Helebce
هەڵەبجە
Halabja · City of memory. City of memory and rebirth at the foot of Hewraman.
- Region
- Başûr
- English name
- Halabja
- Kurdish name
- Helebce
- Sorani name
- هەڵەبجە
- Population
- ≈ 110,000 (2021, urban area)
- Elevation
- 720 m
- Founded/origin
- Grew in the 19th century as a market seat of the Caf (Jaf) tribal confederation on the road from Silêmanî to Persia.
Ottoman-era Halabja was ruled in all but name by the Caf begs — most famously by Adela Xanim, the 'brave princess' whose diwan, bazaar and prison made the town a byword for order in the borderlands. On 16 March 1988, in the last weeks of the Iran–Iraq war, Iraqi aircraft attacked the town with mustard gas and nerve agents; an estimated 5,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed within hours — the largest chemical attack on a civilian population in history, recognised by Iraq's High Criminal Court as genocide. The city has rebuilt itself around remembrance without surrendering to it.
Halabja's peace museum and memorial keep the victims' names; its poets — from Ehmed Muxtar Caf to Goran, father of modern Kurdish poetry — put it in every Kurdish anthology. The orchards, pomegranates and waterfalls of the Hewraman foothills begin at its eastern edge, and the mountain villages above keep the Hewramî dialect and its ancient music alive.
Wetter than the plains — the Hewraman front catches winter storms (over 600 mm of rain), while summers stay hot and dry.
Places in Helebce
- Halabja Monument & Peace Museum — The memorial raised in 2003 for the victims of 16 March 1988 — its cone of joined hands holds the hall of names and the museum of the attack.
- Tavgeya Ehmed Awa — Spring-fed falls in the walnut groves where the Hewraman mountains rise behind the city — Halabja's summer refuge, an easy drive up the valley.