A new report finds ongoing trauma affects survivors of a 1988 chemical weapons attack on Kurdish Iraqis in Halabja and nearby communities, highlighting the need for better health and support services.Some 182,000 Kurds living in Iraqi Kurdistan were killed in 1988 by chemical weapons launched by Saddam Hussein's regime in a series of attacks known as the "Anfal campaign".

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That campaign included chemical attacks on Halabja, a village on the Iraq-Iran border, and other communities.

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Five thousand people are estimated to have died in Halabja. They were the victims of sarin and VX nerve agents, and mustard gas.

The scars of that atrocity, now known as the Halabja Massacre, are still felt today — by about 6,000 people who survived and other Kurds living in the region.

Clinical psychologist Ibrahim Mohammed studied the experiences of 500 survivors to quantify the attack's lasting impact on people's mental health.

His group found around 4 in 5 survivors met clinical criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and around 3 in 4 had clinical depression or anxiety, but also found that fewer than 1 in 5 had received treatment for these conditions.

Mohammed did not respond to DW's requests for comment. However, in an editorial note attached to the report, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, said, "even decades after the chemical gas attack, many survivors showed severe PTSD, depression, and anxiety."

Survivors taking part in the study also reported ongoing symptoms of pain, fatigue and other chronic health problems.

A long shadow of stigma and suffering

Yerevan Saeed was six years old when then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime attacked Halabja, forcing his family to escape the city.

Now based in the US as Director of the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace at the American University, Saeed said the attack looms large in the psyche of Halabja City and surrounding communities targeted in the Anfal campaign.

"Many people are still trying to understand why that happened, many people are still trying to understand why they could not save their beloved ones," Saeed told DW.

He tells of parents having to leave their dying children, children leaving their dying parents, and families having to flee to Iran to live in refugee camps.

Saeed said healing, for many Kurds, remains unrealized, stemming from both generational trauma and the notable absence of any recognition by the international community that the attacks amounted to a genocide.

"The nonrecognition of the attack as a genocide, that's a big, big issue for us," said Saeed. "The Kurds have been trying to have not just Halabja but also the Anfal campaign recognized as genocide, as a way to recognize our pain."

But Saeed said the Kurdish people had had little to no success in these efforts. As a result, he said, "there is this collective memory within the Halabja population that has been transferred from generation to generation."

Beyond individual psychological and health challenges, Saeed said stigmatization persists in Kurdish communities.

It's something that Faraidoun Moradi, a Kurdish clinician and researcher at the University of Gothenburg's Center for Disaster Medicine, has also witnessed on visits to the region.

Moradi, originally from Iran, said chemical contamination anxiety is persistent among survivors, and also those not exposed to chemical weapons.

This includes mistaken beliefs that illness caused by exposure can be inherited by children or can be transmitted, like a contagion, to other people.

"People do not socialize with exposed people," Moradi told DW.

Not the first study to show impact of Halabja

The new study by Mohammed and his team draws on many survivor accounts, but it is not the first.

Survivors of chemical attacks have taken part in multiple studies to understand how the massacre continues to affect their lives.

Gothenburg-based Moradi, who was not involved in Mohammed's study, has conducted his own research with Kurdish survivor communities in Sweden.

Moradi said Mohammed's report supported his previous findings.

"[It] confirmed what we have found in ours, actually, that survivors of Halabja chemical attacks continue to suffer from not just the psychological but somatic [trauma], even almost four decades after exposure."

Moradi said the study would have been stronger if data on chemical exposure among survivors had been recorded, and if a control group of Kurds who had not been exposed to chemical weapons was included for comparison.

In his own research, Moradi found survivors exposed to mustard gas have long-term impaired lung function, poorer psychological health and quality of life, including education and employment outcomes, when compared to Kurds who were not exposed to chemical weapons.

Halabja survivors need 'culturally sensitive mental health services'

Mohammed's study proposes fresh actions to address the needs of Kurdish chemical attack survivors.

"There has been long negligence in attending to the needs of chemical attack survivors, and services in Kurdistan are scant," writes Mohammed in his report. "Besides recognition, survivors need access to culturally sensitive mental health services, programs to trace missing family members, and official support for compensation and ongoing care."

Moradi, who has compared quality of life outcomes between survivors based in Kurdistan and those now living in Sweden, has found a lower quality of physical and emotional health among those who have remained in Halabja.

That may be due to poor access to mental health services within the regions affected by the 1988 attacks — and a greater access to such services in other places like Sweden.

"People certainly need psychological help," Saeed said. "In the Kurdistan region, we don't have clinics, we don't have anything like that, especially in Halabja, to help people with these kinds of trauma after what's happened."

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 20, 2026 11:50 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).