It’s one thing to learn the facts of a tragedy—on March 16, 1988, Iraq carried out a chemical weapon attack against the Kurdish city of Halabja, killing as many as 5,000 civilians—but it’s another to have it reenacted before your eyes, to be confronted with a scene full of mannequin bodies slumped over, children huddled together, a man with a death grip on his infant child. The effect is jarring, the human toll unavoidable.
The volunteer at the memorial continues his slow drip of information, speaking softly in Kurdish and waiting for our guide to translate. When we reach a pause, someone asks him how he does it, how he comes back here every day to revisit this horror. He turns his head to look at one of the bodies, a woman on the ground, her hair dark, her eyes gazing up towards heaven. He answers, and after a long moment of silence, our guide says the woman is his mother.
Outside, alone, I stare off into the distance, at the brown and arid expanse, and beyond, the treeless mountains. I came here as an activist, as a man devoted to peace, but it feels like every gust of wind carries war across the globe. The mountains fade, and I see all the violence still to come: the endless killings in Syria, Russia invading Ukraine, ICE murdering people in Minneapolis, a thousand instances where my own soul will lust for blood and vengeance.
I look back, see the man is laughing at something our guide has said, and the spell is broken: demons disperse; the future dissipates; all that’s left is the present, the small actions we take and the ones we withhold. I let go of my clenched breath and walk back to rejoin the world.
