Sisters separated in Halabja attack meet 28 years later in bittersweet reunion

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - For two sisters in the Kurdish town of Halabja, it was a bittersweet Wednesday this week: It was on this day 28 years ago that they were separated from each other and lost their parents to chemical bombs. And on the same day nearly three decades later they were reunited before a tearful crowd in their own hometown.

“I’ve never seen a happier day in my whole life,” Chiro Tayib, who met her sister after almost 30 years of separation, told Rudaw. “I don’t really know what to say. I feel like my whole family has returned.”

Chiro and her sister Chiya were separated from each other and the rest of their family on March 16, 1988, when the entire population of Halabja had to flee for their lives under bombs that killed some 5,000 civilians, including parents clutching their dead infants.

Chiro spent years wondering and crying secretly for her lost family, including her sister, whose fate she did not know.

When she was told by the town authorities recently that a woman had been found in the Iranian capital Tehran who could be her missing sister, Chiro still remained doubtful. She didn’t want to raise her hopes.

“I was only worried that she might not be my sister,” she said, sitting next to Chiya, holding hands and surrounded by relatives who had come from far and wide for the happy occasion. “But now, as we are holding hands, I have decided not to cry ever again.”

Chiya, the missing sister was a year-old toddler when she was separated from her parents on the day they ran to the mountains with thousands of others, harassed by fighter jets from above and navigating their way through dead bodies and mud roads.

She was picked up by someone along the way and behind the borders an Iranian family adopted her.

The Halabja Chemical Victims Society eventually found her through searches for many other missing children like her across Iran. DNA tests proved her family was in Halabja and she was reunited in a tearful ceremony with her sister Chiro on the anniversary of the day she disappeared.

“I was extremely happy when I heard that I had a sister and she was still alive,” she told Rudaw in Farsi, as one of her relatives translated into Kurdish. “I am very happy today. I feel that she is not only a sister but that I am also holding my mother’s hand.”

On that spring day in March 1988, 5,000 people were killed and many others sustained chronic diseases. Many children like Chiya went missing and the town authorities still search for them through a database containing family and DNA information.

In the last seven years Chiya is the third person to be located in Iran and reunited with their family.

Five members of their family were killed by the chemical bombs: the two sisters lived on both sides of the Iran-Kurdistan border for years.

Some days they hoped they would see each other again. Other times they gave up hope.

The happy day finally happened and they were reunited.

“This spring is mine, this Newroz is mine. I am very happy,” Chiro said, still holding the hands of her returned sister and a family album. “Now I feel my father and mother have come back alive.”

Chiro said that she never enjoyed any happy occasion in the past 28 years. She was alone and didn’t know who to share her feelings with.

“Now my real happiness starts,” she said, trying to fight back her tears. “I even made a feast on the morning I was going to see my sister again for the first time after so many years.”

The day Chiro was told her sister had been found she couldn’t and didn’t want to believe it. “I lived in worry. I feared that at the last minute they might tell me Chiya belongs to one of the other families.”

Chiya also lived her life waiting behind the border in Iran.

Sisters separated in Halabja attack meet 28 years later in bittersweet reunion

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