May 17, 2019
The Majlis has passed a bill requiring the Iranian government to demand compensation from the United States for Iranians who were victims of Iraqi chemical warfare in the 1980s.
Heshmatollah Falahat-pisheh, the chairman of the Majlis National Security Committee, told the Tasnim news agency the law was part of a package of retaliatory measures aimed at hostile US policies.
He said 70 American companies had provided chemical weapons to the Baghdad regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 war with Iran.
He did not name the companies. Nor did he mention any other countries whose businesses provided equipment for the Iraqi chemical program.
An investigation after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, found that the majority of the manufacturing equipment used in the program came from Germany, with much smaller volumes coming from a dozen other countries.
The Iran Times could find references to only two American firms involved. Alcolac International of Baltimore provided thiodiglycol, a chemical used to make mustard gas, and the Al Haddad Brothers Enterprises, a trading company based in Nashville, Tennessee, that was owned by an Iraqi-born man, was accused of shipping various chemicals to Iraq.
In 1984, US customs seized 5-1/2 tons of a chemical used in sarin gas as Haddad was about to load it on a plane. In 2002, Iraq identified Haddad’s firm as the supplier of 60 tons of another chemical used in making sarin. Haddad, who had left the United States by that time, was never charged by the United States.
In an irony, Alcolac was found to be shipping thiodiglycol (used mainly as an ingredient in ballpoint pen ink) not only to Iraq but also to Iran for its chemical weapons program. US prosecutors charged one employee of the firm, Leslie Hinkleman, the woman who handled international sales, with violating US export control laws.
She testified that she had been sent to take a two-day course in such laws, checked in both days, but then left to go shopping. Since Alcolac did not charge a premium for its sales to Iraq and Iran, it did not appear the firm knew what it was doing.
The sales to both countries were handled by European agents, both of whom lied about Iraq and Iran being the buyers and both of whom have since been prosecuted. Alcolac’s total sales to Iraq and Iran came to only $814,000.
The list Iraq released in 2002 that identified Alcolac and Haddad named a total of 31 firms as suppliers for its chemical weapons program. Fourteen of those were German. There were three each from the Netherlands and Switzerland and two each from France, Austria and the Untired States. At least one firm from East Germany, then an independent state, NVA, built a plant near Baghdad for testing chemical weapons.
The biggest supplier by far was Germany’s Karl Kolb and its subsidiary, Pilot Plant, which provided tons of equipment and even helped built Iraq’s manufacturing plants.
According to The New York Times, a Singapore-based company appeared to be the main supplier of actual chemicals, including 3,300 tons of a chemical used to make nerve gas and 950 tons of another chemical used to make mustard gas and sarin.