Another shameful legacy the United States may be leaving behind in Iraq – deformed children. Doctors and residents in Fallujah are saying that babies born there are showing increasing rates of deformities after the US began using ‘special weaponry’ in the two massive bombing campaigns in the city during 2004.
Though they denied it at first, the Pentagon admitted in 2005 to using ‘white phosphorous’, a restricted incendiary weapon. Depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were also used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon has admitted to using 1,200 tons of it in Iraq thus far.
From AfterDowningStreet.org:
Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.
“We saw all the colours of the rainbow coming out of the exploding American shells and missiles,” Ali Sarhan, a 50-year-old teacher who lived through the two U.S. sieges of 2004 told IPS. “I saw bodies that turned into bones and coal right after they were exposed to bombs that we learned later to be phosphorus.
“The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations.”
“I had two children who had brain damage from birth,” 28-year-old Hayfa’ Shukur told IPS. “My husband has been detained by the Americans since November 2004 and so I had to take the children around by myself to hospitals and private clinics. They died. I spent all our savings and borrowed a considerable amount of money.”
Shukur said doctors told her that it was use of the restricted weapons that caused her children’s brain damage and subsequent deaths, “but none of them had the courage to give me a written report.”
Doctors and the Fallujah General Hospital administration will not go on record about the deformities, fearing reprisal, so no official data is available – we can only go on anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, it may be many years before we find out the whole truth of how children in Iraq are being affected by this unnecessary war.
Shameful. We sent our troops to Iraq, to risk their own lives, for the wrong reasons – and as a result, who paid for it the most? Innocent citizens of Iraq. Families torn apart, lives destroyed – and for what?
Link [AfterDowningStreet.org]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
