MEDIA ADVISORY:
Halabja Victims’ “AMA” Makes Reddit’s Front Page

Victims’ Survival Stories and Lawsuit Against European Corporations Trends on Reddit for a Day

Media Advisory: March 16, 2018

Media Contact: Valentina Cominetti │1-312-253-7444 │press@halabjavictimssociety.org

Halabja, Kurdish Region of Iraq – Two survivors of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical weapons attack on Halabja, Aras Abid Akram and Mardin Mahmood Fatah, participated in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) to tell their story and answer questions from the Reddit community.  That conversation was quickly up voted and spent nearly a day on Reddit’s front page. 

For three hours, Aras and Mardin answered hundreds of questions posed by Reddit users worldwide and shared their perspective of what it was like to endure a chemical weapons attack and what they are doing thirty years later to make sure it never happens again.

Aras and Mardin are members of the Halabja Chemical Victims Society, a grassroots organization that supports the victims of the attack, cares for their ongoing health needs, and advocates for a permanent end to the use of chemical weapons.  They are also part of a major lawsuit that has just been filed against many of Europe’s largest corporations who allegedly funded and equipped the Saddam Regime with the technology, gas chambers, and chemicals necessary to perpetrate the mass murder of thousands of Iraqi Kurds thirty years ago.   

AMAs are a popular subreddit, with over 17 million online subscribers.  To date, the Halabja Victim Lawsuit AMA has received over 400,000 views and has generated over 1,100 written comments, which people have voted up or down over 40,000 times.  Their AMA rose to the top of the IAMA subreddit and soared to the third most popular subreddit on the day it went live, making impressions on millions of Reddit users throughout the world.

Click here to view the AMA.