The Dead Bombers of Halabja

In the 1980s, the city of Habbaniyah in west­ern Iraq was the site of one of Saddam Hussein’s chem­i­cal weapons plants. With the Kurds in north­ern Iraq in upris­ing, in 1988 Saddam ordered Iraqi Air Force units to drop chem­i­cal weapons on the rebel town of Halabja. Weapons were trucked from Habbaniyah to nearby Al Taqaddum air base. The sub­se­quent gas bomb­ing of Halabja killed 5,000 peo­ple.
I’ve been to Halabja. I’ve seen the mas­sive ceme­tery and the recently-​​built memo­r­ial and I’ve talked to attack sur­vivors and peo­ple who lost friends and fam­ily there. Now I’ve seen Habbaniyah, from a dis­tance, and Al Taqaddum close-​​up. In a remote cor­ner of the air base, now a Marine Corps logis­tics hub, there is a row of derelict Soviet-​​built Il-​​28 Beagle bombers from the for­mer Iraqi Air Force, quite pos­si­bly the very bombers that attacked Halabja 18 years ago.
I’m a huge avi­a­tion buff, and the Il-​​28 with its clean lines and anachro­nis­tic rear tur­ret is one of my favorite Cold War air­craft. Under any other cir­cum­stances, I’d be thrilled to see these museum pieces and appalled at their neglect. But with Halabja on my mind, I feel only a sense of jus­tice — and anger — entirely mis­di­rected at these life­less pieces of metal.
In the first Gulf War we bombed the snot out of Habbaniyah and Al Taqaddum. Twelve years later we occu­pied the air base and found its res­i­dent air­craft either buried in sand or, like the Beagles, aban­doned. Their pilots were dead or, at the very least, no longer pilots. Their engines were rusted out. Their wind­screens were clouded over. Their tur­ret guns drooped.
The machines that killed Halabja were dead.
–David Axe

January 23rd, 2006 | Axe in Iraq (and Elsewhere) | 17916 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/01/23/the-dead-bombers-of-halabja/The+Dead+Bombers+of+Halabja2006-01-23+23%3A21%3A35murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.