International sources for technology and chemical precursors[edit source | editbeta]
See also:
Iraqi chemical weapons program
The
know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam's regime from foreign sources.
[24] The largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Singapore -based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.
[25] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989: "For people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad."
[24]
The 2002
International Crisis Group (ICG) no. 136 "Arming Saddam: The Yugoslav Connection" concludes it was "tacit approval" by many world governments that led to the Iraqi regime being armed with
weapons of mass destruction, despite sanctions, because of the ongoing Iranian conflict.
On December 23, 2005, a Dutch court sentenced
Frans van Anraat, a businessman who bought chemicals on the world market and sold them to Saddam's regime, to 15 years in prison. The court ruled that Saddam committed genocide against the people of Halabja;
[26] this was the first time the Halabja attack was described as an act of genocide in a court ruling. In March 2008, the government of Iraq announced plans to take legal action against the suppliers of chemicals used in the poison gas attack.
[27]
Among the chemical precursors provided to Iraq from American companies such as Alcolac International and Phillips, was
thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture mustard gas, according to leaked portions of Iraq's "full, final and complete" disclosure of the sources for its weapons programs. The
provision of chemical precursors from United States companies to Iraq was enabled by a
Ronald Reagan Administration policy that removed Iraq from the State Department's list of
State Sponsors of Terrorism. Alcolac was named as a defendant in the Aziz v. Iraq case presently pending in the United States District Court (Case No. 1:09-cv-00869-MJG). (Both companies have since undergone reorganization and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum is now part of
ConocoPhillips, an American oil and discount fossil fuel company, while Alcolac International has since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc.
[28])
Controversies[edit source | editbeta]
Allegations of Iranian involvement[edit source | editbeta]
See also:
Iraq and weapons of mass destruction
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tan_-_Iraq.jpg http://bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.2...gnify-clip.png
An original bomb casing used as flower pot at the Halabja Memorial Monument in 2011
The
U.S. State Department, in the immediate aftermath of the incident, took the official position based on examination of available evidence that Iran was partly to blame.
[15] A preliminary
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time reported that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war
[29] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of weapons of mass destruction before the
2003 invasion of Iraq. Pelletiere claimed that a fact that has not been successfully challenged is that Iraq was not known to have possessed the
cyanide-based blood agents determined to have been responsible for the condition of the bodies that were examined,
[30] and that blue discolorations around the mouths of the victims and in their extremities,
[31] pointed to Iranian-used gas as the culprit. Leo Casey writing in
Dissent Magazine argued that "none of the authors of these documents [...] had any expertise in medical and forensic sciences, and their speculation doesn't stand up to minimal scrutiny."
[32]
Joost Hiltermann, who was the principal researcher for
Human Rights Watch between 1992–1994, conducted a two-year study of the massacre, including a field investigation in northern Iraq. According to his analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, it is clear that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and that the United States, fully aware of this, nevertheless accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack.
[15] This research concluded there were numerous other gas attacks, unquestionably perpetrated against the Kurds by the Iraqi armed forces. According to Hiltermann, the literature on the Iran-Iraq war reflects a number of allegations of chemical weapons use by Iran, but these are "marred by a lack of specificity as to time and place, and the failure to provide any sort of evidence." Hiltermann called these allegations "mere assertions" and added that "no persuasive evidence of the claim that Iran was the primary culprit was ever presented."
[33] An investigation conduced by Dr Jean Pascal Zanders, Project Leader of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project at the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, into responsibility for the Halabja massacre also concluded in 2007 that Iraq was the culprit, and not Iran.
[34]
In August 2013,
Foreign Policy charged, based on recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials, that the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. Saddam's military also received intelligence assistance from the CIA in 1987 prior to the Iraqis' early 1988 launch of sarin attacks to stop the potentially decisive Iranian offensive to capture the southern city of
Basra, which would result in a collapse of Iraqi military and Iranian victory.
[35]