LONDON More than 10 years after Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, the atrocity that killed up to 7,000 civilian victims is not being forgotten. According to the Guardian newspaper Friday, the after-effects of the nerve agent attacks that devastated the village is still claiming victims. It quoted medical director of Halabja's hospital, Dr. Adil Kerim saying that he had seen at least 10 cases of deformities of the spinal cord among babies, as well as cleft lips and palates.

The first things we noticed were increases in malignant carcinomas, leukemia, infertility in women, respiratory difficulties, miscarriages and congenital abnormalities, he said. The atrocity, in which the Iraqis used VX and other nerve agents on March 16, 1988, exposed the double standards of the international community in supporting Saddam during his eight-year war with Iran. The attack, like Iraq's previous use of chemical weapons against Iran, was widely condemned without naming Saddam as the perpetrator at the time.

British professor of medical genetics, Christine Gosden, who has been working with Kerim in the first assessment of nerve gases on a civilian population, still complains that the program is frustrated by the lack of equipment. Mustard gas changes the genes and creates rare cancers of the head and larynx nut the victims are not getting the drugs they need, she was quoted saying by the Guardian. (IRNA)