Genesis of Eden Diversity Encyclopedia

Get the Genesis of Eden AV-CD by secure internet order >> CLICK_HERE
Windows / Mac Compatible. Includes live video seminars, enchanting renewal songs and a thousand page illustrated codex.

Return to Genesis

Depleted Uranium and Sanctions: Killing the Children of Iraq

Severe Fetal Abnormality

BAGHDAD They smiled as they were dying. One little girl in a Basra hospital even put on her party dress for a photograph. She did not survive three months. All of them either played with explosive fragments left behind from United States and British raids on southern Iraq in 1991 or were the children, unborn at the time, of men and women-caught in those raids. Even then the words "depleted uranium", were on everyone's lips. Western politicians made no inquiries about this tragedy and missed a vital clue to the suffering of their own soldiers in the Balkans eight years later. In March of 1998, Dr Jawad Ehadirn al-Ali, trained in Britain and a member of the Royal College of Physicians, showed me his own maps of cancer and leukaemia clusters around the southem city of Basra and its farming hinterland, which were drenched in depleted uranium dust from exploding US shells in the 1991 Gulf War. The maps showed a four-fold increase in cancers in those areas where the fighting took place. And the people from. those fields and suburbs where the ordnance were fired were clustered around Ali's cancer clinic in Basra. Old men, young women with terrible tumours, whole families with no history of cancer suffering from leukaemias. They stood there, smiling at me, wanting to tell their stories. Their accounts, tragically, were the same. They had been close to the battle or to aerial bombing. Or their children had been playing with pieces of shrapnel after air raids or their children born two years after the war had suddenly began to suffer internal bleeding. Of course, it could have been one of President Saddam Hussein's bombed chemical plants, or the oil fires, that were to blame. 13ut the proximity of cancer victirm to air raids, right across Iraq from Basra and Kerbala to Baghdad, was too exact to leave much doubt. And tragic did not begin to describe the children's "wards of death" in Baghdad and Basra. Ali Hillal was 8 when I met him he was to survive less than two months more and lived next to a television broadcasting transmitter and several factories at Diala, repeatedly bombed by Allied aircraft in February 1991. He was the fifth child of a family that had no history of cancers. He now had a tumour in his brain. Little Youssef Abdul Raouf Moharned came from Kerbala, close to Iraqi military bases bombed m the war. He had gastro-intestinal bleeding. Aluned Fleah had already died in the children's ward, bleeding from his mouth, ears, nose and rectum. About the same time, the flrst British Gulf War Syndrome victims were telling of their suffering. It was often identical to the stories, told in Arabic, which I listened to in the Iraqi hospitals. Something terrible happened in southern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, I reported. But the British Government, now so anxious to allay fears for the health of British soldiers who had been in contact with depleted uranium shells in the Gulf and in the Balkans, put their collective nose in the air. Doug Henderson, then a Defence Minister, wrote in a letter that "the Government is aware of suggestions in the press that there has been an increase in W-health including alleged deformities, cancers and birth defects in southem Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted uranium-based ammunition by UK and US forces during the 1990/91 Gulf conflict. However the Govenunent has not seen an; peer-reviewed epidemiological research on this population to support these claims and it would therefore be premature to conunent on this matt6r." 'Had he been able to see the tiny girl in Basra whom I met with a tumour the size of a football pushing up from her stomach, perhaps his reply would have been more serious. Many of the other children in this purgatory hospital were bald and suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. All came from heavily bombed areas of Iraq. A few knew they were dying. Some told me they would recover. None of them did. When in 1998 I visited areas around Basra, the burned-out Iraqi tanks still lay where they had been attacked by the US First Infantry Division, amid the farms and streams. Many of the farmers had relatives dying of unexplained cancers. One Baghdad doctor had just watched a child patient the when I went to visit him. He sat in his chair in his clinic with his head in his hands, the tears flowing down his face. This was not propaganda. In Basra, in the poorest part of the city, I asked a random group of women about the health of their families. "My husband has cancer," one of them said. Sundus Abdel-Kader, a 33-year old mother, said her aunt had just died of leukaemia. Two other women interrupted to say that they had younger sisters suffering from cancer. And so it went on, in a society where merely to admit to cancer is regarded as a social stigma. Why had so many Iraqis especially children suddenly fallen victims, I asked myself, to an explosion of leukaemia in the aftermath of the 1991. Gulf War? Of course, they were Iraqis. They were Muslims. They were not Caucasians or Nato soldiers. But I do wonder if I'm going to have to tour the children's wards of Bosnia and Serbia in the years to come and see again the scenes I witnessed in Iraq. Or perhaps the military wards of European countries. That's why I asked Nato just after the Kosovo bombing in 1999 for the locations of depleted uranium munition explosions. The details, I was told, were "not releasable."

Before

After

One girl saved because the British Un sanctions coordinator smuggled in the chemotherapy drugs unavailable to toher patients who only receive partial ineffective treatment cutting cure rates fro 80 to 30%.

Victims of the 'mistaken' cruise missile attack on the air raid shelter in Baghdad

Numbers of neuroblastoma and lymphoma cases have soared to ten times their previous levels, particularly among those who have lived within the dust zones of depleted uranium contamination.

On to part 2

Genesis of Eden Diversity Encyclopedia

Get the Genesis of Eden AV-CD by secure internet order >> CLICK_HERE
Windows / Mac Compatible. Includes live video seminars, enchanting renewal songs and a thousand page illustrated codex.

Return to Genesis