UPDATED ON: Saturday, June 28, 2008 20:25 Mecca time, 17:25 GMT News Middle East Sardasht suffers in silence By Nazanine Moshiri in Iran
The Iran-Iraq war was a brutal conflict that costs hundreds of thousands of lives Perched in the rolling green hills of Iran's Kurdish region, just a few miles from Iraq's border, Sardasht has not really changed in twenty years. Men, young and old, still wear baggy trousers, turbans round their heads and wide belts - all traditional Kurdish clothes. It is still a thriving border town. There are very few physical signs that anything ever happened here - the mental scars are harder to see. Everyday, at precisely ten past four in the afternoon, its residents remember the moment the peace of this mountain was shattered forever.. That is the exact time Iraqi warplanes dropped chemical bombs on the town. With no masks or proper shelters, people breathed in the mustard gas that was contained in the weapons' shells. The immediate effect was devastating. More than 150 people died and in the following hours and days, about 6,000 people were injured. The scene must have been horrific. Victims told me how they remember the air tasting sweet like sugar, mixed with the pungent smell of garlic; then came a burning sensation in their eyes and skin. There were people gasping and vomiting all around them. The survivors were rushed to hospitals around Iran. Twenty-one years on, many are still suffering. Struggling to breathe I met Haj Hassan Fattahi, in his twenty's when the attack came. The gas left his lungs permanently damaged - there is no cure for what he has. Doctors have told Fattahi that he has probably only a few years to live The only thing keeping him alive is an oxygen machine always by his side. Doctors have told him he probably only has a few years left to live. Even talking to me was difficult for him, his chronic coughing a barrier to a normal life. "I don't really think about my future, I just want to die because my life is different from a normal person's life," he told me. "They can breathe properly, I can't breathe at all." The attack came near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, a brutal conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Saddam attack Then ruled by Saddam Hussein, Iraq's military was known to have used nerve gases and mustard gas in its chemical attacks in Iran and in northern Iraq. The most notorious attack came in 1988, when Saddam gassed his own people in the town of Halabja, killing 5000 Iraqi Kurds.. Everyone I spoke to in Sardasht told me how bitter and frustrated they were that the attack on their town has not received any real international recognition. Mostafa Assadzadeh has every reason to be angry. He lost all ten members of his family that day, the only reason he survived was because he was away on military service. "The people of Sardasht don't deserve this from international leaders," he said. "People would expect them to have cared about this attack and condemned Saddam at the time. If they had maybe it would have forced him not to have used chemical weapons later on and perhaps Halabja would not have happened." On a hillside overlooking Sardasht there is a memorial clock, a permanent reminder of the exact time the bombs fell. The survivors of Sardasht have been waiting for a long time for justice, and justice is probably the only thing that can help them move on from their painful past. Source: Al Jazeera --------------- Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
