KOULKIN, Iraq (AFP) – A young Iraqi man has been reunited with his mother 20 years since being taken to Iran as an infant after surviving the notorious Halabja chemical attack by Saddam Hussein's forces.

Found amid a mess of corpses after the massacre, Zimnaco Saleh was taken to Iran, where he grew up believing himself to be an orphan.

He was reunited with his mother at a ceremony in Halabja, the northeastern Kurdish village where they were separated in 1988.

"You are a gift from God," Fatima Hama Saleh, his mother by birth, told him in Kurdish at her brother's home in Koulkin on Friday evening, tender words that had to be translated for Farsi-speaking Zimnaco.

"I will not die in sorrow and grief, after all the miseries I have experienced," she said, just a day after authorities confirmed that he was, in fact, her son.

Now 21 years old, Zimnaco, who Fatima says looks like his father, is the unlikeliest of survivors of the Halabja massacre.

With the Iran-Iraq war coming to a close in 1988, Kurdish peshmerga rebels seized control of Halabja, near the Iranian border, in the Kurdish mountains.

In response, the Iraqi army shelled the village, forcing out the militia. For five hours on the morning of March 16, Iraqi fighter planes released a deadly cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX.

An estimated 5,000 were killed, three-quarters of them women and children, in what is now thought to have been the worst gas attack ever carried out against civilians.

Many village residents are still dealing with the after-effects of the brutal campaign ordered by Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's enforcer better known as "Chemical Ali."

Fatima saw her husband -- Zimnaco's father -- and her four other children die in the attack.

"It was 11:00 am, I was at our home," the 50-something woman recalled, her dark black hair partially concealed by a white headscarf.

"We ran to shelters. When we left the house, I covered my face with a wet tissue, but I fainted with Zimnaco on my lap."

She woke up in an Iranian hospital in Karmanshah, a town close to the Iran-Iraq border, but without her son.

"I was taken to Tehran and I asked where my son was, but I got no response."

At the time, baby Zimnaco was being treated in the same hospital in Karmanshah before being placed in an orphanage in Mashhad, a town in northeastern Iran, near the country's border with Turkmenistan.

There, he was adopted by Koubra Hamdi Pour, a widow who already had two children. She named him Ali.

"I felt as though she loved me more than her real children," Zimnaco said, sitting alongside his mother. "She was very sweet, and I never felt as though I was an orphan."

Koubra's brother, who attended the ceremony in Halabja, said his sister was the only person in Mashhad willing to adopt Zimnaco.

"She really loved him, and he was her favourite," Asfindyar Hamid Pour added.

When Zimnaco was seven years old, Koubra told him the truth, how he had lived in Halabja but lost his entire family to the chemical attack.

There would soon be more loss in his life, though: when Zimnaco was 18, Koubra died in a car crash. With his half-brothers already married, he decided to trace his past.

"I used the Internet to find Kurdish organisations helping victims of Halabja," he explained. "I went to go see them in Iraq with the help of the Kurdish ministry of martyrs."

There, he underwent DNA tests to track down any remnants of his family.

At the same time, Fatima learned from television reports that a lost child who survived the Halabja attack had been found.

With four other families, she underwent her own set of DNA tests which were sent to a laboratory in Jordan.

On Thursday evening, Zimnaco and the five families were brought together at the ceremony when an official got up and announced amid complete silence: "According to the results of DNA tests, Ali is the son of Fatima Hama Saleh."

Shouts of joy erupted in the room -- Fatima, who had initially stood up, fell to her seat with the weight of the moment.

"Thank you God! You brought back my son Zimnaco," she cried, after hearing the news.

As they embraced for the first time in more than two decades, she added: "It's like my whole family has come back to life -- my son has returned."




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