Zeynep Ay/JINHA

HALABJA – On the 27^th anniversary of the Halabja massacre, wounds are still fresh.

Tomorrow will mark 27 years since the Ba'ath regime killed 5000 Kurds and wounded between 7000 and 10,000 othersin an aerial attack against the civilians of Halabja, most of them women and children.

The aerial chemical bombardment left survivors with serious illnesses, including skin, throat and lung cancer. The majority of babies born after the attack were born with physical disabilities.According to recent research, the number of babies born with disabilities in the years following the attack is slightly higher than was the case after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.Because of ongoing war in Southern Kurdistan, serious rehabilitation never took place.

Şewnim Abdullah Mixemed, a Halabja survivor, spoke to our agency about the massacre, in which she lost dozens of her relatives, including four children and all of her siblings. Like many of the people of Halabja, Şewnim has been struggling with cancer for the last eight years.

"The people of Halabja are uncomfortable with the state," said Şewnim bluntly. She said the current political parties have all been a disappointment.

"The parties are after political profit," Şewnim said, explaining that although Halabja was legally declared a city, it has never even received a governor due to political neglect, let alone received financial aid or rehabilitation services.

"This year there aren't even memorial activities. Their excuse is that their budgets are tight," said Şewnim of the government of Iraq's richest region.

"The Kurdish people have been facing massacres from the Ottoman period until today," said TalarEmin Ali, of Sulaymaniyah University's History Department. "Halabja was one of the biggest. But unfortunately neither the state nor the international community has given the material and moral support necessary here."

Talar said that although Kurds have been in power in Halabja for 25 years now, there are still unidentified bodies from the massacre. The locations of the hundreds of children who fled the massacre also remain unknown and under researched.

"If we forget the Halabja massacre, we open the way for more massacres like it," said Talar, mentioning other state massacres that preceded and followed Halabja, including theDêrsîm genocide of 1938 and the Roboski massacre of 2011.

Şewnim said she wanted to see the regional government put pressure on the state of Iraq to recognize what happened in Halabja. The attack should be recognized around the world as genocide, she said.

(zd/fk/cm)