The Iraqi cabinet in March approved a bill to make Halabja a province, in recognition of the 35th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s brutal chemical attack against the city. In order for the decision to be finalized, the Iraqi legislature needs to pass the bill through a vote.
In a letter forwarded to Iraq’s Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, Rashid urged the legislature to vote on the bill so that the historic city’s long-awaited ascension into a province can be completed.
“Halabja is a symbol of standing up to the tyranny of the former regime, and its people have been subjected to successive massacres and they have offered convoys of martyrs,” read the letter from the Iraqi president.
During the tenure of former PM Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Council of Ministers approved a bill to make Halabja the country’s 19th province on December 31, 2013. Nonetheless, the deterioration of Erbil-Baghdad relations soon after, as well as disagreements between the Sunni and Shiite blocs of the parliament, prevented the legislature from officially passing the bill.
On the last days of the eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq, warplanes of the former regime of Saddam Hussein rained down a lethal cocktail of chemical weapons on the city Halabja on March 16, 1988, killing at least 5,000 people, mostly women and children, and injuring hundreds of others.
The attack was part of a longer genocidal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds by the Baathist regime that continues to resonate in the mind of Kurds to this day.
