HALABJA, Iraq, 17 March 2003 — Survivors of one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious acts, a poison gas attack that killed at least 5,000 people, were yesterday quietly marking their day of terror but wondering why it took the world 15 years to take notice.

With residents of the Iraqi Kurdish town gearing up for imminent war and thrown back in the international spotlight, many here can barely conceal their frustration as they recall their memories of a gassing that the international community chose to ignore.

One of those residents going about his business on the anniversary was Mohammad Kader, a 70-year-old shopkeeper who was happy to describe his miraculous survival.

“We knew the Iraqis would attack, so I moved the family into the shelter,” he said, recalling Baghdad’s fury over local support for Iranian troops in the dying days of the brutal 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

“As soon as I heard it was gas, I soaked a blanket in water and covered the door, and I remembered an old army trick of urinating in a scarf and covering the mouth with it.”

With him in a tiny basement shelter were nearly 60 other people.

The attack lasted five hours, with wave after wave of jets screeching in from the west and dropping a cocktail of poisons — including mustard gas and VX nerve agent — on terrified civilians. At the time Iraq was plied with weapons from countries including the US, Britain, France and Germany.

“When we left the shelter, there was nobody around, so we walked over to Iran,” he said, pointing from his home to a ridge of snowcapped mountains that marks the border. As hundreds of people fled the town, the jets turned their attention to those trying to flee. Many are now buried in mass graves in the lush green hills that overlook the town.

“My eyes were burning and I was vomiting. I was running and stumbling over bodies, God knows how many I saw. There was this horrible burning smell,” he said, revealing that he was still blind in one eye and suffered regular respiratory problems.

Doctors here say ailments such as asthma, Down’s Syndrome, miscarriages, still-births, sterility, chronic skin and lung disorders, birth deformities and blindness are still today well above normal levels.

The cruel irony of imminent war is not lost on residents of the town, which has managed to recover some kind of normality and had not arranged any ceremonies for the anniversary — leaving Kurdish authorities in the nearby city of Sulaymaniya to put on a series of events for the mass of foreign journalists here.

After the 1988 attack, Washington was tight-lipped and continued its support of Saddam against Iran’s rulers. Some circles in the United States even tried to blame the attack on Iran, while in Britain Downing Street merely said it was “concerned”.

But now hoping to bolster support for what appears to be an imminent US invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam, US President George W. Bush on Saturday recalled the attack in his weekly radio address.

Kader said he listened to the address on a foreign Kurdish-language station, but quickly switched off the radio. “Our only friend at the time was Iran,” he complained. “Why did it take them 15 years? Why did nobody pay attention to us? Where was America 15 years ago?”