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Northern Iraq Part 4: Halabja and Ahmadawa
Our next trip was to Halabja, the scene of one of the worst atrocities to be committed by humans. Halabja is one of the sites in Kurdistan that really imprints itself onto the memory of those who visit it. On March 16th, 1988, over 5,000 people were killed and 10,000 people horrifically injured by chemical bomb attacks conducted by Saddam Hussein’s regime after orders were given by “Chemical Ali” that Halabja was a danger to Iraq.
We’d rung Tariq the night before and he’d said he’d pick us up at 9, so we woke up, got ready and then got in the taxi and headed to Halabja. It was actually really nice having Tariq as our driver as he spoke fluent English and we constantly had to get out at checkpoints and have our passports checked and he translated everything the soldiers were saying for us.
The Halabja Memorial is a museum dedicated to showing people the true extent of the attacks on Halabja in 1988. The first room you enter shows pictures of the people of the town before the attack, explaining how Halabja was culturally a lot more Western than most of Iraq, with many women not wearing the headscarf, a woman in charge, musical groups and an up and coming football team, all with the traditional mullets that so many great footballers had in the 80s.
The next room was a recreation of what the village looked like after the bombings, with bodies laid out as they were found in the village, with photos later on in the museum showing the historical accuracy of this room. It was horrible, especially when you looked past the falseness of the plastic models and put real people in their place.
We were told then by the guide, who Tariq translated for, that the town was bombed with normal bombs first, just so all the windows would be smashed and this was followed up by the chemical bombs. Apparently when the town first started to be bombed the people started to flee to Iran but the planes realised this and bombed the road and this is where most of the people died or were injured. Then people realised the road was being bombed and gassed so they headed back to hide in the town but the planed realised again and the town was gassed.
We were then taken into the central room where all the names of the people who died are written on the walls, though were were told some happy news that recently a boy who had been presumed dead had actually been taken off to Iran and brought up there and he’d been reunited with his mother after a DNA test confirmed his identity.
The central room was followed by two more rooms, all filled up with photographs of the deceased after the attack and the injured people in hospitals in Iran. One of these picture (see above) is of a man clutching his two baby boys, trying to shield them from the gas, but obviously failing. There were many different pictures like this, each with their own story, and the pictures of the injured people were so horrific that they made me feel sick. Even whilst writing this I feel shivers go down my spine when I think about what I saw in those photographs.
On leaving the museum we were given a book and a DVD on Halabja and we wrote in the visitors book our thoughts about what we had seen in the museum. We then asked the man who had given us the tour if he wanted a donation from us and he said that he didn’t want any money from us, all he wanted was to go back to our countries and let people know what happened there. I’m hoping in writing this I’m doing that for him.
We then got back in the car and went over to the graveyard where the mass graves of the people of Halabja are. At the entrance to the graveyard is a sign that says “Ba’aths members are not allowed to enter”, banning any supporter of Saddam’s government to enter. We headed inside and were greeted by the man who looks after the graveyard who told us that three more people had been found recently in a place nearby who were proved to have been killed in the Halabja attacks and they’d been bought to this graveyard to be buried.
There were also graves set out in the style of the war graves you find in cemeteries in France, where you find rows upon rows of graves with names on. The site at Halabja wasn’t as big as each grave had a family on it, not just one person, and you’d imagine that if they’d done it singularly then the graveyard would be five times as big.
That afternoon we headed off to Ahmadawa, the sights we’d seen and the stories we heard in Halabja still going through our minds. We stopped off for lunch and Tariq bought us these really nice goats meat wraps which were filled with grease and the floor in the place they served them was slippy from all the drippings. Watching Tariq I realised why as I saw the grease dripping off the end of the wrap and onto the floor. However I was too hungry and the food was too tasty for that to put me off so we gobbled them up, had some tea, then headed on our way again.
We eventually reached Ahmadawa which we had to pay someone in a Land Rover to take us up to the waterfall but the journey up there was great fun and the scenery was amazing and we got properly rocked about as we tried to get up to our destination, getting stopped occasionally by cows on the road…
The waterfall itself was pretty average but it was nice to see and apart from a group of shabab (lads) from Baghdad we were the only ones there. We knew we couldn’t go hiking here though as this was the place where the US tourists accidentally strayed into Iran and were taken hostage for spying…
Instead we chatted to the shabab who told us they were on holiday and they insisted that we took photos of them, which was a good laugh. It was really nice seeing such clean water though and the pools next to the waterfall looked absolutely amazing.
The journey back home was spent by Adam and Tariq chatting about Coronation Street and Eastenders, as Tariq wanted to be updated as he hadn’t been able to watch them since he left England. I promptly fell asleep and woke up when we arrive back at our hotel in Sulemani. Tariq then told us that he’d had a good day and that if we didn’t have the money and needed it for other things then we didn’t have to pay him, however we would have felt bad if we didn’t due to his kind nature and the help he gave us by translating things for us in Halabja.
That evening we popped back out to Sarchnar to try and find a place to eat Chinese but everywhere we found was too expensive, so we instead stopped at an American diner type place where we all got pizza, I enjoyed the free WiFi and we watched Eden Lake whilst eating, which it turns out is a horrifically graphic horror film.
Back at the hotel we had a few drinks then noticed some Americans out on the balcony next to our room, so they invited us round to their room and we ended up having a bit of a party in their room. They turned out to be from Damascus Uni as well so we chatted to them about their experiences in Kurdistan so far and they said they’d looked around quite a few places but they found it pretty boring, except when they went via Kirkuk and they saw tanks and burnt-out cars by the side of the road. Apparently they weren’t as impressed by the landscape of the country as we were…
We had a good evening none the less and had a few drinks with them before going to bed to get some sleep before our taxi ride back to Erbil the next day.
