(March 16, 2003) -- The U.S. government has marked the 15th anniversary of Saddam Hussein's use of checmical weapons against people in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja by posting on the State Department's web site photos of the victims with text describing the horrific chemical weapons used and their human toll.

"Saddam Hussein is the first world leader in modern times to have brutally used chemical weapons against his own people," the State Department web page says (we post link below), noting:

"Hussein launched chemical attacks against 40 Kurdish villages and thousands of innocent civilians in 1987-88, using them as testing grounds. The worst of these attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988. Halabja Casualties"5,000 civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly, died within hours of the attack. 10,000 more were blinded, maimed, disfigured, or otherwise severely and irreversibly debilitated. Thousands died of horrific complications, debilitating diseases, and birth defects in the years after."

The photos above entitled "Arsenal of Terror" and captioned "Victims of the regime-ordered attacks on the civilians of Halabja, March 16, 1988."

To view the State Department page in its entirety, click, U.S. State Dept: Saddam's Chemical Weapons Campaign: Halabja, March 16, 1988"

The State Dept. posting comes one day after the President met in the Oval Office with three individuals from the Kurdish area of Iraq where a chemical weapons attack killed 5,000 citizens.