Do the Iranians claim that there have been chemical attacks on their armies or people during their war with Iran?
In answer to this question, yes. Furthermore, Saddam's use of chemical weapons was verified by the UN and was in violation of international law. Note that the report below was published way back in 1984. 18 years later people are still denying the truth about Saddam.
Also I would point out that the Iranian government, whom few would consider consider benign or enlightened, did not however respond in kind against Iraq. Further evidence that Saddam is a very unique threat.
projects.sipri.se
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There have been reports of chemical warfare from the Gulf War since the early months of Iraq s invasion of Iran. In November 1980, Tehran Radio was broadcasting allegations of Iraqi chemical bombing at Susangerd. Three and a quarter years later, by which time the outside world was listening more seriously to such charges, the Iranian Foreign Minister told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that there had been at least 49 instances of Iraqi chemical-warfare attack in 40 border regions, and that the documented dead totalled 109 people, with hundreds more wounded. He made this statement on 16 February 1984, the day on which Iran launched a major offensive on the central front, and one week before the start of offensives and counter-offensives further south, in the border marshlands to the immediate north of Basra where, at Majnoon Islands, Iraq has vast untapped oil reserves. According to official Iranian statements during the 31 days following the Foreign Minister's allegation, Iraq used chemical weapons on at least 14 further occasions, adding more than 2200 to the total number of people wounded by poison gas.
Verification
One of the chemical-warfare instances reported by Iran, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh on 13 March 1984, has since been conclusively verified by an international team of specialists dispatched to Iran by the United Nations Secretary General. The evidence adduced in the report by the UN team lends substantial credence to Iranian allegations of Iraqi chemical warfare on at least six other occasions during the period from 26 February to 17 March.
The efficiency and dispatch with which this UN verification operation was mounted stand greatly to the credit of the Secretary General. His hand had presumably been strengthened by the announcement on 7 March by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that 160 cases of wounded combatants visited in Tehran hospitals by an ICRC team "presented a clinical picture whose nature leads to the presumption of the recent use of substances prohibited by international law". The casualties visited were reportedly all victims of an incident on 27 February. The ICRC statement came two days after the US State Department had announced that "the US Government has concluded that the available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". Iraq had denounced the Washington statement as "political hypocrisy", "full of lies", a fabrication by the CIA, and had suggested that the hospital patients examined by the ICRC had "sustained the effects of these substances in places other than the war front". On 17 March, at almost the same moment as the UN team was acquiring its most damning evidence, the general commanding the Iraqi Third Corps, then counter-attacking in the battle for the Majnoon Islands, spoke as follows to foreign reporters: "We have not used chemical weapons so far and I swear by God's Word I have not seen any such weapons. But if I had to finish off the enemy, and if I am allowed to use them, I will not hesitate to do so".
Some Consequences
On 30 March, the UN Security Council issued a statement condemning the use of chemical weapons during the Gulf War. Evidently none of the five permanent member used its veto power to block the condemnation. That same day the US government announced that it was instituting special licensing requirements for exports to Iraq and Iran of particular chemicals that could be used in the manufacture of chemical weapons, and that it had urged other governments to do likewise. Other governments have since taken similar steps.
Reports of Iraqi chemical warfare have dwindled since the UN Security Council statement, but they have not stopped altogether. A British television team filming on the Iranian side of the Majnoon Islands front encountered evidence of a mustard-gas attack in mid-April. But Iranian media are no longer publicizing such reports, perhaps mindful now of potential negative impacts on their domestic audience.
VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
The use in war of poisonous, as well as asphyxiating or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices was prohibited, along with the use of bacteriological methods of warfare, in the 17 June 1925 Geneva Protocol, which entered into force on 8 February 1928. The agreement was prompted by the experience of World War I, during which the battlefield use of chemical agents caused an estimated 1 300 000 casualties, including 90 000 deaths. In fact, the Protocol only re-affirmed a constraint on acts which were held in abhorrence and which had been condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world.
In the part dealing with chemical weapons, the Protocol reiterated a prohibition already contained in previously signed international documents. These included the 1899 Hague Declaration IV, 2, under which the contracting powers had agreed to abstain from the use of projectiles for the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases, as well as the 1907 Hague Convention IV, which prohibited the use of poison or poisonous weapons.
Since 1925 chemical weapons have been used on several occasions, but on each such occasion the extent of world-wide indignation and censure testified to the immutability of the standard of international law as embodied in the Geneva Protocol. It is, in great part, due to this international instrument that the history of chemical warfare since World War I has been one of relative restraint. The Protocol is now binding on as many as 106 parties, including all militarily important states.
Iran acceded to the Protocol on 5 November 1929, while Iraq acceded on 8 September 1931. The latter state did so with an express reservation that its government would not be bound by the prohibitions in question towards any state whose armed forces did not respect the provisions of the Protocol. Such a requirement of reciprocity was formulated by over 40 parties, including the great powers. Iran has not attached any condition to its accession, but since the reservations made by others have in essence turned the Protocol into a no-first-use treaty, it could now consider itself free from its obligations towards Iraq.
Neither the UN group of experts, which has established the fact of use of chemical weapons in the war between Iraq and Iran, nor the UN Security Council, which has condemned such use, have specified the party guilty of violation. However, the Geneva Protocol does not require that violators be internationally identified. Iran could thus claim the right to reprisal in kind on the basis of its own findings. In other words, there is a danger of an escalating chemical warfare. Indeed, there can be no guarantee that the weapons banned by the Geneva Protocol will not be resorted to as long as there is no absolute prohibition on their very possession, subject to international control.
However, at the Committee on Disarmament at Geneva, Iran has declared that, due to humanitarian considerations, it would not embark on retaliatory action with chemical weapons against Iraq.
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