This suggests that the anthrax source may be Iraq:
Iranian Soldiers Offer Grim Glimpse
By BRIAN MURPHY
.c The Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Animals wobble and collapse. Birds drop lifeless from trees. People scratch wildly at blinded eyes and shudder with their dying gasps. Survivors stagger away, wheezing and vomiting blood.
It's a scene the world dreads: terrorists striking with a chemical weapon. It's also the memory of Iranian soldiers still suffering from the grip of poison gas more than a dozen years after exposure on the battlefield.
Even amid the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, there are worries of something potentially worse - terrorists lashing out with chemical or biological agents. The worries are so acute that U.S. authorities temporarily grounded crop dusters after learning some of the hijackers inquired about the planes. Some Americans have rushed to buy gas masks and books on surviving a chemical attack.
Books and research papers describe the immediate killing potential of chemical weapons. Thousands of Iranian veterans from the 1980-88 war with Iraq display the long-term consequences: chronic respiratory troubles, skin that won't heal, ravaged digestive systems and an agonizing slide toward death.
``He suffered so much. He never lived without pain. When I hear the words `chemical weapons,' I have fire in my heart. Damn these things,'' sobbed widow Golbas Negati, whose husband, Dawoud Taqavi, was exposed to mustard gas near the end of war and spent nearly half the years afterward in the hospital. He was buried Saturday, dead at 49.
Iraq during the war, unleashed dozens of attacks using chemical weapons, according to international monitors. Two main Western-developed formulas were verified by U.N. investigators: mustard gas, an oily liquid first used in World War I whose vapor can remain deadly for days; and tabun, a nerve gas that causes violent convulsions and paralysis before death.
Compared with the estimated 1 million killed or injured in the war, the toll from the chemical attacks were modest, partly because most Iranian forces had gas masks and other anti-gas equipment. Estimates of battlefield deaths range from several hundred to as many as 5,000.
The blow to unprepared civilians has already been chronicled.
In 1988, an estimated 5,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed in the town of Halabja when Saddam Hussein's military bombed with poison gas. In 1995, in the Tokyo subway, 12 people died in a sarin nerve gas attack carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
``The greatest immediate danger arises from a non-state group - or even an individual - acquiring and using a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon,'' U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said earlier this month.
U.S. investigators say one of the key Sept. 11 hijackers met with an Iraqi intelligence agent earlier this year.
Iraq says it dismantled its chemical and biological weapons program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But the former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team, Rolf Ekeus, said in 1997 that he believed Saddam sought to preserve a ``strategic capability'' of chemicals.
``The West invented and produced these dirty weapons and now they are scared of their own creation,'' said Rezal Mohammadi, 52, caught in a mustard gas attack in 1985.
He is now a patient on the ninth floor of Tehran's Sasan Hospital, the main treatment center for chemical attack veterans. There, he uses an oxygen tank because of severe respiratory troubles and dabs antibiotic solution on chronic skin boils.
Akbar Salimi, another ninth-floor patient, lightly touched the stitches closing an incision across his abdomen. It was the 32-year-old's third operation to stop intestinal bleeding that doctors attribute to mustard gas exposure in 1987.
``I saw animals - sheep, cows - dying all around me. Birds fell right from the trees,'' he said. ``We were vomiting blood. It was horrible.''
AP-NY-10-08-01 0215EDT |
