Halabja (Iraq): 6 families nervously awaited the DNA tests on the young man who returned from Iran. They wondered: Could this be their son who was just an infant
in 1988 and somehow lived through a deadly chemical attack by Saddam Hussein's regime?
There was absolute silence as the judge announced the
lab results. The man, who called himself Ali, was deemed to be
the sole surviving child of 58-year-old Fatima Mohammed Salih,
who had lost her husband and all her other six children in the
poison gas clouds that covered the mostly Kurdish city of
Halabja.
For the first time in more than two decades, they
embraced.
"I'm in a dream," said 21-year-old Ali Pour as he
comforted the weeping woman.
The reunion yesterday in Iraq's northern Kurdish
region was the rarest of artifacts from Halabja: a moment of
joy from the day the city became an open cemetery for an
estimated 5,600 people killed when lethal gas was dropped by
Saddam's military.
It was part of Saddam's brutal 1987-88 campaign to
crush a Kurdish rebellion. Nearly 200,000 people died in
Baghdad's scorched-earth offensive.
The alleged mastermind of the Halabja attack, Saddam's
cousin known as "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid, is among
regime officials who have been sentenced to death for the
Kurdish crackdown and other crimes. The trial specifically on
Halabja is still under way.
PTI
First Published: Saturday, December 05, 2009, 23:06