Warning: Disturbing Pics (Beyond Belief) Fallujah babies: Under a new kind of siege

Doctors and residents blame US weapons for catastrophic levels of birth defects in Fallujah’s newborns.

Dahr Jamail

Fallujah, Iraq – While the US military has formally withdrawn from Iraq, doctors and residents of Fallujah are blaming weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorous used during two devastating US attacks on Fallujah in 2004 for what are being described as “catastrophic” levels of birth defects and abnormalities.

Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005.

“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.

As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699.

“There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we’ve never seen them until now,” she said. “So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I’m unable to provide a medical term.”

Most of these babies in Fallujah die within 20 to 30 minutes after being born, but not all.

Four-year-old Abdul Jaleel Mohammed was born in October 2007. His clinical diagnosis includes dilation of two heart ventricles, and a growth on his lower back that doctors have not been able to remove.

Abdul has trouble controlling his muscles, struggles to walk, cannot control his bladder, and weakens easily. Doctors told his father, Mohamed Jaleel Abdul Rahim, that his son has severe nervous system problems, and could develop fluid build-up in his brain as he ages, which could prove fatal.

“This is the first instance of something like this in all our family,” Rahim told Al Jazeera. “We lived in an area that was heavily bombed by the Americans in 2004, and a missile landed right in front of our home. What else could cause these health problems besides this?”

Dr Alani told Al Jazeera that in the vast majority of cases she has documented, the family had no prior history of congenital abnormalities.

Alani showed Al Jazeera hundreds of photos of babies born with cleft palates, elongated heads, a baby born with one eye in the centre of its face, overgrown limbs, short limbs, and malformed ears, noses and spines.

She told Al Jazeera of cases of “thanatophoric dysplasia”, an abnormality in bones and the thoracic cage that “render the newborn incompatible with life”.

Rahim said many of his relatives that have had babies after 2004 are having problems as well.

“One of them was born and looks like a fish,” Rahim said. “I also personally know of at least three other families who live near us who have these problems also.”

For now, the family is worried how Abdul will fare in school when he is enrolled next year. Maloud Ahmed Jassim, Abdul’s grandfather, added, “We’ve seen so many miscarriages happen, and we don’t know why.”

“The growth on his back is so sensitive and painful for him,” Rahim said. “What will happen in school?”

Jassim is angered by a lack of thorough investigations into the health crisis.

“Why is the government not investigating this,” he asked. “Western media seem interested, but neither our local media nor the government are. Why not?”

In April 2011, Iraqi lawmakers debated whether the US attacks on the city constituted genocide. Resolutions that called for international prosecution, however, went nowhere.

Alani, along with Dr Christopher Busby, a British scientist and activist who has carried out research into the risks of radioactive pollution, collected hair samples from 25 parents of families with children who have birth defects and sent them to a laboratory in Germany for analysis.

Alani and Busby, along with other doctors and researchers, published a study in September 2011 from data obtained by analysing the hair samples, as well as soil and water samples from the city.

Mercury, Uranium, Bizmuth and other trace elements were found.

The report’s conclusion states:

“Whilst caution must be exercised about ruling out other possibilities, because none of the elements found in excess are reported to cause congenital diseases and cancer except Uranium, these findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases. Questions are thus raised about the characteristics and composition of weapons now being deployed in modern battlefields.”

“As doctors, we know Mercury, Uranium and Bismuth can contribute to the development of congenital abnormalities, and we think it could be related to the use of prohibited weapons by the Americans during these battles,” Alani said.

“Findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases,” says a recent scientific report on the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah [Dr Samira Alani]

“I made this link to a coroner’s inquest in the West Midlands into the death of a Gulf War One veteran… and a coroner’s jury accepted my evidence,” he told Al Jazeera.

“It’s been found by a coroner’s court that cancer was caused by an exposure to depleted uranium,” Busby added, “In the last 10 years, research has emerged that has made it quite clear that uranium is one of the most dangerous substances known to man, certainly in the form that it takes when used in these wars.”

In July 2010, Busby released a study that showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks. The report also showed the sex ratio had declined from normal to 86 boys to 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage similar to but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima.

Dr Alani visited Japan recently, where she met with Japanese doctors who study birth defect rates they believe related to radiation from the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She was told birth defect incidence rates there are between 1-2 per cent. Alani’s log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the affected areas of Japan.

In Babil Province in southern Iraq, the head of the Babil Cancer Centre, Dr Sharif al-Alwachi, said cancer rates have been escalating at alarming rates since 2003, for which he blames the use of depleted uranium weapons by US forces during and following the 2003 invasion.

