Halabja

Halabja sits below the Hawraman mountains, about an hour and a half east of Sulaymaniyah, close enough to the Iranian border to feel it. Almost everyone arrives for the same reason. On 16 March 1988, in the final months of the Iran–Iraq war, Iraqi aircraft dropped mustard gas and nerve agents on the town; roughly 5,000 people died, most within minutes, most of them women and children. The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum, a domed building crowned by a sculpture of hands reaching skyward, holds a hall where the identified names are cut into the walls, beside recreated street scenes and the photographs taken by the first reporters to reach the town. It is a hard hour; some travellers need to sit outside afterwards. The martyrs' cemetery, with its mass graves, is a short drive on. Only when that is done do people turn to the terraced stone villages of Tawela and Biyara and the Ahmed Awa waterfall. Iraq made Halabja its nineteenth governorate in 2014.