This is the Jocco Unraveling Podcast episode two with Darrell Cooper and me, Jocco

Willink. I know that the last episode, you know, we wrapped up with a pretty

harrowing account and you kind of said, well, we'll move on to other things, but I

gotta keep us there for one more account here. It goes like this,

horror insidoms, iraq takes endless forms. In 1987, 1988, Iraqi Air Force

helicopter sprayed scores of Kurdish villages with a combination of chemical

weapons, including mustard gas, seren, and VX, a deadly nerve agent. Scores of

thousands of Kurds, most of them women and children died horrible deaths. Of

those who survived, many would have left blind or sterile or crippled with

agonizing lung damage. But most of the Kurds slaughtered in that season of

mass murder were not gassed, but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves.

Those victims were mostly men and boys, and their bodies have never been

recovered. In one village near Kirkuk, after the males were taken to be killed, the

women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One

survivor, Salma Aziz Baban, described the ordeal to two journalist Jeffrey Goldberg

who reported on Saddam's war against the Kurds in the New Yorker in March. More

than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat. When

some starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through a

window in the door. Aziz's six-year-old son grew very sick. She says he knew he was dying.

There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much. He died in his mother's lap.

I was screaming and crying. She told Goldberg. We gave them the body. It was passed outside,

and the soldiers took it. Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had

...