Grim Legacy
Iranian veterans are still suffering from the effects of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. In spite of political obstacles, American doctors can learn from their painful experiences
By Babak Dehghanpisheh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
March 19 — For nearly 20 years, Esmail Khoshnevisan, 65, hasn’t been able to take an easy breath. His eyes, swollen to tiny slits, can’t fix on the green plastic tube next to his bed and his shaking hands can’t turn the valve on his oxygen canister.
HE GULPS FOR air and insists on keeping two windows open in spite of a winter storm outside his hospital room. A nurse in a black headscarf stands by to help him insert the respirator into his nose.
“We came under heavy bombardment, but there was no shrapnel,” recalls Khoshnevisan as his gray stubbled cheeks billow in and out rapidly. “Only the smell of chocolate and fresh grass.” He adjusts his ill-fitting nosepiece and looks away. “Then my eyes and lungs burned like they were on fire,” he recalls.
Khoshnevisan is a victim of the chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein’s forces during Iran’s brutal eight-year war with Iraq. Today he is one of more than 200 soldiers at Sasan Hospital in central Tehran still suffering from the after effects. And the men are only a small percentage of more than 100,000 chemical victims, including civilians, who were exposed to blister agents like mustard gas as well as nerve agents like sarin and tabun during the 1980-88 war.
Khoshnevisan, along with approximately 3,000 fellow soldiers, was hit with mustard gas during a 1984 offensive on the Majnun Islands in southern Iraq. It was one of the earliest confirmed uses of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein’s military commanders, and Iran was unprepared for it. Khoshnevisan, a military truck driver, didn’t have a mask or a protective suit. He thought he would be safe after a shower. Three days later, blisters appeared on his left arm and stomach. Within a year, he was losing patches of hair and some of his teeth.
The Iranian medical community, mostly through the experience of field medics, learned unpleasant lessons while treating these patients. That Khoshnevisan, and nearly 6,000 other chemical victims, are still alive and being treated through government-sponsored programs in Iran is a testament to their success. “The long-term treatment of chemical victims has created a body of medical data in Iran that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” says Dr. Brian Davey, 46, head of the United Nations’ Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) health and safety branch. “The closest we have to this body of knowledge are the records from World War I, which have largely dropped off the books.”
Most of the medical data has been collected by individuals like Dr. Ahmad Moradi, 50, an instructor at Shiraz University who, as a young medical-school graduate was sent straight to the Hamid Hospital, a front-line facility composed of four large hangars near the southern city of Ahvaz. Hamid was one of the first hospitals to receive mustard gas victims in 1984. “We saw a group of soldiers whose eyelids were swollen, their skin was gray and they were deathly afraid of light,” says Moradi, who has kept hundreds of photographs of soldiers he’s treated for the past 20 years. “They were screaming ‘We’re blind! We’re blind!’ We were shocked by what we saw.”
The doctors were overwhelmed and hundreds of casualties began clogging up the medical infrastructure. They soon realized it would be impossible to treat all of the chemically exposed soldiers near the front lines. Instead, they devised a system of triage where patients would be cleaned up on the battlefield, frequently using household bleach, and their symptoms would be noted on a personal card issued to each individual. These soldiers were then sent on to hospitals in larger cities, like Ahvaz and Isfahan, for further treatment. ” One of the most valuable lessons offered by Iran’s experience is the decentralized way they dealt with chemical-weapons victims,” says Davey. “Injuries were rated based on the degree of exposure and, as a consequence, got the required amount of care.”
Richard Price, 69, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who heads Applied Science and Analysis, a consulting firm focusing on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons issues, observed a team of Iranian doctors at a U.N.-organized simulated terrorist chemical attack in Croatia last September. “The triage for casualties was extremely fast,” says Price. “This goes back to their experience with mustard gas victims. They’ve learned to treat casualties as far forward as possible.”
The learning process wasn’t smooth: because of scarce resources, soldiers’ clothes were initially washed and given back to them. But the doctors found that the soldiers, as well as the laundry staff, were getting exposed to traces of mustard gas left in the uniforms. “We decided to burn the clothes,” says Moradi.
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