Shafaq News / Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said that "chauvinist ideology" is still prevalent in Iraq.

"It is indeed shameful that even after the bombardment of Halabja with chemical weapons and the genocide against the people of Kurdistan, chauvinistic thinking remains dominant in Iraq, and that the rights of the people of Kurdistan continue to be denied", Barzani said in a tweet. 

On March 16, Iraqi fighters flew over Halabja for five hours and dropped a mustard, sarin, and nerve gas mixture. The bombing left five thousand victims, most of whom were women and children.

 In January 2010, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, nicknamed "Ali al-Kimawi", President Saddam Hussein's cousin, was executed for his responsibility for this massacre.

 Moreover, in 2007, a Dutch businessman was sentenced in the Netherlands to 17 years in prison for complicity in committing war crimes and handing over chemical materials to Baghdad in the 1980s, knowing that they would be used to produce chemical weapons.

 The chemical attack on Halabja occurred in the final days of the Iran-Iraq war.