German companies provided former regime with chemical weapons

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The Society for Threatened Peoples will disclose names of German companies that supplied the former Iraqi regime with chemical weapons, the head of Halabja’s municipal council said on Thursday. “We will meet on Thursday with the chairman of the Society for Threatened Peoples to discuss the matter,” Khadr Kareem Mohammed, who represents Halabja at a conference on persecuted peoples in the German capital Berlin, told IraqiNews.com by phone. “The chairman of the society keeps documents condemning a number of German companies that provided the former regime with chemical weapons,” Mohammed noted. Halabja is a Kurdish town in a majority Kurdish area of Iraq about 150 miles (240 km) northeast of Baghdad and 8-10 miles from the Iranian border. The town’s population is largely Kurdish. Halabja was liberated by Kurdish Peshmerga supported by Iran in the final phase of the Iran-Iraq war. On 16 March 1988, after two days of conventional artillery attacks, Iraqi planes dropped gas canisters on the town. The town and surrounding district were attacked with bombs, artillery fire, and chemical weapons, the latter of which proved most devastating. At least 5,000 people died as an immediate result of the chemical attack and it is estimated that a further 7,000 people were injured or suffered long term illness. The Society for Threatened Peoples is a human rights organization based in Göttingen, Germany. It attempts to create awareness of and protect minority peoples around the world who are threatened by oppressive governments. The group states on its website that it “campaigns against all forms of genocide and ethnocide”. It has sections and offices in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile and Iraqi Kurdistan. SS (S) 1