Senate Probers See ‘Genocide’ in Iraq Gas Use

WASHINGTON — Investigators for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a report that includes graphic eyewitness accounts of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks, said Wednesday that Iraq’s use of poison gas last month left Kurdish towns and villages near the Turkish border an empty wasteland and may have killed “hundreds of thousands” of Kurds farther south.

“Iraq’s policy has the characteristics of genocide,” said the Senate staff report, based mainly on interviews conducted by two Senate investigators with some of the 65,000 Kurds who escaped across the Iraqi border to Turkey in a sudden surge in late August.

Iraq’s ‘Final Solution’

“Poison gas is Iraq’s final solution to its Kurdish insurrection,” the investigators charged.

The report comes as Congress moves toward adoption of a bill that would block U.S. trade with Iraq until the President certifies that the Baghdad regime has ended its use of chemical weapons.

The measure, passed unanimously by the Senate on Sept. 9, is scheduled to be reviewed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee today. In releasing the study, Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) called on the House to adopt the Senate bill quickly.

The use of chemical weapons was outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

The Reagan Administration, which has denounced Iraq’s chemical attacks, opposes the legislation, insisting that efforts to isolate Iraq diplomatically would be more effective. The proposed sanctions would hamper Iraq’s plan to rebuild its economy in the wake of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, an effort that is expected to bring contracts to many American and European firms.

In dramatic accounts of what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called chemical attacks on about 30 villages from Aug. 25 to 28, Kurdish refugees told of Iraqi planes appearing at dawn to drop canisters that spewed foul-smelling yellow clouds.

“They did not produce a big noise,” one resident of the town of Dahok told the visiting Senate staff members. “A yellowish cloud was created, and there was a smell of rotten parsley or onions. There were no wounds. People would breathe the smoke, then fall down and blood would come from their mouths.”

“In our village, 200 to 300 people died,” Bashir Shemseddin, a Kurdish villager, told the investigators. “All the animals and birds died. All the trees dried up. It smelled like something burned. The whole world turned yellow.”

The investigators concluded that the victims’ descriptions of the attacks suggested that Iraq had used both mustard gas--which burns, causes vomiting and blocks respiration after several hours--and a nerve agent, which causes immediate death.

No Traces

So far, however, Iraq has not permitted international experts to go to areas where chemical weapons were said to have been used, and Turkish medical authorities say that they have not found traces of the chemicals in refugees that would allow them to conclude that chemical weapons were used.

The Iraqis have denied using gas against the Kurds.

The Senate investigators, however, returned with the remains of bees, which have died in massive quantities inside and near Iraq’s Kurdistan region, for U.S. chemists to examine.

Kurdish refugees told the Senate investigators of brutal efforts by Iraqi forces to block their escape to Turkey.

After a series of chemical bombings, one survivor recounted, “they deployed forces to the border so that people could not escape.”

“When the people tried to pass, they were shot,” added Ekrem Mai of Dahok. “Whatever they saw, they shot--women, children, young and old.”

Reports of Mass Graves

In the town of Baze, survivors reported that Iraqi forces opened fire with machine guns on everyone as they tried to flee Aug. 28. The Iraqi forces then used bulldozers to push the bodies into mass graves. By one account, 1,300 perished there.

The authors of the Senate report--Peter W. Galbraith and Christopher Van Hollen Jr.--contended that the international community’s failure to act against Iraq has encouraged Iraqi leaders to believe that they could use the weapons without fear of reprisal.

“Right now, the Kurds are paying the price for past global indifference to Iraqi chemical use,” the two concluded. “The failure to act now could ultimately leave every nation in peril.”