Israel & The West Suffer a Major Blow From Iran!

Right, so once upon a time the American author Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” To Iranian minds this rings rather true as they have just acknowledged 38 years to the day, of the stench of mustard gas being deployed over Sardasht in 1987 and how that carries a disturbingly familiar echo in the smoke rising from Gaza today. The two events, nearly four decades apart, may seem distant on the surface, unrelated from each other, different eras, different state actors—but scratch beneath and you find the same fingerprints, the same war crimes, the same lessons have gone unlearned. And just as in 1987, when Western powers handed Saddam Hussein the gas canisters and looked the other way, they now offer Israel the bombs—and then look away again as well. Welcome to the rerun nobody asked for, brought to you again by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin, where ‘Never Again’ is apparently just a slogan, not a principle.
Right, so on June 28, Iran commemorated a dark and painful memory: the 38th anniversary of the chemical weapons attack on the city of Sardasht. This remembrance was not only a moment of national mourning but was also made a powerful statement of, a statement of political and moral indictment. Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, drew an explicit parallel between the silence that followed Iraq's chemical assault on Sardasht in 1987 and the muted global response to Israel's current campaign in Gaza. In both instances, the same Western nations—the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany—stood not only as indifferent bystanders but as active enablers.
On June 28, 1987, Iraqi fighter jets under the command of Saddam Hussein dropped four chemical bombs filled with mustard gas on the civilian population of Sardasht in Iran's West Azerbaijan Province. It marked the first time since World War II that a civilian population was targeted with chemical weapons. According to Iranian news agency IRNA, at least 130 civilians were killed, and over 8,000 suffered grievous injuries, many with permanent respiratory, physical, and psychological damage.
The use of mustard gas, a blistering agent banned under the Geneva Protocol, inflicted horrifying damage: skin burned and blistered, eyes swollen shut, lungs scorched, and internal organs slowly decaying over time. Survivors today still suffer from cancer, infertility, and chronic pain. Mustard gas does not just kill—it disfigures, maims, and leaves lifelong wounds both visible and invisible.
This attack was one of over 350 chemical strikes carried out by Iraq during the war. Sardasht remains the most infamous because it targeted an entirely civilian population with the specific intent of causing mass suffering. It was a deliberate act of terrorism sanctioned at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime.
But Saddam Hussein's regime did not act alone. Back then, well before he invaded Kuwait and the West turned on him, Hussein’s regime had the full support—financial, military, and technological—of powerful Western governments. These nations were not just silent about the atrocities being committed; they were complicit in enabling them. The victims of Sardasht were not only failed by international law but betrayed by the global powers who armed and abetted their killer.
The Sardasht attack was part of a Western-enabled war machine. Declassified CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency documents confirm that the United States supplied Iraq with satellite imagery and intelligence that helped pinpoint Iranian troop movements—even when Washington knew Iraq would follow up with chemical strikes.
The US played a pivotal role in ensuring Saddam Hussein’s military successes. Senior officials in the Reagan administration openly justified US support to Iraq as a strategy to "balance" against revolutionary Iran. In reality, it meant facilitating war crimes. The US turned a blind eye as chemical weapons were unleashed not just on soldiers but on entire cities like Sardasht.
Germany was particularly culpable. German companies such as Karl Kolb and Preussag played a central role in Iraq's chemical weapons program, providing crucial precursors, equipment, and know-how. The Samarra chemical weapons facility—where these chemical weapons were manufactured—was built with German help. Germany ultimately became the largest Western supplier of dual-use chemical materials to Saddam Hussein’s regime, sold as fertiliser ingredients, knowing how they could also be used, there was even one story about how a dough mixing machine for a professional bakery from Germany actually ended up in a chemical weapons factory in Iraq, very much not baking bread.
Reports revealed that over 1,000 tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas precursors, were shipped by German companies, some of them even protected by their government’s export policies. Germany’s involvement was so blatant that it became the first and only country ever formally held responsible by an international court for exporting chemical weapons precursors.
The UK’s role was equally shameful. British firms continued selling chemical precursors and dual-use technologies to Iraq even after 1983, when UK intelligence agencies confirmed that Iraq was deploying these chemicals in warfare. A 1994 report to the UK Parliament admitted that officials knew about chemical attacks on Iran but maintained trade anyway. The UK's long-standing policy of "constructive engagement" politics speak as we know, with Iraq in reality enabled the use of chemical weapons against civilians.
France was Iraq’s leading arms supplier throughout the 1980s, delivering Mirage jets, advanced weaponry, and artillery. These weapons were used not just against Iran's military but against civilian infrastructure, contributing to one of the deadliest conflicts of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the Netherlands also shipped key precursors, and the United States facilitated weapons-grade intelligence while claiming to oppose chemical warfare. And so all of this government hypocrisy was complete. Iraq committed these crimes with Western eyes wide open, though not those of the public of course.
Despite these atrocities, no major Western government condemned Iraq at the time. The United Nations did not launch a formal investigation for years. The Security Council, hamstrung by US and UK opposition, failed to adopt binding resolutions or impose sanctions. The world turned away.
So lets fast forward to 2025 and the same complicity, silence, and suffering is evident in Gaza is not it? Israel’s military assault has destroyed entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, and UN schools. Tens of thousands have been killed, the majority civilians, many of them children. Human rights groups have documented systematic attacks on healthcare infrastructure and aid convoys, amounting to war crimes.
And yet again, the US, UK, Germany, and France are not just silent. They are aiding and abetting. The United States continues to provide billions in military aid and uses its veto at the UN Security Council to shield Israel from accountability. British surveillance planes flying from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus are believed to be supplying targeting intelligence for Israeli operations, just as Britain and the US did for Iraq in the 1980s.
