On June 28, Iran commemorated the victims of the in the northwestern Iranian city of Sardasht in 1987 that killed some 130 people and injured more than 8,000, mostly children and teenagers.
During the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, Iraq used about 2,540 tons of chemical weapons in “more than 30 chemical attacks against Iranian non-military targets,” a estimated in 2003.
More than 100,000 Iranians received emergency medical care, at least 7,500 Iranians died “directly and immediately” from chemical injuries and about 75,000 still require treatment for conditions caused by chemical weapons, the U.N. report said.
The people of Sardasht still suffer from “pain and torment” caused by the “brutal attack,” , Director General of the United Nations’ Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), on June 28.
used chemical weapons not only in Iran but also against Iraqi citizens, targeting the country’s Kurdish population. The in a 2003 report that, in 1987-1988, Iraq’s military used chemical weapons against 40 Kurdish villages, turning them into a “testing ground.”
The report said local victims suffered life-long health complications. A March 1988 attack in the city of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan killed about 5,000 people and injured more than 10,000.
On the Sardasht attack anniversary, Iranian government and military officials for helping Saddam obtain technology and components to develop chemical weapons. Iranian officials said the victims of those attacks are still waiting for justice.
"The crimes of the Europeans in the chemical attack on our country and even on the Iraqis themselves, like in the case of Halabja, were not sued in any courts,” Brig. Gen. Reza Jalali, head of Iran's Passive Defense Organization ().
The statement is misleading.
In fact, there have been investigations, and European and American companies and persons who supplied the Iraqis have been in U.S. and European courts.
An international investigation into Saddam’s acquisition of chemical weapons led to the 2004 arrest of a Dutch citizen, , in the Netherlands. In December 2005, found Van Anraat and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. In 2007, the Court of Appeals in The Hague increased his sentence to 17 years.
European prosecutors learned from U.S. officials that the was Saddam Hussein’s source for raw ingredients. In 1989, the U.S. government issued an international request for Van Anraat’s arrest and extradition. He had become a suspect a year earlier, when created to hide the shipment of hundreds of tons of thiodiglycol, a.k.a. TDG, a key component of mustard gas.
According to U.S. prosecutors, the TDG cargo would first sail to Rotterdam or Antwerp, where the barrels were reloaded onto a different vessel and shipped to Jordan’s port of Aqaba. From there, trucks would drive the chemical cargo across the desert to Iraq.
Van Anraat, whom the U.S. investigators described as the last man in the network directly dealing with the Iraqis, operated the chain via an umbrella network of commercial firms. He used a New York City shell firm called NuKraft to order thiodiglycol from a Baltimore, Maryland, manufacturing company, Alcolac (a subsidiary of the British conglomerate Rio Tinto Zinc), which sold TDG under the trade name Kromfax.
U.S. government agencies warned Alcolac about the restrictions on exporting thiodiglycol to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and other countries known to be pursuing development of chemical weapons, . In 1987-1988, Alcolac sold NuKraft four shipments of Kromfax totaling more than 1 million pounds, the investigation concluded.
In 1989, Alcolac pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Export Administration Act. However, it claimed it had not known that the thiodiglycol was ending up in Iraq, or that the Iraqi government was using it to manufacture chemical weapons, stating that TGB has many legal commercial uses, including ink production and textile dyeing.
In 2011, victims and surviving family members of the Kurdish chemical attacks filed a under a U.S. law known as the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), accusing Alcolac of genocide and war crimes. A U.S. appeals court ruled that the prosecutors were unable to provide evidence that Alcolac sold TDG to Iraq with the intention of supporting the regime’s manufacture of chemical weapons. Still, the court ruled that the facts presented were true.
Alcolac is now defunct, its assets having been sold off to Rhodia, a French chemicals concern. However, Alcolac remains a target of litigation. In 2017, Victor Alcaron, a U.S. Army Gulf War veteran, brought a , claiming he was exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons while deployed in Iraq and that the poison gas seriously damaged his lungs.