March 16 marks the 34th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attack on Halabja which left some 5,000 civilians dead and around 10,000 others injured.

In February 1979, after demonstrators briefly attacked the US embassy in Tehran, preparing to leave the country an American declared: “We used to run this country. Now we don’t even run our own embassy”.”

A victim of Iraq’s 1987 chemical attack on the Iranian city of Sardasht censures a decision by the British government to grant asylum to an official in the former Ba’athist regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Central Criminal Court of Iraq sentences 9 to death over their involvement in the Daesh Camp Speicher massacre back in June 2014.

Iran’s foreign minister has blasted the Western countries that provided former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with deadly chemicals, but now “care not to remember” his massacre of Iraqi people with the same weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Tehran says it has taken some European firms to international courts over their involvement in Saddam’s chemical attacks on Iranians.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slams Western countries for meddling in the Middle East’s affairs and selling weapons to regional regimes.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has drawn a parallel between the hostile policies of outgoing US President Donald Trump and Iraq's Saddam Hussein for waging wars on the Islamic Republic, saying the American leader will eventually not fare much better than the former Iraqi dictator.

Apparently great friends, Iran and the USA fell out with each other in 1979 due to the Islamic Revolution of Iran, but most Iranians remember no less than 60 years of underlying bi-lateral enmity, beginning with US bullying.

The necessities of an 8 year war, while isolated on all fronts, forced Iran to improvise a defense strategy based on the concept of self-sufficiency and independence of military defence capabilities.