preview

How Did Western States Use Chemical Weapons In The Iran-Iraq War

Decent Essays

Iran and Iraq had been in war since 1980 and Iran had used chemical weapons in the war since 1984 against enemy soldiers but in 1988 something even worse happened – chemical weapons were used against civilians. This was a difficult time for Western countries who were allies with Iraq because using chemical weapons was considered illegal by international rules but not by Iraq – and allies chose to close one eye. In this essay I am going to discuss when and where were chemical weapons used, by and against whom and how did Western countries react.
One of the darkest chapters of the war was the Al-Anfal campaign which culminated in 1988. It was a genocidal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq after fighting for years with the peshmerga insurgents who were fighting for their independence which was unacceptable for Iraqi leaders because Kurdish lands were very rich with oil. The most powerful man in the area was Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of President Saddam Hussein who was …show more content…

Many Western countries had been backing Saddam’s Iraq during the war with arms and financing like Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Iraq even managed to convince the Reagan administration that Iran was behind all this but it did not take long for others to see the truth. What makes the truth even worse is that Americans provided Iraqis with intelligence about Iranian troops and their location although CIA knew Saddam’s forces were going to act with chemical weapons on it. They calculated coldly that using chemical weapons was better than Iraq losing the war to post-revolution Islamic Iran.
One of the biggest crimes against humanity of recent decades has been talked about far too little and much of that is because many Western countries were linked to it. Saddam’s Iraq used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians during the Al-Anfal campaign and in attacking the city of Halabja killing thousands and crippling even

Get Access