Tortoise. I remember being a kid sitting on my parents comfortable sofa in London in the 80s watching news reports about the Iran-Iraq

war on TV.

Oil facilities on both sides burned as the Iraqi invasion ground to a halt and hostilities

enter the phase of sporadic war.

At that age a lot of it went over my head but I do remember the brutality of it.

All my entire life. remember the brutality of it all.

My entire life, my worst nightmare was to see a scene like this.

The unbearably young Iranian soldiers looking terrified.

How old is it? How old is this guy?

That's 14, 14 or something.

But it's come here to fight.

Dusty Iraqi tanks rolling across the desert, AK-40 gunshots ringing out in the background.

More than a million people died during that war.

For 45 minutes, Saddam Hussein's planes bombarded Alabja with some of the most toxic agents known to science,

nerve gases, an old-fashioned mustard gas.

Chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of those deaths and 100,000 survivors.

The United States government is convinced that Iraq has used chemical weapons.

The TV screen was filled with them in their thousands.

Children and babies littering the streets,

frozen in their tracks, a white film covering their eyes

and foam crusted round their mouths.

The bodies which litter this town were those of people who ran out of their houses to try to escape the gas.

...