# Halabja Massacre On March 16, 1988, in the closing months of the [[Iran-Iraq War]], [[Saddam Hussein]]'s forces attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons — a cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents — killing an estimated 3,200 to 5,000 people, most of them civilians, in a single day. ## The Crime and the Hypocrisy The largest chemical-weapons attack ever directed against a civilian population, Halabja was part of the wider [[Anfal Campaign]] against Iraq's Kurds. Its bitter irony runs through Iraqi history: the same Saddam who gassed Halabja was, at that moment, being quietly backed by the United States against Iran — yet the attack would later be cited as evidence of the monstrousness that justified the 2003 [[Iraq War]]. Halabja stands as both a genocide and a monument to the selective memory of great-power policy. *See also: [[Iraqi History Hub]], [[Kurds]], [[Anfal Campaign]], [[Saddam Hussein]], [[Iran-Iraq War]]*