When we arrived at the museum on the northern edge of Tehran’s Shahr Park on a drizzly late October morning, we were greeted by the museum’s director, Mohammad Reza Taghipoor Moghadam who, I couldn’t help but notice, had no legs. As he wheeled himself into the museum, my companions and I followed closely behind.

After entering the compact round building, we gathered in a small room where Moghadam introduced us to his colleagues, Mr. Mohammadi, who was wearing dark sunglasses even on the dreary morning, and Mr. Roostapour who wore no glasses but, like Mr. Mohammadi, suffered from damage to his eyes and lungs resulting from chemical warfare.

As veterans of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), all three men bore grave injuries more than 30 years after the war had ended.Today they welcome visitors to the Tehran Peace Museum where they discuss the history of the brutal war, describing how Iraq, under Saddam Hussein who was aided with intelligence and arms provided by the United States, used chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds.

Jon Letman

One museum display states that some 65,000 Iranian civilians and military veterans still suffer chronic health problems from those attacks. Standing before exhibits detailing how civilians were victims of the war, the three veterans spoke about the suffering caused by nuclear weapons, poison gas, nerve agents, incendiary munitions, cluster bombs, conventional rockets, missiles, mortars and artillery used in wars waged from the air, in the sea, and on the ground by militaries around the world.

As the veterans recounted the human and environmental damage caused by