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I read the Robin Miller article early last year and it had a strong impact on me. I guess for me the bottom line is that if there are 5000 dead there should also be 5000 graves of some description somewhere. Especially considering that Iran controlled the town for at least 4 months after the incident (ignoring HRW claims that the Iraqis bulldozed the town and left the gas attack victims to rot in the street ..... four months after the attack - yeap they really did claim that :D). Using the HRW report we see a footnote that claims 3000 victims were buried in the nearby village of Anab "under a thin layer of earth" and that they were now contaminating the groundwater. No source was given for the claim. Are they still there (that was 4 years after the event), what happened to them? Again if anyone knows what has happened to bodies (surely Iran, the Islamic republic, would have tried to have follow Islamic rites as far as possible - not just bulldoze them into a trench), I can only repeat I would be very interested. I thought I had found my answer with this picture of Colin Powell at the "Halabja Mass Grave Site Ceremony". http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/pix/events/secretary/2003/24270.htm It looked very much like a mass grave cemetary to me, but guess what? It isnt! The sting can be found here http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/paul_halabja030915.html "Against a backdrop of 1,076 symbolic white headstones in the local graveyard, one for each family that lost members, Powell pledged that the world would never forget Halabja. " I am guessing this translates to this being a "symbolic" graveyard. A virtual mass grave, that is almost as good as the real thing - certainly as far as manipulating mass consciousness is concerned. At least that is my interpretation - but its only armchair analysis. I am very interested if I am incorrect. Again surely someone must know where the bodies are and how many. A useful resource on what was said back in 1988 can be found here http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Iran/Chemical/2340_2960.html But to be honest it wont spread that much light. Clearly the whole issue was very much caught up in Iran's propaganda as it began to decisively lose the war. But so many different accounts, particularly of the gas used seems even at the time no one bothered to give a definitive account - the Red Cross and the UN didnt even bother to visit. ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk