On 19 April 2025, Pugwash Iraq organised a conference in Sulaymaniyya, in northeast Iraq, to commemorate the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish Iraqis in 1988 and to examine current international efforts to ban chemical weapons in the region and beyond. The conference was combined with a commemorative visit to Halabja the following day.
The choice of Halabja as a central theme was deliberate, symbolically linking the past with the future. Thirty-seven years earlier, on 16 March 1988, Iraq’s military forces had struck the Kurdish town of Halabja, releasing chemical weapons that killed between three and five thousand people — almost all of them civilians, an estimated three-quarters of them women and children. The effects were not confined to those directly exposed: genetic damage from mustard and nerve agents has passed to subsequent generations, making their descendants transgenerational victims of chemical warfare.
The conference was structured around three sessions addressing the genocidal use of chemical weapons against the Kurds during the 1980–88 Gulf War, developments in the international regime banning chemical warfare, and the prospects for a zone free of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons across the Middle East and North Africa. The event was the first major public activity of Pugwash Iraq since the group’s establishment, and was attended by Iraqi and international scientists, diplomats, and policy experts, as well as Pugwash President Dr. Hussain Al-Shahristani, who conducted a press conference on the occasion.
