5. The Idlib Attacks
Not all terrifying gas attacks took place in the past. Some have happened frighteningly close to the present, such as the attack on Idlib in spring of 2015. A Syrian city that fell under rebel control during the war, it was targeted by Assad troops for bombing. On March 16, dozens of crude barrel bombs were pushed from helicopters onto the city below. Each barrel contained canisters filled with poison gas.
In the carnage of the Syrian civil war, it’s impossible to say exactly what that gas was. The best guess is chlorine, a favorite tool of Assad’s forces. Human Rights Watch reported that the gas caused at least 206 casualties across the city. One particularly-severe chlorine cloud choked six people to death outright, including 3 small children.
Horrifying as this is, it’s not a one-off. Only a couple of months later, ISIS used mustard gas on civilians in the town of Marea. Chillingly, it seems chemical weapons are becoming a daily tactic in Syria’s multi-faceted battle for supremacy.
4. Saddam Gasses the Kurds
As far as chemical attacks are concerned, the date March 16 has eerie resonance. 27 years before the Idlib bombing, the Kurdish town of Halabja experienced the worst gas attack in recorded history. At 11am, 20 Iraqi planes dropped dozens of canisters onto every major part of the city. The resulting cloud of mustard gas killed more people than 9/11.
At its lowest end, the Halabja attack claimed 3,200 lives. At its highest estimate, it may have claimed more than 5,000. Around 75 percent of the victims were women and children and all died in unimaginable agony. Mustard gas causes the skin to break out in gigantic blisters. It blisters the eyeballs, the inside of the face, the inside of the lungs. Alongside the thousands of dead, another 10,000 Kurds were seriously injured.
The attack was carried out because the area’s Kurds were seeking their own state, and Saddam didn’t want to let them have it. The US initially blamed the Iranians, who Saddam was then at war with. In a gruesome twist, it later turned out the CIA had helped Saddam deploy his chemical weapons in the hopes of scoring a clandestine victory against Iran.
3. The Ghouta Attack
In the years since 1988, no gas attack has killed anywhere near as many people as that on Halabja. One attack did, however, come close. In August 2013, Assad’s forces fired rockets into a rebel-held neighborhood in Damascus. As civilians hid away from the war in their homes, a strange gas began to seep through the streets. Like Aum in the 1990s, Assad had turned to Sarin to do his dirty work. The results were tragic.
Around 1,000 people – nearly all of them women and children – died in agony. Over 3,000 more reported to hospitals suffering the symptoms of Sarin poisoning. Kids choked to death in the streets. Mothers asphyxiated with their babies clutched in their arms. It was likely the single worst massacre committed with Sarin in history (although the Nazis developed Sarin, they largely used Zyklon-B in the Holocaust).
The international outrage over the attack was so great that Assad was forced to destroy his stockpiles of the gas. However, as we’ve already seen, even this wasn’t enough to stop chemical attacks in Syria. Both the regime and groups like ISIS simply switched to other gasses, and continued killing as if nothing had happened.
2. The Bhopal Chemical Disaster
The Bhopal Tragedy is unique on our list in that it wasn’t an attack so much as an accident. However, it was by far and away the worst chemical accident in history. On the night of December 2, 1984, a screw-up at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in the Indian town of Bhopal led to 30 tons of methyl isocyanate being released into the air. The resulting toxic cloud settled over the nearby shanty towns. By sunrise, 600,000 people had been injured.
Methyl isocyanate is deeply unpleasant stuff. It causes the eyes to burn, intense feelings of nausea and, in the right circumstances, death. It also hugs close to the ground, meaning those sleeping on the floors of their shacks got a concentrated dose. At the time, it was thought around 3,800 had been killed – as many as the lower estimates of the Halabja Massacre. As the years went by, though, more and more people died from the chemical cloud’s long-term effects. According to the government of India, the death toll today is around 15,000.
As for Union Carbide, the company behind the tragedy, they agreed to pay out a pittance in compensation. In 2001, they were taken over by Dow Chemical and now refuse to pay another penny. Many Bhopal victims are still unable to afford treatment for their injuries.
1. Saddam Gasses the Iranians
Ask most people to name history’s worst gas campaign, and they’ll probably tell you about WWI. Around 90,000 people died on Europe’s battlefields due to inhaling mustard and chlorine gas, with over a million wounded. Shockingly, though, this might not be the deadliest use of chemical weapons on record. That honor could instead go to Saddam Hussein’s chemical campaign against Iran during the 1980s.
An 8-year war instigated by Iraq, the conflict saw numerous war crimes on both sides. Perhaps the worst of all were Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. Iranian civilians and military alike were bombed with cocktails of mustard gas and Sarin, killing tens of thousands of people. At the time, around 50,000 gas causalities were recorded – a shocking number, but still far short of the WWI total. At least, that used to be the case. As the years tick by, more and more Iranians who inhaled only trace amounts during the war are starting to sicken and die from complications. It turns out mustard gas can be deadly even decades after inhalation. With the death toll still climbing, it’s now thought the number of casualties might rise to over 90,000 within the next decade. If that happens, the Iran-Iraq War will become the deadliest chemical weapons campaign in history… as well as one that many people have still never heard of.