ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Nine-year-old Shno Hamamin Salih and her family got out of their beds exhausted. Bombs fell from the skies over Halabja the night before; “we were scared, we were all crying, screaming,” she recalled.
They were not to rest the next day either. A new bombardment on the city started on March 16, 1988, its force causing a sack of books from somewhere in the neighborhood to fall on the mulberry tree in the Salih family’s garden.
“It was there even after we returned, all rotten. It was from the nearby schools,” said Shno Hamamin Salih, one of the remaining four of what was once an eight-member family.
In 1988, Iraq’s Baathist regime planned an eight-phase operation that was part of its Anfal campaign against the Kurds. It began in Halabja in late February and concluded in Badinan in September. Around 5,000 people, including Shno’s mother, were killed when Saddam Hussein’s regime dropped mustard gas onto the city of Halabja on March 16.
“We were in our house when the catastrophe happened,” Shno said. “The whole family was in the basement when Halabja was being bombarded, mustard gas hit our neighborhood. My father said let’s leave the house and head south. We came out and saw that the neighborhood had been destroyed.”
“We went south, we didn’t know we were heading into the chemicals. We saw that some people had fallen, and then we fell unconscious.”
After the attack, the family stayed on the streets for 13 days, until Shno’s uncle came searching for them and sent them to Iran for treatment.
Shno and her sister are the only two remaining members of the family in the Kurdistan Region, following the loss of their father in 2006. Though she was a young child at the time, she remembers everything “as though it was now”.
Two of her brothers, Kaiwan and Goran, live abroad as they were sent for treatment.
Kaiwan, the oldest child, was 13 when the massacre took place, lives in Austria and requires urgent medical treatment, according to Shno.
Of her other brothers, one recently died due to the lingering effects of the chemical attack last year; the other hung himself in Halabja’s public park three months later, because of what Shino described as family problems.
Later in 1988, what remained of the family moved back to Halabja after they were told the city had been fixed up – but they were arrested by the Iraqi government soon after and taken to the notorious Nugra Salman prison camp, where thousands of people were treated with exceptional cruelty.
“They would kill and torture many people in front of their parents… then they would throw them outside of the prison and feed them to dogs,” said Shino.
She recalled her 10-year-old brother Zana being tortured by Baathists with cables in that prison, where they stayed for six months, surviving on handouts of “dirty salty water and stale and hard bread”.
“My father didn’t expect for him to live,” she said.
Survivors of the Halabja chemical attack suffer from long-term health problems. In 2019, the Kurdistan Regional Government opened the first hospital specially equipped to treat the victims of the attack. But Shino, who has suffered from lung and eye damage because of the toxic gas and needs surgery, said they have not been helpful.
“They have opened a huge hospital, yet they make you buy medicine elsewhere… there are people [survivors] who have a salary, and then there are people like me who don't have anything – they prescribed me a [respiratory] pump for 12,000 dinars ($8),” adding that sometimes she does not buy it.
Related: Halabja genocide: ‘I couldn’t tell if it was my brother’s body I was carrying’
Many of the genocide’s survivors, some of whom have since passed, have called on the governments of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq for treatments but have been neglected, Shno said; she also pleaded for her brother Kaiwan to be treated.
Shno now lives in the neighborhood where she spent her childhood. It is now called Omar Khawar named after the Kurdish father who died holding his infant in his arms – Shno’s neighbor, who later became a symbol of Halabja’s suffering.
Nobody who lived in the neighborhood remains there, Shno said; “everyone either died, left, or there are one or two of them left in a family.”
“What could March 16 be for us? They’ll hang Newroz banners the next morning. That’s it,” the genocide survivor said. “March 16 is an agony, our wounds are reopened.”
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