Ayub Nuri’s mother hid her tears as she wept for her dead son and daughter.

Two of her children and husband had been in Halabja, a city in Iraq’s Kurdish north, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s air force attacked it with chemical weapons on March 16, 1988.

Saddam’s soldiers had already slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds before the attack on Halabja. Some died in poison gas attacks. Others were lined up and shot into pits in scenes that, but for the desert sand in place of forest and steppe, might have been lifted from the Nazis’ killing fields of Eastern Europe.

Iraq was then in the final year of a long and crushing war with Iran. The country’s Kurdish minority was simultaneously rebelling, sometimes in cooperation with Iran. Saddam’s response was genocidal. His army razed hundreds of Kurdish villages and murdered some 100,000 Kurdish non-combatants. The campaign was named “al-Anfal,” after a chapter in the Quran about the spoils of war.

“I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!” Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the architect of Anfal who came to be known as “Chemical Ali,” said in a recorded meeting with officials from Saddam’s Ba’ath Party.

The chemical attack on Halabja was carried out with similar casual brutality. Entire families perished cowering in the basements of their homes, trying to shelter and protect one another as the heavier-than-air vapours—likely mustard gas and nerve agents—seeped ever lower.

Nuri, his mother and six of his eight siblings were refugees in Iran when it happened. His father, along with a brother and sister, were back in Halabja, the family’s home. His mother assumed all three died. But then Nuri’s father walked across the mountains and knocked on their door.

“We were happy, but not quite,” Nuri says. Nuri’s brother and sister were still missing: a tragic loss, but less devastating than what other families suffered. “We were basically mourning secretly. My mother was not allowed to cry in the open because she knew that 5,000 other people had died,” he says.

Iranian army trucks brought survivors to the village in Iran where Nuri was living and unloaded them on the street.

“My mother and I fed many of the victims. I remember giving them tea and bread,” he says. “I was too young to know why, but my mother told me: ‘Don’t touch these people.’ She said just leave the food on the ground, because they were all contaminated with the chemical gas. We couldn’t invite them into the house for a shower or a meal, which is against our culture.”

A week or so later, Nuri’s missing brother arrived at the family’s temporary home in Iran. Then, against all odds, they found his sister alive in a nearby refugee camp. She had been evacuated from Halabja by helicopter. Nuri’s mother’s grief was misplaced. Her immediate family had survived.

Now a Canadian and the editor of Rudaw English, an online news site that is part of an Iraqi Kurdish media network, Nuri says the massacre would not have occurred had Iraqi Kurdistan been an independent country, one able to defend itself and with a government that did not view its own citizens as enemies.