Lessons from Iran on facing chemical war

His gas mask would not fit tightly enough, so Mohammed Akbari shaved off his thick, black beard.

The Iranian officer, fighting in 1985 on one of the most gruesome front lines in the Iran-Iraq war, thought he was ready for any chemical weapon that Saddam Hussein's forces could throw his way. Day and night, he wore a special protective suit.

"The whole area was contaminated, there was always the smell of rotten fish," says the Revolutionary Guard colonel, who is among the largest group of chemical-weapons victims in the world.

Iran's grim experience offers valuable lessons as global concern about mass terror attacks - including chemicals - remains high, and as American troops ready for possible chemical warfare in Iraq. Scientists and doctors have visited Iran to study the effects of these weapons on the survivors and learn better ways to treat victims.

Col. Akbari was exposed one night as he walked toward an artillery battery in the dark - and mustard shells found their mark.

"With chemical weapons, you hear nothing," Akbari says. He turns on an oxygen tank next to his couch at home, and slips on a respirator. "I hurried to take my mask, but I realized it was too late."

His hands were exposed to the blistering agent. His son, born years later, was diagnosed with a nervous disorder attributed to the gas. "Nothing is left of me," Akbari says, pulling at his slack pant legs. "I can't laugh or cry."

Officials in Iran estimate that during the eight-year war 100,000 people were exposed to nerve agents like Sarin and Soman, and blistering agents like mustard gas.

President Bush often lists Iraq's use of these weapons as one reason that Mr. Hussein must be disarmed - though the US helped create Iraq's deadly ar- senal at the time by supplying lethal ingredients, sophisticated facilities, and a green light to fight the Ayatollah Khomeini's uncompromising Islamic regime.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, responsible for ensuring adherence to the UN-brokered 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, has already held four clinical courses in Iran for medical experts, and plans another next May.

Brian Davey, head of the OPCW's health and safety branch, says that since Sept. 11, "awareness has surged, as the possibility [of a chemical terrorist attack] has moved from a very low-risk, faraway event to something much more real in people's minds."

Detailed medical records here often date from the first battlefield exposure and treatment. "This provides a body of experience that really doesn't exist anywhere else," Dr. Davey says.

Besides using chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, Baghdad used them against Kurdish cities in northern Iraq in the late 1980s, and to put down an uprising among Shiite Muslims in the south after the 1991 Gulf War.

The USSR used chemical weapons during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. And US troops used powerful defoliants in Vietnam - and napalm during the Gulf War. But nowhere else has such a large population been so exposed, monitored, and now learned from as in Iran.

"What we learned from this bloody war was how to establish a system for mass disaster: How to treat cases, and how to triage them," says Dr. Hamid Sohrab-Pour, who was a leader of Iran's chemical exposure response team for a decade.

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