A Kurdish doctor told Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial on Thursday that children vomited blood, animals died and people sustained skin rashes and itching following a flower-smelling gas that blanketed his northern Kurdish village in a 1987 military offensive under the deposed regime.
A second Kurdish doctor also gave dramatic, but much less graphic, testimony. He said under continuous air strikes and a ground offensive, he tended to Kurdish men, women and children, some of them with serious body burns or who went blind after an alleged chemical attack as part of Saddam’s 1987/88 campaign against the Kurds, known as Operation Anfal.
”I treated a man whose entire body was full of chemical bubbles, but he died a few days later,” he said in a brief testimony, recalling one of his April 1987 patients.
The names of the two doctors — both dressed in Western-style business suits and speaking Kurdish through an Arabic interpreter — were not announced when they took the witness stand as is the court’s common practice. It was not immediately clear if the court deliberately withheld their names.
In previous hearings, some witnesses who preferred to remain anonymous spoke from behind a curtain.
Saddam and his six-defendants — all former members of his regime — sat silently throughout Thursday’s hearing, which later adjourned until December 18 after the two witnesses testified.
The seven men have pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their alleged roles in Operation Anfal. Saddam and one other defendant have pleaded innocent to the additional charge of genocide. If convicted, they could all be condemned to death.
The prosecution estimates that 180 000 Kurds were killed when Saddam’s army waged a scorched-earth campaign against Kurdish separatist guerrillas, allegedly destroying hundreds of villages, killing or forcing their residents to flee.
‘It was not a bad smell’
The first doctor testified that air strikes preceded the arrival of Saddam’s ground forces into his Balisan village. ”On April 16 1987, I saw many planes hovering in the sky as I was standing outside my clinic,” said the physician, who maintained that he also was a Kurdish guerrilla fighter. ”There was a strange smell; some people said it was like garlic or apples,” he said. ”It was not a bad smell, it smelled like flowers.”
Shortly after the chemical attack, ”I saw dozens of women and children walking with their eyes red; many were vomiting blood,” he said.
”Everything in the village was dead, the birds, the animals, the sheep,” he said, adding that he and some villagers fled to nearby mountains to escape Saddam’s advancing troops. Days later, he said he returned to the village to find it ”entirely burned; there were no people, only some blind animals who had survived were there”.
He said fellow Kurdish fighters told him it was ”the first chemical attack on Kurdistan”. He insisted that there was another ”chemical attack” on his village in 1988, but said he did not see any dead people in both assaults.
”I was infected by the chemicals, I felt a burning sensation on my skin and used to throw up blood whenever I coughed,” he said. He did not specify when he sustained his chemical injury.
Saddam was sentenced last month to death by hanging in an earlier trial on charges of crimes against humanity for a campaign against Shi’ites in the 1980s. His lawyers have formally appealed the sentence.
Iraqi officials have not said whether Saddam would be immediately executed if the appeal were rejected even as he is on trial for the Anfal campaign. — Sapa-AP
Juhi reported from Baghdad and Halaby from Amman, Jordan. Some material in the story came from a pool report at the trial in Baghdad