A Town in the Path of Two Wars
Halabja lies in the mountains of south-eastern Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. In 1988 that position placed it between the closing months of the Iran-Iraq War and a campaign the Iraqi state was waging against its own Kurdish population.
The Iran-Iraq War had been grinding on since 1980. By early 1988 it was in its final year, and the mountainous Kurdish border region had become one of its active fronts. Kurdish peshmerga forces opposed to Baghdad were operating in the area, in some cases alongside Iranian troops.
Running in parallel was the Anfal campaign, directed against the Kurdish rural population of northern Iraq and commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein. Villages were destroyed, populations deported, and chemical weapons used repeatedly. Al-Majid was to become known by the name that has followed him since: Chemical Ali.
Two days before the attack, Iranian forces supported by Kurdish fighters had taken Halabja as part of an operation known as Zafar 7. The town was in Iranian hands, and still full of its own civilians, when the Iraqi aircraft came.
Context
- The Iran-Iraq War, 1980 to 1988 — Halabja fell in its final months
- Part of the wider Anfal campaign against the Kurds of Iraq
- Commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali
- Halabja had been captured by Iranian and Kurdish forces two days earlier
The Sixteenth of March
Iraqi aircraft bombed the town with a mixture of chemical agents. Most of those who died were killed within minutes.
The bombardment began in the afternoon of 16 March 1988 and continued into the evening. According to the BBC, the weapons used were a combination of mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun, sarin and VX.
Mustard gas blisters the skin, eyes and lungs; the nerve agents kill quickly by paralysing the muscles used to breathe. Because the agents were heavier than air, they settled into cellars and low ground — the very places where families had sheltered from conventional bombing. Survivors described a smell of apples, then people collapsing in the streets.
The Times gives figures of between 3,200 and 5,000 killed and 7,000 to 10,000 injured. The dead were overwhelmingly civilians: women, children and the elderly who had not left the town.
Casualty figures are estimates. The ranges given here follow The Times; other sources cite figures within and slightly beyond them.
“I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything?”Ali Hassan al-Majid, in a recording made during the Anfal campaign and later used in evidence against him.
What the Gas Left Behind
The killing did not end when the gas dispersed. Halabja's survivors have carried the attack in their bodies for more than three decades.
Those who survived fled, many towards the Iranian border, and much of the population spent years displaced. Medical help in the immediate aftermath was minimal: the town sat inside a war zone, and Iraq denied responsibility.
The long-term health consequences have been severe and are still being documented — respiratory disease, eye damage and blindness, skin conditions, cancers, miscarriages, and congenital abnormalities in children born long after 1988.
For years the attack was contested internationally. Iraq blamed Iran, and some Western governments, then aligned with Baghdad against Tehran, were slow to attribute responsibility. That ambiguity was only fully dispelled after 2003, when Iraqi state documents and testimony became available.
Halabja has since become the central symbol of the Kurdish genocide. The sixteenth of March is marked each year across the Kurdistan Region and in the diaspora, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons commemorates the anniversary as part of its remembrance of the victims of chemical warfare.
Naming It Genocide
It took more than twenty years for a court to call Halabja what its survivors had always called it.
Several other national parliaments have since adopted similar recognitions.
A City, Not Only a Memorial
Halabja was rebuilt, and in 2014 it became a governorate in its own right. In 2025 Iraq recognised it as the country's nineteenth province.
The Halabja Monument and its memorial cemetery stand at the centre of the city's public memory, alongside the mass graves of those killed in 1988. Survivors' associations remain active, campaigning for recognition, compensation and continued medical care.
On 13 March 2014 the Kurdistan Regional Government made Halabja the fourth governorate of the Kurdistan Region, raising it from district status. Recognition by the federal government came more slowly: the Iraqi Council of Ministers acted in March 2023, and on 14 April 2025 the Iraqi parliament formally recognised Halabja as the nineteenth province of Iraq.
The governorate covers 889 square kilometres and had a population of 113,926 at the 2024 census, taking in the districts of Halabja, Sirwan, Xurmal, Biyare and Bamo.