Weapons of Mass Destruction
The Iran-Iraq War
The Iran-Iraq war was an armed conflict that began when Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 and ended in August 1988, with an estimated total of 1.7 million wounded and 1 million dead. The underlying cause of the war lay in the long-standing regional rivalry between Persian Iran and Arab Iraq.
The immediate cause, however, was a border dispute that had its origins in the mid-1970s. In 1974 Iran had begun supplying weapons to Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq, enabling them to stage a revolt against the Iraqi government. In order to halt the rebellion, Iraq in 1975 compromised on a dispute with Iran regarding the border on the Shatt al Arab estuary. In exchange, Iran stopped supplying arms to the Kurds.
In 1980 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran hoping to reverse the 1975 border settlement and perhaps to gain control of the rich, oil-producing Iranian province of Khuzestan. Hussein also wanted to put an end to religious propaganda directed against Iraq's secular regime by the Islamic government of Iran, which had come to power in 1979 under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini and most Iranian Muslims belonged to the Shiite sect of Islam. Hussein feared that the propaganda would undermine the loyalty of Iraqi Shiites, who comprised about 60 percent of his country's population.
Hussein believed that victory would be easy; he assumed that Iran's military strength had been greatly weakened by the revolution that had brought the Islamic Republic to power in Iran the previous year. However, he was mistaken. Although Iraqi forces won early successes, Iran rallied, held the invaders, formed new armies, and took the offensive. By 1982 Iraqi troops had been cleared from most of Iran. However, Iran rejected the possibility of peace and pursued the war. Iran's only clear objectives were to punish Iraq and overthrow Hussein. Between 1982 and 1987 the fighting resulted in a stalemate. Iran mounted offensives all along the border between the two countries, but especially in the south, where Iran tried to capture Al Basrah, Iraq's main port. Iraq resisted stubbornly, aided by donations and loans from other Arab states in the region and by arms from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and France. Iraq held back Iranian troops with superior firepower and gas warfare, while the Iraqi air force attacked Iranian cities and oil installations, as well as tankers approaching or leaving Iranian ports in the nearby Persian Gulf. Iran retaliated in kind, also attacking the ships of Iraq and its allies.
The attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf indirectly drew other countries, including the United States, into the conflict. In 1987 the United States and other nations stationed warships in the Gulf to protect shipping. By 1988 Iran had lost the will to continue the war. Iraqi forces resumed the offensive, but with economic development in both Iran and Iraq at a standstill due to reduced oil exporting capabilities, an agreement for a cease-fire was reached in August 1988 with the help of the United Nations. Peace negotiations between the two countries stalled until August 1990 when Iraq dropped demands for full control of the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway. Iran and Iraq restored diplomatic relations that same year, and divided control of the Shatt al Arab. By early 1991 Iraqi troops had withdrawn from Iranian territory and many prisoners of war had been exchanged. - Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia ©Microsoft Corporation.
The Use Of Chemical Weapons
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) report on Iraq's use of chemical weapons during the Iraq-Iran War. This report is dated May 1984.Allegations of the use of chemical weapons have been frequent during the Iraq-Iran War. One of the instances reported by Iran has been conclusively verified by an international team dispatched to Iran by the UN Secretary-General.
There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq's invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded. He made this statement on 16 February 1984, the day on which Iran launched a major offensive on the central front, and one week before the start of offensives and counter-offensives further south, in the border marshlands to the immediate north of Basra where, at Majnoon Islands, Iraq has vast untapped oil reserves. According to official Iranian statements during the 31 days following the Foreign Minister's allegation, Iraq used chemical weapons on at least 14 further occasions, adding more than 2200 to the total number of people wounded by poison gas.
Verification
One of the chemical-warfare instances reported by Iran, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh on 13 March 1984, has since been conclusively verified by an international team of specialists dispatched to Iran by the United Nations Secretary-General. The evidence adduced in the report by the UN team lends substantial credence to Iranian allegations of Iraqi chemical warfare on at least six other occasions during the period from 26 February to 17 March 1984.The efficiency and dispatch with which this UN verification operation was mounted stand greatly to the credit of the Secretary General. His hand had presumably been strengthened by the announcement on 7 March by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that 160 cases of wounded combatants visited in Tehran hospitals by an ICRC team "presented a clinical picture whose nature leads to the presumption of the recent use of substances prohibited by international law". The casualties visited were reportedly all victims of an incident on 27 February 1984. The ICRC statement came two days after the US State Department had announced that "the US Government has concluded that the available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". Iraq had denounced the Washington statement as "political hypocrisy", "full of lies", a fabrication by the CIA, and had suggested that the hospital patients examined by the ICRC had "sustained the effects of these substances in places other than the war front". On 17 March, at almost the same moment as the UN team was acquiring its most damning evidence, the general commanding the Iraqi Third Corps, then counter-attacking in the battle for the Majnoon Islands, spoke as follows to foreign reporters: "We have not used chemical weapons so far and I swear by God's Word I have not seen any such weapons. But if I had to finish off the enemy, and if I am allowed to use them, I will not hesitate to do so".
