The bombs fell in two separate runs across four residential areas. Mustard gas, a blistering agent that attacks the skin, eyes, and respiratory system, settled over homes and streets like an invisible tide. First responders who rushed in to help became casualties themselves. Though mustard gas kills relatively few of those exposed -- mortality rates hover between 3 and 5 percent -- it maims with terrible efficiency. The survivors, making up 95 percent of those exposed, did not escape unharmed. Over the following years, thousands developed chronic respiratory disease, progressive eye lesions, skin disorders, and compromised immune systems. By 2006, nearly two decades after the attack, a quarter of Sardasht's population still suffered severe illness directly traceable to that single afternoon.

The Sardasht bombing did not happen in a vacuum. A year before the attack, the UN Security Council had issued a statement expressing its members' profound concern over Iraq's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops, condemning the practice as a clear violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The United States voted against issuing even this diplomatic language. Iraq's chemical weapons program continued unchecked. Sardasht was one attack in a broader campaign that included the more widely known Halabja chemical attack on Iraqi Kurdish civilians the following year. The pattern was unmistakable, and the international community's response remained muted throughout.

The toll emerged slowly. By 2007, 130 people had died from the attack's effects -- 109 civilians and 21 military personnel. Among the civilian dead, 39 were children under 18. Eleven were under 5 years old. Thirty-four were women and girls. These numbers continued to climb as long-term complications claimed more lives. The survivors carry their injuries visibly: scarred lungs that struggle with each breath, eyes clouded by chemical burns, skin that never fully healed. The 2020 Iranian film Walnut Tree drew on the Sardasht bombing for its story, bringing the event to audiences who had never heard of the city or what happened there.

On June 28, 2004, the seventeenth anniversary of the bombing, Sardasht renamed one of its streets Hiroshima. A Japanese delegation from Nagasaki and Hiroshima attended the ceremony, and 111 white doves were released at the memorial site. The gesture was reciprocated: in Hiroshima, a street bears the name Sardasht, and each year the mayor of Hiroshima sends a message marking the anniversary. Iranian organizations focused on chemical disarmament travel annually to Japan to participate in commemorations of the atomic bombings. This bond between two cities separated by thousands of miles rests on a shared understanding that few other places possess. Both know what it means when a weapon does not simply destroy a target but poisons a community for generations.

In April 2004, a Tehran court ruled the United States government liable for the attacks, citing its support for Saddam Hussein's regime, and ordered $600 million in compensation to victims. The ruling carried no enforcement mechanism, but it served as a formal act of documentation. Iranian NGOs now maintain an annual exhibition at The Hague in the Netherlands, coordinate with victims' associations from other countries affected by weapons of mass destruction, and have established a peace museum focused on chemical weapons. They hold membership in the International Network of Peace Museums. Sardasht's residents have chosen to make their suffering visible rather than letting it fade into the margins of a war most of the world has already forgotten. The mountains around the city remain green and steep. The scars remain too.