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VERIFYING THE TRUTHIn an effort to verify Iran's accusations against it's hostile neighbor, the UN sent a team of specialists to investigate Iraq's alleged use of chemical weapons. Since then, one of the chemical warfare incidents, at Hoor-ul-Huzwaizeh, on 13 March 1984, has been conclusively verified. The evidence uncovered by the investigators supports Iran's claims of chemical warfare on at least six other occasions during the period from 17th February to 17th March.
The effectiveness of this UN verification operation has been attributed to the Secretary General. His will had supposedly been strengthened by an announcement by the International Committee of the Red cross (ICRC) that around a 160 cases of wounded soldiers 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".
Not surprisingly, all the casualties interviewed were victims of a chemical attack on the 27th of February. Two days earlier, the US State Department made a statement announcing that "the US Government has concluded that the available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". When pressed, the Iraqi government accused the report as "political hypocrisy", "full of lies", a fairy tale by the CIA and had implied that the patients examined by the ICRC had "political hypocrisy", "full of lies", "sustained the effects of these substances in places other than the war front".
Ironically, on the 17th of March, the very same day that the inspectors were collecting their most damning evidence, an Iraqi general told the press: "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".