Some 182,000 Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan were killed in 1988 during Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign, which included chemical attacks on Halabja and other communities along the Iraq-Iran border. An estimated 5,000 people died in Halabja from sarin and VX nerve agents and mustard gas. About 6,000 people survived, and the region’s Kurds continue to feel the effects.
Clinical psychologist Ibrahim Mohammed studied 500 survivors to measure the attack’s lasting mental-health impact. His team found roughly four in five survivors met clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and about three in four had clinical depression or anxiety. Despite this, fewer than one in five had received treatment. Mohammed’s report, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, notes that even decades after the attacks many survivors show severe PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Survivors also reported persistent pain, fatigue and other chronic health problems.
Yerevan Saeed, six at the time of the attack and now director of the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace at American University, says the assault still looms over Halabja and the communities targeted in Anfal. Families were ripped apart — parents forced to leave dying children, children abandoning dying parents, and many fleeing to Iran to live in refugee camps. Saeed says healing remains unrealized because of generational trauma and the international community’s reluctance to recognize the attacks as genocide. “The nonrecognition of the attack as a genocide, that’s a big, big issue for us,” he said, adding that efforts to gain recognition for Halabja and the wider Anfal campaign have had little success and that collective memory is passed from generation to generation.
Stigmatization also endures. Faraidoun Moradi, a Kurdish clinician and researcher at the University of Gothenburg’s Center for Disaster Medicine, says anxiety about chemical contamination affects both exposed survivors and others in Kurdish communities. Misconceptions persist that illnesses from exposure can be inherited or transmitted like contagions, leading people to avoid socializing with those who were exposed.
Mohammed’s study is not the first to document long-term impacts. Moradi, who has researched Kurdish survivor communities in Sweden, says Mohammed’s findings confirm earlier work: survivors of Halabja continue to suffer both psychological and somatic trauma decades after exposure. Moradi notes the new study would be stronger if it had recorded specific data on chemical exposure levels and included a control group of Kurds who were not exposed. In his own research, Moradi found that survivors exposed to mustard gas have long-term impaired lung function, worse psychological health, and lower quality of life, including poorer education and employment outcomes, compared with Kurds not exposed to chemical weapons.
Mohammed’s report recommends concrete actions: recognition of the attacks, access to culturally sensitive mental-health services, programs to trace missing family members, and official support for compensation and ongoing care. Moradi’s comparisons between survivors who remained in Kurdistan and those now living in Sweden suggest those remaining in Halabja have lower physical and emotional health, possibly reflecting poorer access to mental-health services in the region. “People certainly need psychological help,” Saeed said. “In the Kurdistan region, we don’t have clinics, we don’t have anything like that, especially in Halabja, to help people with these kinds of trauma after what’s happened.”
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany