HALABJA, Iraq -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell brought the debate over banned arms in Iraq to this farming town nestled in the country's barren northern mountains today, asserting that a 1988 poison-gas attack that killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish villagers in the area provided ample evidence that Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Providing an emotional defense of the Bush administration's contention that Iraq needed to be invaded to prevent the weapons from being used, Powell visited a mass grave site, toured a new museum about the attacks and stood as Kurdish political leaders proclaimed that the Halabja massacre provided sufficient legitimacy to go to war.

"If you want evidence of the existence and the use of weapons of mass destruction, come here now to Halabja today and see it," Powell said after walking through the museum. "What happened over the intervening 15 years? Did he [Hussein] suddenly lose the motivation? Did he suddenly decide that such weapons would not be useful? The international community did not believe so."

Powell's three-hour visit to this town near the Iranian border, which required him to fly in an airborne convoy of UH-60 Blackhawk and AH-64 Apache Longbow attack helicopters, brought him face to face with scores of Iraqi Kurds who praised the U.S. invasion and held aloft signs lauding President Bush. Although the sentiments appeared to be genuine, they were far more ebullient than those generally expressed by Iraqis in parts of the country Powell did not visit.

"Today it is perplexing and rather painful indeed for the people of Halabja to hear voices in the international community that continue to insist on proof for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction," said Barham Salih, the prime minister for the western part of Iraq's Kurdish enclave. "Here is the proof. Halabja is the proof. . . . This mass grave in Halabja and the other 170 so far discovered mass graves in Iraq should dispel any doubts about the legitimacy of the American and British liberation of Iraq. These mass graves vindicate the moral imperative of your intervention to protect the people of Iraq."

Standing at the mass grave site in front of rows of gravestones aligned in prefect diagonals with the precision of a military cemetery, Powell said the world "should have acted sooner" after the massacre. But he said the toppling of Hussein would prevent such atrocities from occurring in the future.

"What I can tell you is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again," he said, noting that Ali Hassan Majid, Hussein's cousin and the alleged architect of the Halabja attack, has been detained by U.S. forces. "Chemical Ali is in jail," he said. "He will stay in jail until an Iraqi decides his fate. Saddam is running and hiding. . . . Beyond that, the system that spawned them, a system of coups and plots and assassins is smashed and will never return."

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