“It Smelled Like Apples”

 

They had been warned for months, though they had lived there forever.   One of the oldest tribes in a small village set tight against of the rugged mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, they lived in the same house in the same neighborhood with the same neighbors.  It was the kind of sameness that the village youth rejected while simultaneously and unconsciously internalizing its comforts.  Once the invigorating juvenile rebellion eventually and inevitably died away,  however, they simply accepted its succor. 

Halabja, view from a mountaintop

It was against this backdrop of modesty that the family would have to undertake the biggest decision of its lifetime.  Some feared the threats; others could not imagine abandoning their world.  For refugees are what they would become should they decide to leave, and rare does the path of refugee lead home again.

They attacked during lunch time.  The Sarin gas, delivered by MiG jets, exploded on the unsuspecting village.  It poisoned the air, which carried its lethal currents through the town.  It poisoned the water, which ran strong and fast and cold from the melted snow of early spring.  It consumed the entire city, capturing its final moment in a macabre still-life.  It was the largest-scale chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in human history.  It smelled like apples.

 

The survivors of the Halabja massacre on March 16, 1988 all have stories.  Arslan’s family moved to Sulaimaniyya to stay with a sister before the attack.  Afan, his sister, four brothers and parents walked over the mountains and into Iran.  They lived for one year in the tent cities that tragically multiplied on Iraq’s northern borders.  Afan would be born in one of those tent cities. 

A tent city in Iran

But there would be no work there.  A year later, Afan’s family of six would move again, this time to Erbil, the Arabic name for the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.  But after two years, they would pack up and move to “New Halabja,” a grotesque creation from the country’s repulsive dictator.  Many felt Saddam built New Halabja so he could attack its survivors.

But those fears would not be tested: Afan’s family eventually returned to Halabja a few years later.  They would arrive on the very spot where their home had once been, and there they attempted to rebuild what was lost in the interregnum.  But the house, like the recent internationally negotiated no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan north of the 36^th parallel, was incomplete.  Indeed, only two of its rooms were salvageable.  Afan’s four brothers soon moved married and moved out.  Structurally, it stands much the same as it did after repairs in 1994, but it is repaired and furnished on the inside.

The newly built Halabja memorial building, with the charred and scratched welcome sign in the foreground

 

 In 2006 there was a riot in Halabja against the KRG for failing to deliver on its promise to improve the village’s basic services.  Of all things, the rioters turned on a monument dedicated to the victims of the 1988 attack and burned down.  Some claim the riots were orchestrated by Iran, their border in plain sight.  Others simply claim the village wanted to be heard by the KRG, and the monument to their tragedy was their most visible symbol.  Either way, it is a quaint village, full of tragedy, ambiguity, and stunning beauty.

The graveyard of 1988 victims, Halabja