Kurdish boy who 'died' in Halabja gas attack is reunited with his mother

www.timesonline.co.uk/
For two decades, Fatima Hama Saleh thought that all her children had died in a gas attack carried out by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish town of Halabja — the worst atrocity of the former Iraqi dictator’s rule.

But now she has been reunited with her son, Ali Pour, at a dramatic meeting after DNA tests confirmed that the young man, now aged 21, was the infant she became separated from when chemical weapons rained down on the Kurdish market town in 1988.

“I’m in a dream,” said Mr Pour, as he embraced and comforted his weeping mother. She replied: “I wonder if it is a dream or a gift from God.”

Mother and son were talking to each other through an interpreter because Mr Pour speaks only his adopted tongue farsi and not his native Kurdish or Iraq’s official language, Arabic.

Mrs Saleh revealed his birth name, Zimnaku Mohammed Saleh, and recalled the day Halabja was attacked, including the panic the family felt when their home was enveloped by a deadly cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX.

“We didn’t know where to go,” Mrs Saleh said. “Zimnaku, the four-month-old, was on my lap and suddenly my older son screamed saying: ‘Mother, I feel like I’m burning’. I tried to help him and my other sons, too. But it was in vain. I saw them dying in front of me. I collapsed and the next thing I remember is lying in a hospital bed in Tehran.”

Mr Pour’s adoptive uncle explained what happened next. “The baby Ali survived for three days,” said Habib Hamid Pour. He was found by the Iranian military, which moved into Halabja after the attack, and took him to Iran along with other survivors.

Eventually he was placed with a family in the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad and was raised as an Iranian.

“My adopted mother was nice,” said Mr Pour, dressed in traditional Kurdish clothing of baggy pants, tunic and scarf tucked into his belt. “When I entered primary school at age 6, she told me I am from the Kurdish people of Halabja. She said I should return some day to meet my relatives.”

Four months ago, his adoptive mother was killed in a car accident. “I felt lonely and I felt a strange feeling calling me to return to the arms of my relatives,” he said. “I decided to go back.”

He contacted Iranian officials who kept records on the Halabja survivors brought to Iran. They contacted the Halabja government, which said six families were missing a boy who would now be Mr Pour’s age. A judge ordered a DNA test to be carried out by a medical lab in Jordan.

The massacre in Halabja on March 16, 1988, was part of Saddam’s Anfal Campaign that killed up to 200,000 Kurds. Three-quarters of the 5,000 killed in Halabja were women and children, making it the worst gas attack carried out against civilians.

Four of Mrs Saleh’s five children died in the attack as well as her husband, Mr Pour’s father. After the reunion, she said: “I will not die in sorrow and grief, after all the miseries I have experienced.”

She had learnt from a television report that a surviving child was looking for his family and applied to do the DNA test. At the meeting of the six participating families, shouts of joy eventually broke the silence that had greeted the announcement.

Mrs Saleh stood up and then fell to her seat as she took in what had been said. “Thank you God! You brought back my son Zimnaku,” she cried. “It’s like my whole family has come back to life — my son has returned.”