Iraq’s ‘Chemical Ali’ infamous for 1988 gas attack

Published 10:23 am Monday, January 25, 2010

BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, who was hanged today, ordered the infamous poison gas attack on the northern Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 that killed 5,000 people — the biggest chemical weapons attack on civilians in history — and earned him the chilling moniker “Chemical Ali.”

Al-Majid was executed a week after he received his fourth death sentence on Jan. 17, the final one for the Halabja attack. He bore a striking resemblance to Hussein and was one of the most brutal members of the dictator’s inner circle.

The general led sweeping military campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s that claimed tens of thousands of lives — wiping out entire villages in attacks against rebellious Kurds and cracking down on Shiites in southern Iraq.

He was one of the last high-profile members of the former Sunni-led regime still on trial in Iraq.

Al-Majid was a warrant officer and motorcycle messenger in the army before Hussein’s Baath party led a coup in 1968. He was promoted to general and served as defense minister from 1991-95, as well as a regional party leader.

In 1988, as the eight-year Iran-Iraq war was winding down, al-Majid commanded a scorched-earth campaign known as Anfal to wipe out a Kurdish rebellion in the north. An estimated 100,000 people — most of them civilians — were killed in less than a year.

Later, al-Majid boasted about the attacks, as well as the separate March 16, 1988, gas attack on Halabja, where an estimated 5,000 people died.

During the trials of figures in Hussein’s regime, prosecutors played audiotapes of what they said were conversations between Hussein and al-Majid.

In one of the recordings, al-Majid was heard vowing to “leave no Kurd (alive) who speaks the Kurdish language.”

Poison gas had largely fallen out of use after its horrendous effects in World War I until Hussein used it as a way to stave off Iran’s superior numbers during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

“For Saddam Hussein, chemical weapons were a force multiplier, a way of countering the Iranian human-wave infantry tactics that were overwhelming Iraqi positions,” said Jonathan Tucker, author of “War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaida” and a Washington-based senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Under al-Majid’s leadership, chemical weapons became the Iraqi tool of choice against the villages of the rebellious Kurds hidden in the mountainous terrain of the north — making the victims primarily civilians this time instead of enemy soldiers.

Survivors of the Anfal campaign described to the court at al-Majid’s trial in 2006 how during the gas attacks the air would fill with the smell of rotten apples before people would start dropping.

The 5,000 dead in the single attack in Halabja represents the biggest chemical weapons attack against civilians in history, and the world could no longer turn a blind eye to Iraq’s tactics.

“I think the large-scale use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war gave impetus to the chemical weapons convention,” said Tucker.

The development, production and stockpiling, as well as use, of chemical weapons were banned under a 1997 U.N. convention. To date 188 countries have ratified the convention; only Angola, Somalia, Egypt, Syria, Israel, North Korea and Myanmar have not.

Al-Majid was also linked to crackdowns on Shiites in southern Iraq, including the bloody suppression of their 1991 uprising, which also involved the use of poisonous gas. He was also sentenced to death for that.

After that uprising was crushed, Iraqi opposition groups released video showing al-Majid executing captured rebels with pistol shots to the head and kicking others in the face as they sat on the ground.

His two other death sentences were for the Anfal campaign and for a 1999 crackdown that sought to quell a Shiite backlash in response to the slaying of a Shiite cleric who opposed the regime.

The previous sentences were not been carried out in part because Halabja survivors wanted to have their case against him heard.

Al-Majid was Hussein’s “hatchet man,” Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, remarked when the general was touring Arab capitals seeking support two months before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. “He has been involved in some of Iraq’s worst crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Al-Majid was no less brutal with his own family.

His nephew and Hussein’s son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, was in charge for many years of Iraq’s clandestine weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan with his brother, Saddam Kamel, who was married to Hussein’s other daughter.

Both brothers were lured back to Iraq in February 1996 and killed on their uncle’s orders, together with several other family members.

Al-Majid also served as governor of Kuwait during Iraq’s seven-month occupation of the emirate in 1990-1991. Days before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Hussein put him in charge of the key southern sector of Iraq.