Massive Epidemic of Severe Birth Defects Result of America’s Attacks Against Iraq

 

The terrible price of war is not limited to dollars, combat deaths and injuries but includes the horrible human suffering that persists for many years after the shooting war stops.

 

By James P. Tucker Jr.

 

In the decade following Gulf War I, the rate of birth defects among newborn Iraqi babies leaped tenfold from 11 per 100,000 births to 116 per 100,000 births. In the wake of Gulf War II, physicians and human rights groups are anticipating further increases in horrible deformities and sick and dying children with which Iraq’s shattered medical system will be unable to cope.

Scientists contend that the blame is to be placed on toxic elements in U.S. weapons such as depleted uranium (DU) used in U.S. missiles. While its use has yet to be defined as a “war crime,” scientists say it certainly is a “crime against humanity.”

Jawad Al-Ali, MD, a British-trained oncologist at the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra has four albums filled with pictures of babies with birth defects.

He has photos of infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without arms and legs, without eyes, without sexual organs, without spines—the horror pictures are beyond description.

He also has photos of cancer patients. Cancer has increased dramatically in southern Iraq. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer. In 1998—seven years after Gulf War I ended—450 died of cancer. In 2001, there were 603 cancer deaths.

The wards are filled with children suffering from leukemia. Most of them die, physicians told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, because there are insufficient drugs available for their treatment. There was a notable exception: one boy whose parents could afford to buy the expensive drugs on the black market.

It defies logic for the United States to try to absolve DU of the blame when American veterans of Gulf War I and of the fighting in the Balkans share common illnesses with children in southern Iraq, Al-Ali said. Children of American vets who were exposed to DU are being born with horrible deformities.

“The cause of all these cancers and deformities remains theoretical because we can’t confirm the presence of uranium in tissue or urine with the equipment we have,” Al-Ali told the Post-Intelligencer. “And be cause of the sanctions, we can’t get the equipment we need.”

Since combat operations ended—although guerrilla fighting still claims American lives almost daily—the United States has called on the United Nations to lift the sanctions. But the destruction and turmoil in Iraq render this meaningless at the moment.

Physicians in southern Iraq have documented increases in childhood cancers and birth defects since 1990, Dr. Thomas Fasy, of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told Associated Press. Fasy has met with Iraqi physicians.

A dialogue between Ahmed Mansour and Doug Rokke, former chief of the depleted uranium project at the Pentagon, was reported by al Jazeera.

“The infections that showed up in the south of Iraq and the deformities in the newborns, do you expect these to last for 4-5 billion years?” Mansour asks.

“Absolutely,” Rokke responds. “As long as individuals are being exposed to uranium, we know that the changes in the RNA and in DNA, the changes that occur genetically, are causing all of these birth defects.”

“Can the insistence of the United States to use this ammunition against human beings and against Iraq be considered a new war crime?” Mansour asks.

“Anybody who uses uranium munitions in war must understand that it is a crime against God and a crime against humanity,” Rokke responds. “When you deliberately and willfully spread radioactive waste, ignore the health effects and refuse to clean it up, that is a crime against God and a crime against humanity.”