trees in Kurdistan in 1988. He bulldozed 4000 of the 5000 villages in Kurdistan and the Kurds ran to the mountains for safety, so he cut down all of the trees on these mountains and killed all of the game, so that the Kurds would have no wood for fires and no food to eat. He was incredibly effective. The Kurds are now replanting the trees. You can see hundreds of tiny trees if you look closely at the mountains. I didn't notice them until they were pointed out to me. In Kirkuk they found a mass grave of Kurdish children. One of the U.N. guys offered to take us out and show it to us. I haven't taken him up on it. I have no reason to go there and I feel like it would be disrespectful to go and gawk. I guess some of the children were buried with their toys and dolls.
It makes me sick everytime I surf the net and see all these people in Europe and back home saying that the war was not justified because we haven't found 50 tons of sarin gas yet. I wish those people would come to this country and look at ruined villages between here and Kirkuk and the bare mountains. Anyone who protested against this war and defended Saddam ought to be ashamed of themselves. Its just unimaginable the things that went on here.