A Kurdish witness at Saddam Hussein's genocide trial on Thursday described how panicked villagers fled clouds of deadly gas as government forces bombed northern Iraq with chemical weapons in 1988. Abdullah Saeed, 79, said clouds of smoke drifted to his village when Saddam's forces bombed two nearby towns in April 1988.
"People in my village were screaming that they were contaminated by chemical weapons," said Saeed, according to the AP. "We loaded children, women and other persons contaminated by chemical weapons onto three trucks and fled to another village."
The farmer said that Saddam's forces stopped the trucks, arrested the passengers and took them to a detention center in southern Iraq where sanitary conditions were appalling. He and another Kurdish witness said hundreds of people at the detention center died of malnutrition and diseases such as cholera.
A second witness told how the dirty water they finally were allowed made them throw up and gave them diarrhea. "When the doctor came to check us, he said we had cholera," said Baqr Qadr Mohammed, 72. "Since the days of Adam and Eve, no nation suffered like our nation."
The court adjourned until Oct. 30.
