HALABJA, Iraq -- Zaki Saeed will never forget the day 15 years ago when she sent her daughter to Halabja for a family picnic.

Hours later, 20-year-old Tania Saleem was one of 5,000 Iraqis who died when President Saddam Hussein's forces dropped chemicals on the town in a Kurdish corner of northern Iraq.

Saeed's harrowing tale is typical of families who are still grieving, all desperate to see Saddam pay the ultimate price for atrocities carried out under his rule, Reuters reported.

"His death would bring me so much joy," said Saeed, a woman in her 50s living in the northern enclave Iraqi Kurds wrested from Baghdad after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "This is my biggest wish. I want him torn to pieces in front of my very eyes."

The history of relations between Saddam and Iraq's Kurdish minority is written in bitterness and blood. It is a history of accusations of bad faith, bloody feuds and forced evacuations.

The mild-mannered mother's bitterness is not hard to understand. Her daughter Tania died quietly in a basement after inhaling the deadly gases.

Locals in Halabja who survived the attack, which came toward the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, say the gas smelt like apples.

Of the seven cousins huddling with Tania in the room, three died, two ran away never to be seen again and two survived.

Tania's uncle Fakhradeen Saleem buried his three dead children on the spot before fleeing with the surviving members of his family.

Months later, when the area was declared safe, Saeed, who had been living in the town of Sulaimaniya at the time of the attack, went back to Halabja to find her daughter's grave.

"Many times I uncovered bodies where people said my daughter lay buried," she said, tears streaming down her face. "But I have never found her. Now I go to the mass graves and just pray for everyone there, hoping she is among them."

At a cemetery on the outskirts of the shabby town, some 250 km (150 miles) northeast of Baghdad and close to the Iranian border, a small sign with a missile painted on it lists 12 people from a single family who perished in the attack.

Halabja is still deeply traumatized by the events of March 16, 1988 -- 15 years ago on Sunday.

Hamina Hamman Hussein, a woman in her 60s, recalls seeing dozens of bodies littering the streets when she finally dared to venture out, all victims of the mustard gas and nerve agents dropped by Iraqi warplanes.

She shares many locals' view that as long as Saddam is in power, Halabja is not safe.

"Even now I am afraid of it happening again," she said.

The anniversary of the attack coincides with looming war between the United States and Saddam's Iraq, which denies it is hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The threat of war has caused a diplomatic crisis between Washington and countries including France and Germany who want to give weapons inspections more time.

"We hear these antiwar arguments (in the West), but if people in other countries do not know whether Saddam has nonconventional weapons, we do," says star Hussein Allahkerem, 46, another survivor of the attack.

His face and scalp are still badly scarred, and his children suffer from speech impediments and throat disease, legacies, he adds, of Saddam's cruelty against the Kurds.

But there are newer threats to the town. Just a few kilometers (miles) away, in the hills close to the Iranian border, hundreds of radical fighters are defying the mainstream Iraqi opposition group controlling the area.

There is speculation that the United States may attack Ansar al-Islam's stronghold as part of its war in Iraq, putting Halabja back in the firing line.

But there is also an inkling of hope in the town that Kurds may gain more than they lose if the war goes ahead.

"It is too late for me now, but let's hope future generations of Kurds do not live what I've lived through," says Maebuba Mohammad, Tania's 67-year-old grandmother who was with her in Halabja when she died.