“The environment could be contaminated by chemical weapons and depleted uranium from the aftermath of the war on Iraq,” Dr Alwachi told Al Jazeera. “The air, soil and water are all polluted by these weapons, and as they come into contact with human beings they become poisonous. This is new to our region, and people are suffering here.”

The US and UK militaries have sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, but Iraqi doctors like Alwachi and Alani, and along with researchers, blame the increasing cancer and birth defect rates on the weapon.

Abdulhaq Al-Ani, author of Uranium in Iraq, has been researching the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqis since 1991. He told Al Jazeera he personally measured radiation levels in the city of Kerbala, as well as in Basra, and his Geiger counter was “screaming” because “the indicator went beyond the range”.

Alani explained that she is the only doctor in Fallujah registering cases of congenital abnormalities.

“We have no system to register all of them, so we have so many cases we are missing,” she said. “Just yesterday a colleague told me of a newborn with thanatophoric dysplasia and she did not register it. I think I only know of 40-50 per cent of the cases because so many families have their babies at home and we never know of these, and other clinics are not registering them either.”

The hospital where Alani does her work was constructed in the Dhubadh district of Fallujah in 2008. According to Alani, the district was bombed heavily during the November 2004 siege.

“There is also a primary school that was built nearby, and from that school alone three teachers developed breast cancer, and now two of them are dead,” Alani said. “We get so many cases from this area, right where the hospital is.”

Even with a vast amount of anecdotal evidence, the exact cause of the health crisis in Fallujah is currently inconclusive without an in-depth, comprehensive study, which has yet to be carried out.        

But despite lack of governmental support, and very little support from outside Iraq, Alani is determined to continue her work.

“I will not leave this subject”, she told Al Jazeera. “I will not stop.”

More here: http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/fallujah-babies-under-...

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Comment by Robert Doyle SR on January 22, 2012 at 10:45pm

"WAR is not healthy for children and other living things" This was an antiwar statement of the late 1960's over the damages we caused to the Vietnamese people with the use of 2-4-D aka Agent Orange.

Comment by LYNN SHEDLER on January 22, 2012 at 8:22pm

This  is  only  the  beginning!!!  With  the  disaster  in  Japan  it  will  be  10  times  worse.  And  those  poor  parents  that  have  to  face  the  decisions  of  putting  their  New  Borns  to  sleep  forever.  My  heart  goes  out  to  those  Japanese  people.  And  it  is  spreading  in  the  fish.  What  are  WE  going  to  reproduce????

Comment by Catherine Gleason on January 22, 2012 at 8:06pm

War helps to destroy the planet and the pollution is incredible from this activity.  So do the millions of aircraft flying around the world every day of the year.  But............no one is prepared to go without either.  However, I do support the troops from all our countries.  We are like them, pawns on the great chess board of politics.

Comment by Cryptocurrency on January 22, 2012 at 7:49pm

... if you don't support the war you don't support the troops. Don't be an oddball just go with the crowd and wave a damn flag.

Comment by Catherine Gleason on January 22, 2012 at 7:42pm

I have great faith in my fellow men and women.  We are intelligent beings capable of great innovation, cures and the ability to think wisely.  We will find ways to help our sick planet.  We just need the will of men and women to demand change from the fools who rule.  We need more philosophers within our collective governments right around the world.  One hundred years ago, no one could have even imagined a man would walk on the moon.  Today feats like this are routine.  It is not the possibility, or the impossibility of these great feats, it is the ability of us as a collective force to fight for change.  It will happen. 

Comment by mystery on January 22, 2012 at 6:28pm

Silent Spring=silence. This is only the start of the horrible things that are to come. The people in control are killing the planet a little more every day along with every living thing as we know it today! Toxic waste will remain toxic waste for longer than history can be recorded, it does not go away! We have stored just in the United States alone enough toxic waste and nuclear waste to kill the WORLD many times over and leave it so toxic that it would never be clean again. This earth as we know it and many before us have known will disappear. The human race is slowly destroying itself and its environment. Sad,very sad.

Comment by Catherine Gleason on January 22, 2012 at 5:11pm

OMG  The chickens are coming home to roost with vengence.  Poor little souls.  Is it a case of first cousin marriages?  Perhaps rape by brothers or other sick practices within Islam.  I have seen hideous cases of this and beside Muslim cemeteries there is a place for the burial of babies born from these  reason.  Either way, shame, shame, shame.

Comment by Reg Random on January 22, 2012 at 5:08pm

 do 'cause and effect' studies really have to take place to 'convince' the world that the responsibility is with those who have no regard whatsoever for anyone but themselves. I am sad beyond belief that these acts are carried out in the name of "the humanity and safety of the western world".  Surely we are gradually wiping out the entire human race with this confrontational mindset of "the new world order" - I am glad I do not have too many more years to live in this societal obscenity!

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