Baghdad, Iraq – Survivors described a chemical-weapons attack on their villages in testimony Tuesday at the trial of Saddam Hussein, telling of poisonous clouds of gas that killed children and blinded residents during a military offensive against Kurds in 1987.
Hussein’s co-defendants insisted that the Anfal campaign, in which tens of thousands of Kurds were killed, was directed only at Kurdish guerrillas and Iranian troops in northern Iraq during the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Hussein faces charges of genocide in the trial, which completed its second day Tuesday.
Six co-defendants are in the dock with him over the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, in which troops swept across parts of northern Iraq, destroying villages.
Two survivors told the court about an April 16, 1987, attack on the Kurdish villages of Basilan and Sheik Wasan – believed to be the first time Hussein’s regime used chemical weapons on Iraqi citizens.
“The villagers were blinded and they were vomiting – only God knows what it was like that night,” said Najiba Khider Ahmed, a 41-year-old woman from Sheik Wasan.
She described being held in a detention camp for nine days, where her brother and niece disappeared.
“During those nine days, it was like the apocalypse. Even Hitler didn’t do this,” she said, breaking down into tears repeatedly. “Saddam Hussein used to shout about ‘the Iraqi people.’ If we were his people, why did he bomb us with all sorts of weapons?”
She said she had two pregnancies after the attack – the baby in the first was born with skin peeling off, and the second miscarried, born with malformed limbs, which she blamed on the gas attacks.
Throughout the testimony, Hussein and the defense lawyers insisted the two had been coached in their testimony – with one lawyer asking how Ahmed, who said she was illiterate, could specify that Russian- made Sukhoi warplanes carried out the bombardment.
“Who told you to say these things?” Hussein asked at one point.
The chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, adjourned the court until today.
