In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign killed an estimated 182,000 Kurds across Iraqi Kurdistan and included chemical attacks on Halabja and other border communities. In Halabja alone, about 5,000 people are believed to have died from exposure to sarin, VX-type nerve agents and mustard gas; roughly 6,000 survived. Decades later, survivors and their communities continue to bear deep physical, psychological and social scars.
Clinical psychologist Ibrahim Mohammed and colleagues assessed 500 Halabja survivors to measure the long-term mental-health effects. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study found that 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 the high burden of mental illness, fewer than one in five survivors had received mental-health treatment. Many participants also reported ongoing pain, fatigue and other chronic medical problems.
Yerevan Saeed, who was six at the time of the attack and now directs the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace at American University, says the massacre still shapes life in Halabja and the wider Anfal-affected areas. Families were torn apart—parents forced to abandon dying children, children leaving dying parents, and many fleeing to refugee camps in Iran. Saeed says healing has been blocked by generational trauma and by the international community’s reluctance to recognize the assaults as genocide. “The nonrecognition of the attack as a genocide, that’s a big, big issue for us,” he said, noting that efforts to secure official recognition for Halabja and the Anfal campaign have had limited success and that collective memory is passed down through generations.
Stigma compounds survivors’ suffering. Faraidoun Moradi, a clinician and researcher at the University of Gothenburg’s Center for Disaster Medicine, explains that anxiety about chemical contamination affects both those directly exposed and others in Kurdish communities. Misconceptions persist that illnesses from exposure can be inherited or transmitted like infections, leading some people to avoid social contact with survivors.
Mohammed’s findings mirror earlier research. Moradi, who has studied Kurdish survivor communities in Sweden, says the new study confirms long-standing evidence that Halabja survivors face persistent psychological and somatic trauma. He notes the Mohammed study would be stronger if it had included objective measures of chemical exposure and a control group of unexposed Kurds. In Moradi’s own work, survivors exposed to mustard gas showed long-term impaired lung function, poorer psychological health and lower overall quality of life—including worse educational and employment outcomes—compared with Kurds who were not exposed to chemical weapons.
The studies point to concrete needs. Mohammed’s report calls for official recognition of the attacks, culturally sensitive mental-health services, programs to trace missing family members, and government-backed compensation and ongoing care. Comparing survivors who stayed in Kurdistan with those now living in Sweden, Moradi found that people remaining in Halabja often have worse physical and emotional health, a gap that may reflect limited access to mental-health and medical 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.” Without broader recognition, improved services and efforts to counter stigma, survivors and their descendants are likely to continue struggling with the long shadow of the chemical attacks.