Poison Gases Identified By The UN
Mustard gas From an unexploded bomb found at an Iraqi-attack site, the UN team drew a sample which its analysts in Sweden and Switzerland later found to be high-quality mustard gas.The second poison gas identified by the UN team was Tabun nerve-gas. This was found in a sample which the team was assured by Iranian authorities had been drawn by an Iranian soldier from a dud bomb. The bomb was said to have had the same appearance as the one from which the UN team had drawn mustard gas.
Iranian authorities told the UN team that about 400 people had been affected by chemical weapons during the attack from which the tabun sample was said to have originated. The attack purportedly happened on 17 March 1984, while the UN team was in Tehran, and was said to have been delivered by four Iraqi aircraft. Forty of the casualties were in a field hospital which the UN team was taken to visit the following day. The signs and symptoms in the six cases which the UN team had time to examine were quite different from those associated with the mustard-gas sample. The UN team concluded from them that the patients had been exposed to an anticholinesterase agent.
Other Agents Reported to Have Been Used
Choking gas: Chlorine, the archetypal war gas, is included in at least one of the lists of Iraqi chemical-warfare agents published this year (1984) by Iranian authorities.Arsenica: Iran informed the UN Secretary-General last year that "compounds containing arsenic" had been used in Iraqi chemical weapons. Speaking to reporters, one of the Swedish specialists treating Iranian gas casualties said he thought it probable that the latter had been exposed to a mixture of mustard gas and lewisite. Such mixtures were standard munition-fills in the arsenals of Japan, the USSR and probably other states too during World War II.
Nitrogen mustard: Official Iranian sources have several times stated that an agent of this type had been identified by Iranian military experts in samples from Iraqi chemical munitions. "Knowledgeable" but unidentified US officials have also been reported as speaking of Iraqi nitrogen mustard.
Germ-warfare agents: Israeli intelligence sources have been cited for reports that anthrax had been found in hospitalized Iranians. Iranian sources have referred to Iraqi use of "microbic" and "bacteriological" weapons.
Mycotoxins: A Belgian forensic toxicologist has claimed that his laboratory has found mycotoxins (T2, HT2, nivalenol and verrucarol) in addition to mustard gas in samples of blood, urine and faeces taken from Iranian gas victims hospitalized in Vienna, but this claim currently remains unverified and open to question. There are reports of similar findings from patients hospitalized in Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, but these too still remain open to doubt, especially since, in the Swedish case, the Swedish authorities concerned have expressly repudiated the report. The UN team inspected cadavers returned to Tehran from Swedish and Austrian hospitals, but its report makes no mention of any post-mortem tissue samples having been taken for analysis. Mycotoxins were sought but not found in the chemical samples analyzed by the UN team. The search method used had a detection limit of 0.00005 per cent: i.e., capable of finding mycotoxins at loadings greater than a third of a gram per 250-lb bomb.
Novel unidentified agent: There has been speculation in the press about Iraqi use of a toxic agent unknown in the West. This was excited by reports early in March from the Gzaiel sector, just to the north of Basra, of groups of Iranian corpses having been seen that were said to bear no external trace of injury--looking as though they had fallen asleep in their foxholes.
