[PEN-L:1815] Uranium-tipped bullets and Iraqi children

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Guardian

Monday December 21, 1998

One million rounds of bullets tipped with uranium were fired during the
Gulf war. They slice through tanks. And this is what they do to humans

Maggie O'Kane reports on Iraq's deformed children, victims of a war they
never knew

The movement inside her body is strange: different from her three other
children. As Suad Jope waits for her birth-time, she passes the hours and
the spasms announcing it by sliding her back along the maternity corridor's
grubby cream walls.

It's night now, the early hours. In the afternoon, her consultant, Dr Haifa
Ashahine, had stood over her bed, taken a Biro from the left breast pocket
of her white doctor's coat and traced the spine of Suad's child, holding
the X-ray above her head towards a strip light on the ceiling.

At 34, and already the mother of three children, Suad has been through this
all before. Her heavy cotton nightgown is sprinkled with pale apple
blossoms and hangs down almost covering the puffy ankles of a woman
approaching labour. That afternoon, Dr Haifa Ashahine had stopped and said:
"See, the spine ends here. There is no head."

Dr Ashahine, a senior gynaecologist at the Saddam Hussein Children's
Hospital in southern Iraq, is not shocked. If it is not a child without a
brain, then maybe it's one with a giant head, stumpy arms like those of a
thalidomide victim, two fingers instead of five, a heart with missing
valves, missing ears. The deformities have one thing in common: they are
congenital.

In Iraq, the health authorities say that at least three times more children
are being born with congenital deformities than before the Gulf war. Now,
in both Britain and the United States, veterans of that same war are coming
forward with reports of sick and dying children. In Britain, the Ministry
of Defence has agreed to an £800,000 independent survey of reproduction
that will cover every veteran that served in the Gulf.

Last summer, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine carried out
a pilot study of 400 veterans. On the basis of that, they have given the
go-ahead for a survey of every serviceman and woman who served in the Gulf
war. The study is to include specific questions about "occupation and
environmental exposures". According to the MoD, no results will be
available before the year 2000.

The brutal irony is that the most likely origin of this gene-twisting force
is not Iraqi, but Western. During the 100-hour ground war of February 1991,
coalition planes fired at least one million rounds of ammunition coated in
a radioactive material known as depleted uranium, or DU.

There is another explanation for this genetic plague: the environmental
pollution caused when chemical and biological centres were blown up in an
effort to 'degrade' the Iraqi arsenal. But radiation from depleted uranium
rounds remains the most plausible explanation.

"We know that depleted uranium is toxic and can cause diseases," says Dr
Howard Urnovitz, a microbiologist who has testified before the Presidential
Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses.

"This is the beginning," says Dr Jawad-al Ali, a paediatrician and fellow
of the Royal College of Surgeons. He is based in southern Iraq's largest
hospital and has spent three years researching congenital defects and
cancers in children. "Something happened to our environment in that war.
Maybe it was DU or maybe it was the chemicals that were released when we
were bombed - we can't say for sure yet, but something has happened to our
environment.

"We even see it in the plant and agricultural life. Giant marrows, huge
tomatoes - it's clear that there has been some sort of genetic modification
since the war." In a Guardian investigation which has involved talking to
doctors all over central and southern Iraq - inspecting maternity logs,
birth defect registers and personal records taken by midwives and
paediatricians - a terrifying pattern emerges. There has been a clear
increase in birth defects, ranging from thalidomide-type deformities to
entire villages where the children of different families are being born
blind or with internal congenital defects in the heart and lungs. The
highest concentration is in the south of Iraq.

Two hours south of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the road comes to an
abrupt stop at a fence of barbed wire some eight metres high. This is the
controlled zone, a graveyard of rusting Iraqi tanks riddled with bullets
and abandoned there since the war. The Guardian was the first independent
foreign newspaper to enter the region since the war.

Using simple radiation Geiger counters, we measured high levels of
radiation in the destroyed tanks and in the desert that surrounded them.
The source of the radiation was a substance that had never been used in the
battlefield before the Gulf war. Iraq became the laboratory for an untested
and unknown material - DU.

A byproduct of the manufacture of nuclear weapons and energy production
techniques used in nuclear power plants, DU is the heaviest metal in the
world. Britain imported 500 tonnes from the US in 1981. Its attraction is
that bullets tipped with DU are so tough that they can slice through tanks
like a knife through butter.

The problem is that when DU-tipped bullets hit the target they explode,
sending millions of tiny radioactive particles into the atmosphere. 'This
is when it becomes most dangerous,' says Arjun Makihani, the President of
the US Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Once released, the
particles can be directly inhaled, can pollute the water table and enter
the food chain, spreading radioactive pollution over thousands of square
miles.

Exposure to this kind of radiation, as well as to chemical pollution, can
cause genetic damage because of the ease with which the uranium can cross
the placenta to the foetus(1). According to the Department of Defense in
the United States, at least 40 tonnes of DU were left on the battlefields
of southern Iraq.

Professor Selma al-Taha is 62 and wears a finely woven headscarf of white
silk over an impeccable bun. From a pint-sized office on the fourth floor
of the Baab al-Muadam medical college - dedicated, as every establishment
in Iraq is, to Saddam Hussein - she runs the country's only functioning
genetics laboratory. She studied for a masters degree in Human Genetics at
Edinburgh University and worked in the Western General Hospital in the
city. "Such a lovely city, so easy to get around," she says. "And the
picnics, I remember the picnics." In 1975 she established the first
genetics laboratory in Iraq and is the country's leading geneticist. "I
first began noticing the increase around 1993," she says.

