The damage caused by these weapons did not end over time.

The “Forced War” or “Sacred Defense” – the names Iranians use to describe the conflict that lasted from 1980 to 1988 following the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – was a conflict with few equals in the world for its cruelty and tragedy. In particular, the massive use of chemical weapons by the Iraqi dictator represents the darkest chapter of the conflict, as well as one of the most devastating pages in contemporary military history.

Since the early years of the conflict, the Iraqi army used toxic agents on a large scale, mainly mustard gas (mustard gas) and nerve gases such as sarin and tabun, openly violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925. This criminal strategy was adopted to counter the massive ground offensives of Iranian soldiers and volunteers of the revolutionary committees, who had dashed the dictator's hope of resolving the conflict with a lightning war. However, the impact of these weapons was not limited to the battlefields alone, tragically and intentionally spreading to civilian populations in border areas.

If the use of such arsenals against soldiers already represented an atrocious war crime, the entire civilian population suffered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, whose wounds continue to haunt the survivors. The border towns, like the Kurdish-Iranian locality of Sardasht, were bombarded with blistering agents, turning entire towns into death traps. Unlike conventional weapons, The gases contaminated not only humans, but also water reserves, the crops and the livestock, devastating the local ecosystem and making rescue efforts nearly impossible due to contamination of health workers themselves. The immediate effects of these prohibited weapons on the health of the population were horrifying: thousands of people died of suffocation in unspeakable pain, while the survivors suffered very severe chemical burns on their skin and temporary or permanent blindness due to the destruction of their corneas.

The damage caused by these weapons did not end over time, but continue to torment entire generations well beyond the end of hostilities, occurred in 1988. Tens of thousands of veterans and civilians survived, known in Iran as the "living martyrs", have developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory tumors and inherited genetic mutations. Exposure to mustard gas, in particular, continued to eat away at the lungs of survivors for decades, forcing them into a painful dependence on oxygen tanks and constant hospitalizations. Furthermore, The collective psychological trauma and the incidence of serious birth defects in the children of contaminated people have left an indelible scar on the nation's memory and social fabric.

But how did the international community react to such unheard-of atrocities? With silence, too often, and only belatedly with weak and formal condemnations. There was no firm position taken by the major global powers, who deliberately chose to ignore or downplay the crimes of the Iraqi regime for purely geopolitical reasons. The strategic priority of the United States, of the Soviet Union and several European nations was in fact to prevent at all costs the victory of the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran, guilty of having escaped the dichotomy between the Western and Eastern blocs to propose a third, independent and spiritual way.

Consequently, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was supported politically and economically. It is historically documented that Western intelligence services provided the aggressor with satellite imagery and tactical maps to monitor Iranian troop movements, in full knowledge that the Iraqi military would use that information to plan chemical attacks. At the same time, Several Western companies continued to export to Iraq the chemical precursors and industrial machinery needed to manufacture these lethal agents. Even the United Nations Security Council maintained a culpable attitude of inaction for a long time.

Let us reflect on this today, when the same bloc of nations raises a unanimous voice of condemnation towards Iranian technological or strategic programs, forgetting to have foraged, in the past, the production and use of chemical weapons by Iraq. The double standards of the great powers are engraved on the skin of the survivors of those cruel weapons, like scars imprinted in the memory of an entire nation. A people who, legitimately, Today we ask ourselves: Is it from these people that we can accept moral judgments?