Disabled Iranian veterans

Disabled Iranian veterans, called janbaz (Persian: جانباز‎‎, literally "those who were willing to lose their lives") in Iran, mostly constitute the disabled veterans of the Iran–Iraq war. According to Mohammad Esfandiari, director of communications and public relations of Iran’s Martyrs and Disabled Veterans’ Organization, there are 548,499 disabled veterans of the Iran–Iraq War living in Iran as of June 2014, a number which includes the victims of Iraq's chemical weapon attacks on Iran. The latter are called "chemical janbaz" (جانباز شیمیایی).

After Iraqi chemical attacks against Iranian soldiers and civilians, from 1983 to 1988, the number of people suffering injuries, including respiratory (42%), ocular (39%) and skin complications (25%) was more than 3,400 – a number which increased to at least 45,000 twenty years later, "due to the occurrence of late respiratory complications of mustard gas exposure." "The latency period can be as much as 40 years" and "So almost every day there are new cases — 30 years after the war," said Shahriar Khateri, the co-founder of the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support. According to Farhad Hashemnezhad in 2002, at least 20 percent of the patients were "civilians who didn’t think they were close enough to be exposed." This large number of chemically affected veterans has made Iran the world’s largest laboratory for the study of the effects of chemical weapons. According to a declassified CIA report, as a result of Iraq’s repeated use of nerve agents and toxic gases in the 1980s, Iran suffered more than 50,000 casualties mostly by mustard gas used in dusty, liquid and vapor forms packed into bombs and artillery shells which were then fired at the front lines and beyond, at targets such as hospitals. The number of registered chemically affected veterans was 70,000 by 2014, according to Shahriar Khateri, Iran’s leading expert on chemical weapons victims. "awareness could have saved lives," Khateri said. Doctors estimate that the final toll of Iraq’s chemical weapons could be as high as 90,000, equal to the total deaths from all toxic gases in World War I.

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