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The Halabja Massacre: Science Finally Confirms That Industrial Poisoning Is Somewhat Stressful

Buck Valor
Written by
Buck ValorPersiflating Non-Journalist
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
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A stark, high-contrast photograph of an abandoned, rusted gas mask resting on a pile of dusty, official-looking humanitarian reports. The background is a desolate, cracked desert landscape under a sickly yellow sky. The lighting is harsh and cynical.

In a stunning display of bureaucratic redundancy, a new report has emerged to inform the breathing world that the survivors of the 1988 Halabja massacre are—wait for it—traumatized. It took three and a half decades, but the collective genius of the humanitarian research complex has finally deduced that having your family, your neighbors, and your very skin dissolved by a cocktail of mustard gas and sarin might lead to a bit of a localized case of the blues. They call it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a clinical term designed to sanitize the fact that the international community watched a chemical genocide in real-time and decided that the paperwork for an intervention was simply too heavy to lift.

The 1988 attack, orchestrated by Saddam Hussein’s charmingly homicidal regime during the Al-Anfal campaign, remains one of the most efficient uses of chemistry ever recorded. It was a masterpiece of human depravity. And yet, the report treats the resulting trauma as a fresh discovery, as if the survivors have just been feeling a little ‘under the weather’ for thirty-six years. The study highlights the need for 'better health and support services,' which is international-speak for 'we should probably send a few more clipboards and some generic antidepressants to the mass graves.' It is a quintessential example of the humanitarian grift: wait for the blood to dry, wait for the bodies to turn to dust, and then arrive with a survey to ask the ghosts if they feel adequately supported by the current geopolitical infrastructure.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On the Right, we had the cold-blooded realists of the 1980s who viewed Saddam as a necessary evil, a secular bulwark against the Iranian revolution. They were the ones who looked at the shopping lists for 'agricultural chemicals' and 'pesticides' being shipped to Baghdad and gave a knowing, profitable wink. To the conservative mind, a few thousand dead Kurds were a small price to pay for regional stability and a favorable oil price. They didn’t care about the gas then, and they certainly don’t care about the PTSD now, unless it can be used as a rhetorical cudgel to justify the next ill-fated desert excursion. They view these survivors not as human beings with shattered psyches, but as historical footnotes in a ledger of acceptable losses.

On the Left, we have the performative mourners. They love a good massacre, provided it happened long enough ago that they don't have to actually advocate for any messy military intervention to stop it. They treat Halabja as a moral museum piece, a way to signal their virtuous outrage against the 'military-industrial complex' while doing absolutely nothing to help the people currently living in the ruins. They talk about 'unrecognized pain' as if the pain was simply hiding under a rug, rather than being actively ignored by every major power on the planet. Their solution is always more 'awareness,' the most useless currency in the history of human suffering. Awareness doesn't filter the poison out of the soil, and it certainly doesn't stop a survivor from reliving the moment their children stopped breathing.

The report notes that the trauma is 'ongoing.' What a revelation. It turns out that when you use a population as a chemistry experiment, the results tend to linger. The 'Post' in PTSD is particularly insulting here, as it implies the trauma has ended. In that region, the trauma isn't 'post' anything; it is a permanent atmospheric condition. The survivors aren't suffering from a memory; they are living in a tomb that the rest of the world has decorated with 'Never Again' banners that are fading in the sun. The call for 'better health services' in a region perpetually destabilized by the very people who funded the original gas attacks is the height of irony. It’s like a serial arsonist offering the survivors a discount on a smoke detector.

We live in a world where the act of killing is industrialized and the act of caring is bureaucratized. The Halabja massacre was a success for the arms dealers and a success for the despots. The subsequent 'studies' are a success for the NGOs and the academics who need to pad their CVs with data on human misery. Everyone gets something out of the deal except the people who were actually gassed. They get to sit in a clinic and wait for a doctor who isn't coming, to discuss a pain that everyone recognizes but no one intends to cure. The tragedy isn't that we didn't know they were hurting; the tragedy is that we knew, we know, and we will continue to do nothing until the next report comes out in 2060 to tell us that the dead are still dead.

This story is an interpreted work of social commentary based on real events. Source: DW

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