Kurdish-Iraqi team to visit Iran in search for Halabja’s lost children

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Baghdad and Erbil will form a joint delegation to go to Iran and search for the children who went missing in Halabja after the 1988 chemical attack, a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) minister said on Thursday.

“Together as a team, we had an intensive discussion on determining the necessary mechanisms to go [to Iran], search for and return the missing children of Halabja according to international standard procedures,” Minister of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs Abdullah Haji Mahmood told journalists.

He said that a Board for Determining the Fate of Missing Children has been created to focus on the issue.

In the last days of the eight-year-long war between Iran and Iraq, warplanes of the former regime of dictator Saddam Hussein rained down a lethal cocktail of chemical weapons on the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988, killing at least 5,000 people, mostly women and children, while injuring and displacing hundreds of others.

In the aftermath of the attack, many children were separated from their families and taken to Iran. Estimates are that a couple of hundred children went missing, but fewer than 20 have been reunited with their families.

Mahmood said the KRG delegation held meetings in Baghdad for two days with the federal Foreign Ministry, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, and the Iraqi ambassador to Iran.

The meetings will continue in Erbil to “take scientific, legal, and final measures to collect data and information. "

The Iranian ambassador to Iraq expressed his readiness to assist the board and said that Tehran is ready to cooperate, according to the minister.

The Halabja chemical attack, which was recognized as an act of genocide by Iraq's High Court in 2010, has left a permanent scar on the historical memory of the Kurdish people. It was part of the Baathist regime’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds that killed over 182,000 people.