Origin Of The Chemical Weapons
The absence in the samples analysed in Sweden and Switzerland of polysulphides and of more than a trace of sulphur indicates that it is not of past British, US or USSR government manufacture, all of these nations produced mustard gas by the Levinstein process from ethylene and mixed sulphur chlorides.Production Capability in Iraq
Increasingly persuasive evidence is now emerging in published sources that, whether Iraq has or has not been receiving chemical weapons from abroad, it has been acquiring a development and production capability for them of its own. An official Iranian commentry dates the beginning of this effort back to 1976, claiming that information to that effect had been provided to Iran by West German intelligence officials. Unidentified US intelligence sources have been quoted as saying that Iraq began making mustard gas in the early 1970s. Such sources have been quoted as believing that Iraq is now attempting to produce sarin nerve gas. Associated with this belief is the assessment, it was reported in the US press at the end of March, that, while Iraq has already been using nerve gas in the Gulf war, this has been on an experimental scale using stocks accumulated during the development programme; supplies of nerve gas from large-scale production facilities were expected--the reporting continued--to be available within a matter of months, even weeks. Further, the press has reported US government sources as having identified three, possibly five, chemical-agent production sites in Iraq. The locations that have been specified in the press are Samawa, Ramadi, Samarra and Akashat. The last of these has, however, been toured by foreign correspondents, including a British journalist who has reported finding only contra-indicative evidence of a nerve gas plant being there.Technological Capacity
Other than the need for elaborate safety measures, there seems to be nothing about the technology of producing mustard gas or tabun--or lewisite or nitrogen mustard--that would obviously be beyond the capacities of the Iraqi chemical industry: an industry which has been growing rapidly in size and sophistication since the early 1970s. However, if nerve gases of a type whose production would necessitate the technically demanding and comparatively specialized processes of phosphorus-fluorination and/or phosphorus-alkylation--i.e. nerve gases such as sarin, soman and VX--foreign technology might very well have to be imported. There is strong public evidence (but by no means conclusive yet) that Iraq has been endeavouring to acquire these or related technologies from private corporations in the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Italy since 1975; and that it has been dissembling these endeavours under the guise of acquiring production capacity for organophosphorus pesticides. - Quoted With Permission -UN Security Council Reports to the UN Secretary-General
Referenced from the ODS (Official Document System of the United Nations). Note: You will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to view the PDFs.S/16433 - March 26, 1984
Report of the specialists appointed by the Secretary-General to investigate allegations by the Islamic Republic of Iran concerning the use of chemical weapons."On 3 November 1983, The Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran alleged for the first time in a communication to the United Nations that chemical weapons were being used by Iraq (S/16128). The reference to such weapons was made in the context of reiterating a request, made initially on 23 October 1983 (S/16104), that the secretary-General should send a second mission to the area to ascertain damages to civilian targets."
The report references UN Security Council reports S/15834, S/16104, S/16128, S/16213, S/16340, S/16342, S/16352, and S/16354. These reports can be found at the ODS.
The report comes to the unanimous conclusion that "Chemical weapons in the form of aerial bombs have been used in the civilian areas inspected in Iran by the specialists as indicated above." and that "The types of agents used were bis-(2-chlorethyl1)-sulfide, also known as mustard gas, and N-dimethylphoroamidocyanidate, a nerve agent known as Tabun."
As stated, on November 3, 1983, the UN recieved it's first official report of Saddm's use of chemical weapons. Iranian media had been reporting such occurancies since November 1980. The UN demanded that Iran stop it's attacks on civilians and cease it's use of chemical weapons.
S/20060 - July 20, 1988
Report of the mission dispatched by the Secretary-General to investigate allegations concerning Iraq's continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic republic of Iran and Iraq."It is with deep concern and anxiety that the Secretary-General must once again inform the Security Council that chemical weapons continue to be used between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq. Indeed, in their letter of transmittal of the attached report on the investigation in Iran, the two specialist say that chemical weapons continue to be used on an intensive scale against Iranian forces in spite of the provisions of the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphiyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed in Geneva on 17 June 1925, and that the use of such weapons in the present conflict has been intensifying and has also become more frequent."
Concusions
The Secretary-General dispatched missions to investigate the use of chemical weapons in March 1984, April 1985, February/March 1986, April/May 1987, and in March/April 1988. I have included, to the best of my knowledge, the first and last UN Security Council reports concerning Iraq's use of chemical weapons and eventually biological weapons during the Iraq-Iran War. There are thousands of security council reports available concerning Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction during the war but my intent is only to show that Saddam Hussein ignored all efforts by the UN and the international community and that he continued to use WMD throughout the entire eight year Iran-Iraq war on both military and civilian targets.Iraq did not restrict his use of WMD to Iranians. As the war was winding down, he launched his most deadly attack against his own population.
Halabja March 16, 1988 - Chemical massacre of the Kurds in Halabja. Warning, this page from the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Sweden is graphic in its depiction of the events of "Bloody Friday." Put bluntly, there are pictures of dead men, women and children. I didn't put it here for the pictures, it is a complete, well written and well referenced description of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iraqi civilian populations from 1984-1988. I have contacted the author for permission to reprint his article here without the photographs, but until such permission is granted, I suggest you scroll quickly to the text at the lower half of the page.
Iraqi troops had not yet completely withdrawn from Iranian territory when in August of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait.
