Doctors testify about Kurds stricken in 1987

The doctor’s testimony would have been shocking, if he weren’t in Baghdad.

As he testified Thursday at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial about struggling to treat a crowd of vomiting villagers suffering from blindness and from blisters and rashes on their skin, sectarian violence raged on the streets outside.

Only a few reporters and about two dozen observers came to view the proceedings. Hussein himself remained subdued, unlike during his previous trial, when he frequently erupted in angry outbursts.

With Hussein already sentenced to hang for the deaths -- in the wake of a 1982 assassination attempt against him -- of 148 Shiite Muslim men and boys from the village of Dujayl, and with horrific violence an everyday occurrence in Baghdad and beyond, Iraq is largely ignoring the former president’s current trial over a 1980s military campaign against ethnic Kurds in which chemical weapons are said to have been used.

On Thursday, the testimony was delayed by a bomb scare at the nearby Rashid Hotel in the heavily fortified Green Zone.

And once it began, Hussein, 69, sat slouched in his chair, staring ahead, silent and impassive. Although defense lawyers had vowed to boycott the trial, some showed up this week, but they too remained largely quiet Thursday.

Those who attended heard two Kurdish doctors testify anonymously about their initial encounters with victims of gas attacks in Kurdish villages in 1987.

The first physician, a cleanshaven man in his 40s, described standing in the yard of his clinic near the village of Khetia at dusk April 16 as 10 helicopters and half a dozen military planes dropped bombs over the nearby countryside. The bombs were described as containing a sweet-smelling gas that was likened to the odor of garlic, apples, grass or flowers.

By 3 a.m., a crowd of villagers had reached his clinic seeking treatment, including women and children blinded by the gas and with other telltale symptoms.

“We didn’t have any way to treat them,” the doctor said.

He told the victims to bathe themselves in a nearby well. As Iraqi troops advanced on neighboring villages with tanks and artillery, the doctor said, he fled to the mountains, taking staff and a few ailing villagers with him.

“It was so difficult because we were carrying them and in some cases dragging them because they couldn’t see -- they were blind,” he said.

The doctor said the attacks continued into 1988. At one point, he too developed a rash and began coughing up blood, he said.

The second doctor, who worked at a hospital in the Kurdish north, described similar attacks on the same day in 1987. Victims included a mother who arrived at the hospital blinded along with her 6-year-old son.

Another boy, a village cowherd named Shamsa, arrived with a rash and breathing problems, the doctor said. Within 10 days, blisters covered the boy’s skin, and he died.

A defense attorney challenged the doctor’s description of the bombs as “chemical weapons,” suggesting that the symptoms the physician saw might have been related to other diseases.

The witness agreed that red eyes are a common symptom, but he added that the victims’ combination of symptoms was unique, and the chief judge agreed.

Prosecutors believe as many as 180,000 Kurds died during the so-called Anfal campaign. Last week, an American forensic archeologist, Michael “Sonny” Trimble, presented evidence from 17 mass graves. Nearly 80% of the remains belonged to women and children, with 90% of the children ages 13 and younger. The evidence showed that men had been separated from women and children before being sent to grave sites, where some were forced to squat while awaiting gunshots to the back of the head.

Hussein and six codefendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges of genocide as well as crimes against humanity as a result of the Anfal, or “spoils of war,” campaign.

The deposed president and two codefendants were sentenced to death Nov. 5 for crimes against humanity related to the killings of the villagers from Dujayl.

Although lawyers filed an appeal of Hussein’s death sentence with the Iraqi High Tribunal on Sunday, he could still be executed next month.

On Thursday, some of Hussein’s current codefendants denied responsibility for the Anfal campaign.

Hussein Rashid Mohammed, former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces, said that the killings described Thursday took place before he came to power and that the court was defining the campaign’s timeline too broadly.

Those charged should not bear responsibility for killings they did not commit, Mohammed said, repeating a common Iraqi saying: “We don’t want to tend another person’s fire.”

After a little over an hour of testimony, the chief judge adjourned the case for two weeks. When the trial reconvenes, documents related to the Anfal campaign will be considered, U.S. officials said.

molly.hennessy-fiske

@latimes.com

Times staff writer Suhail Ahmad contributed to this report.