Victims of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons never fully recover.Fifteen years after the Iran-Iraq war, Lynne O'Donnell visits ahospital in Tehran where soldiers who were gassed struggle to breathe
Borzoo Moghtaderi winces as he sits up in bed and tries to draw breath deep into his damaged lungs.
"I can't breath well, I can't walk well, I can't walk up stairs or hills, I feel tired all the time," he wheezes.
"My heart and lungs are painful, I have pain across my shoulders. It gets worse all the time. My skin often breaks out into itchy red lumps all over my body, and my voice goes. I am slowly losing my voice.
"I have to come to hospital for 20 days or a month at a stretch. What sort of a life is this?" he said yesterday as he sat on his bed in a small, sunny ward on the second floor of Tehran's Atieyeh Hospital.
Mr Moghtaderi is one of thousands of Iranians who were gassed in attacks by Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century with a million dead from both sides.
As world attention focuses anew on the Iraqi dictator's possible stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Moghtaderi's enduring ill-health is a reminder of the horrific and incurable effects of chemical and biological warfare.
The Iranian authorities estimate that during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, around 100,000 people were killed or wounded in gas attacks.
Dr Hamid Sohrabpour, a pulmonary specialist who led Iran's chemical treatment program for more than a decade, said that records were compiled on about 30,000 victims, although 10 per cent had died before being treated.
Between 5,000 and 6,000 people, regarded officially as "living martyrs", receive treatment in hospitals and clinics throughout Iran.
Iraq's use of chemical weapons was verified by the US State Department in 1984, two years before the CIA reported that Saddam Hussein had adopted gas attacks as a formal battlefield strategy. Saddam's deployment of mustard gas was the first time its use had been confirmed since the first World War.
Nerve gases like Sarin and Tabun killed immediately, causing paralysis, convulsions and vomiting in the minutes before death. But the effects of mustard gas are much longer lasting, causing skin burns and blistering, lung damage, chronic bronchitis, blindness and impotence.
"In the case of mustard gas, even if you treat it quickly, if the exposure is heavy there will be long term problems," Dr Sohrabpour said.
"There's no specific treatment for it so all we can do is treat the symptoms."
Those symptons, as Mr Moghtaderi can attest, worsen over time and can eventually cause death.
During the war, Mr Moghtaderi (68), was based on the Iranian border, defending a bridge across the Zimkan River dividing the two oil states.
But unlike most of those killed or wounded in gas attacks, Mr Moghtaderi was not a soldier of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard sworn to defend his country. He was a welder, sent to the frontline to repair, rebuild and defend a bridge that Iraqi soldiers spent the entire war attacking from their nearby defensive positions on surrounding hilltops.
"I was working with a branch office of the ministry of roads and transportation in Kermanshah, my hometown, and was told I had to go to the Zimkan Bridge. I didn't want to go and many of my fellow workers refused.
But I had six children to feed and was told that if I didn't go I'd be fired," he said.
Mr Moghtaderi said he and his team worked day and night welding massive steel plates onto the bridge to enable Iranian forces to cross into Iraqi territory to defend the border.
"Every time we got the bridge rebuilt, the Iraqis would bomb it again.
They weren't trying to destroy the bridge, they wanted us to leave so they could cross it." In the closing months of the war, which ended in a ceasefire in mid-1988, the river valley was regularly bombarded with mustard gas dropped by Iraqi fighter planes, Mr Moghtaderi said.
The ground was blackened, the trees were dead and leafless, the nearby villages were bombed-out and deserted shells. All the residents of the area, near the Iraqi town of Halabjeh, had fled to refugee camps on the Iranian side of the river, he said.
"We didn't know what it was, but when the bombs hit the ground and exploded, they were very strange. White smoke came out that smelled of garlic," he said. "We had no gas masks because no one thought that we would be gassed. By the time we got masks, it was too late because we'd already been gassed.
"One day, while I was working under the bridge and was standing in the water, the planes came. Everyone else ran away but I had no time to run. A bomb landed in the river not far from where I was, and the force of the explosion knocked me off my feet.
"That night, I went back to my dormitory and my skin was covered in red marks, like blisters, and I couldn't stop scratching them. My eyes were burning, my lungs and throat were on fire, it had a terrible effect on my heart.
"When I took an ambulance to a hospital in Paveh, they didn't know what it was, they thought I had an allergy or some skin sensitivity." Mr Moghtaderi said he reported the strange bombs with white smoke, and his sudden illness, to his superiors at the Ministry, but they ignored him.
Such was his condition that after the war he was incapable of working, instead receiving a tiny pension that barely covered his family's living costs.
In his pale blue hospital pyjamas, prayer beads in his right hand, Mr Moghtaderi talked of his struggle to find doctors who could recognise and treat his illness, and to find a hospital in the immediate aftermath of the war that even had a spare bed. For years, Mr Moghtaderi said, he visited hospitals in Kermanshah and Tehran, only recently being certified by a cardiologist as a mustard gas victim.
He talked with bitterness about his efforts to have his insurance company cover his medical costs, and to get officials to even answer his letters - which, because he is illiterate, he must have relatives write for him - asking for financial support.
The Iranian government honours military victims of Iraqi gas attacks as "living martyrs" and is proud of its track record in setting up organisations, such as the Foundation for the Deprived and the War Disabled, with the proceeds of assets seized from the monarchy deposed in the 1979 revolution.
State-controlled newspapers regularly report the deaths of chemical attack victims, and last week television aired a 45-minute documentary called Those Who Go To Heaven, in which "living martyrs" unusually criticised the government's shortcomings in caring for them even though they receive free treatment, housing, transport and other benefits.
As a civilian victim, however, Mr Moghtaderi falls between the bureaucratic cracks, ignored by his former government employer and not entitled to compensation doled out to former soldiers.
"Saddam is to blame for what happened to me, so of course I blame him first. But secondly I blame the leaders of this country, who don't treat us like human beings," Mr Moghtaderi said.
"There are many people in the same situation as me but no one has told us why this has happened and why we have been ignored."