Germany and France continue arms exports, despite mounting civilian casualties. The parallels are not incidental. They are systemic. While civilians in Gaza starve under blockade and bombardment, Western powers offer diplomatic cover and logistical support to the aggressors.
In remarks commemorating Sardasht, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei explicitly connected the dots between Western complicity in 1987 and today. He condemned the “self-proclaimed human rights defenders” who cry foul when it suits geopolitical goals but remain silent in the face of Gaza’s devastation.
There are three central parallels between Sardasht and Gaza as I see it: there is the deliberate targeting of civilians, the scale of mass suffering, and the calculated silence or protection from the West. In both cases, international institutions failed. Just as the UN did nothing meaningful after Sardasht, it is paralysed today over Gaza. Once again, US vetoes blocking any attempt at global justice.
Baghaei’s statement was more than a rhetorical flourish on a convenient date. It is a plea—and a warning—that the lessons of Sardasht have gone unheeded. And if history is ignored, its worst chapters just repeat and we’ve been seeing Israel doing that, now getting on for 21 months. When the world refuses to learn from its complicity in past crimes, it guarantees their continuation and so it is.
The roots of Western hostility toward Iran stretch back to 1979, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah—a loyal puppet of the US. In response, Western powers backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion. Today, with regards to Iran now, we see a similar strategy seemingly unfolding too.
Even as a ceasefire between Iran and Israel continues to tenuously hold, Labour MP Luke Akehurst—in my view the biggest Zionist of them all in UK politics—has invited Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, to speak in Parliament, he’s addressing MPs today as it happens. Pahlavi has visited Israel, posed with Benjamin Netanyahu, and called for a US-backed restoration of the puppet monarchy in Iran, with himself as the new Shah.
Ali Milani, chair of the Labour Muslim Network and a former Labour Parliamentary candidate when Labour was worth a damn under Jeremy Corbyn, told Middle East Eye this was a “slap in the face of every Iranian fighting for freedom and justice.” He was rather polite in his condemnation of this move by Akehurst, a man who before becoming MP was a regressive influence on Labour’s National Executive and has made a career out of promoting Israeli interests in the UK. Someone who was far less polite, was Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif. He was rather blunt, having tweeted out that:
‘If Iranian people are energised and motivated according to you, show some balls and go back and lead them and remove the regime. Put your money where your arse is, bloody parasitical imperial whore.’
He’s not wrong, and having seen what regime change in Syria has turned out like, a Western and Pro-Israel puppet in the former Al-Qaeda terrorist Al Jolani, having targeted minorities brutally since seizing power and now seeking normalisation with Israel and offering to relinquish the Golan Heights formally to Israel, we can see what his leadership would likely do for Iran.
Pahlavi has also never reckoned with his fathers record, the crimes of SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police, which tortured and murdered thousands of Iranians. His campaign is not about democracy but about restoring Western hegemony, under the guise of regime change. The same Western actors that armed Saddam Hussein and ignore Israel’s genocide now promote regime change with a familiar puppet in waiting, though one with no real power to actually do so, as Khawaja Asif so eloquently put it.
This is not about freedom. It’s about restoring a regime that will serve Western and Israeli interests. Just as they armed Saddam Hussein to destroy the Islamic Republic in the 1980s, they now use political exile and propaganda to try again and actually at a time when peace is holding between Israel and Iran, this just encourages Israel to try again. The wheel turns, but it is greased with the same blood.
Sardasht and Gaza are two tragedies, 38 years apart, bound by a common thread of Western hypocrisy. In both, civilians were massacred with the support—direct or indirect—of democratic nations that preach human rights while turning a blind eye to atrocities they’re supplying the means to conduct.
The victims of Sardasht are not only remembered in mourning but in outrage that their suffering was dismissed. The victims of Gaza are being killed in real time while the same powers look away—or worse, provide the weapons, even weaponising aid to do so as we’re seeing under the guise of a supposed aid program, which is just a front for more Israeli atrocity. Entire generations in both cases have been scarred physically, emotionally, and psychologically while the architects of their suffering have faced no justice.
Until the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany are willing to reckon with their enabling of atrocity, their claims to moral authority remain grotesque and in this era of social media and alternative independent media, they are even less able to get away with it. From mustard gas in Sardasht to missiles in Gaza, they are not neutral actors. They are accomplices. They are enablers of war crimes and profiteers of human suffering and a reckoning is due to those leaders issuing such orders.
This moment, now that Iran have raised the comparison, drawn lessons from history, demands not silence, but courage. It demands justice. And it demands that we remember not just the dead, but the hands that helped kill them, both then and now.
If we truly believe in the lessons of history, if we believe we are supposed to learn from it, if we believe in never again moments, then let us remember Sardasht not as a relic of the past, but as a grim warning for the present—, that lessons have not been learned still, as another generation now in Gaza, is being sacrificed once more in the name of geopolitical interests.
Historical precedent has also been raised in another unlikely place and is also especially relevant to the here and now too, as Glastonbury saw the performance of punk ban Bob Vylan get slammed for chanting death to the IDF, a chant that has now gone from a field in Somerset to rattling around the world, but where Zionists are again weaponising this as being antisemitic and condemnation comes thick and fast, it ignores what the IDF have literally been doing in Gaza and elsewhere and actually dismantling and abolishing this entity is even more the right call, when you consider how the IDF actually came into being and the terrorism that actually remains an influence in the worlds supposedly most moral army. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch
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