"By the end of the year I was sure there was something wrong. We've no idea
of the real scale of it, because most of it is happening in the south and
people nowadays have no money to travel to the capital. Still, from the
data it's clear that we were being presented with complicated congenital
defects that we have either never seen before, or only very rarely seen.

"Something has happened to the environment since the war. It is true that
it could be pollution due to smoke or chemicals, but the reason we believe
the most probable cause is radiation is because radiation is most effective
on a fast-changing organism like a foetus or a growing child. Also, the
organs most susceptible to radiation, after the kidneys, are the
reproductive organ - the gonads and the ovaries.

"We are getting a huge increase in late miscarriages for unknown reasons.
We're getting mothers as young as 20 giving birth to mongol babies, which
shouldn't happen. My research shows that the number of children born with
Down's syndrome-type defects has tripled since the war."

She admits her statistics are sketchy and that from her Baghdad
headquarters she can't monitor the whole country.

Twenty-five-year old Dr Zenad Mohammed is making her own attempt to monitor
the problem. She is five months pregnant and doing her maternity training
in the Saddam Hussein Teaching Hospital in Basra - a jumble of one-storey
buildings with peeling white paint, filled with a pale odour of
disinfectant. Outside, two decorators are delicately crafting the green,
white and orange stripes of the Iraqi flag on to the concrete. Dr Zenad is
carrying her first baby and she watches these things very, very carefully.
"I'm scanning myself every day. I know I shouldn't but I'm terrified."

For the past three months Dr Zenad, terrified of giving birth to a deformed
child, has been monitoring the birth defects in their delivery room, where
20 to 30 babies are born daily. She keeps her findings in a hard-backed
grey notebook. In a scrawny blue Biro she has divided the page into
columns, in which she writes the sexes, dates of birth and weights of the
babies. In a fourth column, she logs their deformities.

She begins: "August - we had three babies born with no head. Four had
abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, none with
large heads and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four
with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities."

Stuck up on the hot water boiler of a kitchen in Wiltshire is a typewritten
letter from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It is
inviting Darren and Julia Office to take part in a survey to investigate
the "effects of serving in the Gulf war, and in the armed forces in
general, on reproduction and child health".

Their daughter Kimberley has a congenital deformity that affects her
chromosomes. She is almost six, but the size of a three-year-old. Her
deformity has led to heart and lung problems. When it was diagnosed, their
doctors told them to go away and enjoy her life because she might not have
long. It was, they said, "just one of those things".

Warminster is bleak on a wet Saturday in December. It is a military town
with two army bases and an unmanned train station with a screen that
advises travellers to London to change at Salisbury. The Offices' terraced
home is comfortable and their daughter, Kimberley, with her stack of books
and Barbie doll, gets the lavish love and care of a six-year-old whose
suffering has broken her parents' heart.

There is a Spice Girls video and a video recorder poised to tape their last
Christmas together on the wine- and purple-checked sofa before the arrival
of the new baby.

"I started to think about it when I learned that out of the 27 in my group,
three of us had children who are sick," says Darren.

"There was a baby that died at birth, another one and our Kimberley. We
were talking among ourselves, and people were saying that there were too
many sick babies. It's the kiddies I'm thinking about."

Julie is due to give birth to her second child in three weeks. As the birth
approaches, she is becoming more and more worried: "I just thought that we
had to come forward and talk about this. There are a lot who don't, because
they're still in the services and afraid of making a fuss. I can't put my
hand on my heart and say it was the Gulf war - I don't know. Nobody knows
yet. But there are too many people talking about the deformities. We were
two healthy young people. We had no history of congenital illness."

Darren went to the Gulf in October 1990 with the Queen's Royal Irish
Hussars. For most of the war he and his regiment were far from the
fighting, but for the last seven days they were at the front, at the Basra
Road, where some of a heavy air bombardment in the final days of the war
led to the death of thousands. It was here that the greatest number of
depleted uranium rounds were fired.

Darren and his unit reached the road after the dead had been looted but
before their bodies had been removed: "We were on the road for about 10
hours. It was after the ceasefire, and with a couple of the guys we went
wandering through the wreckage. We had never heard of depleted uranium and
hadn't been warned about taking any precautions."

The village of Abbarra is two hours' drive north of Baghdad, close to the
Iranian border where the brick factories bake mud in the traditional way
and the land is fertile with aubergine and cucumber. In a compound, the
neighbours have gathered, and hot, sweet tea from delicate glasses is
offered while the children of the blind families are sent for.

Since the war, five children from three separate families have been born
here in this tiny village with a strange congenital blindness. These
families are the subject of a special study by the Baghdad Genetic Clinic.

"All their fathers served in the war," says Professor Selma al-Taha. "There
is no history of any kind of congenital blindness and they are all from
different families. The only other possibility is vitamin deficiency, but
they are farmers and relatively well off in that respect."

One of the children, Azhar, is four. She moves across the mats of the
meeting room, arms outstretched, feeling the air in front of her, calling
for her father.

The concern in Iraq is that the radiation from DU, which has a radioactive
half-life of at least 4,000 years is spreading around the country. "It's in
the food chain now," says Professor al-Taha. "Dates are being sent from the
south - oranges, tomatoes, there isn't any way to control the spread." The
birth of deformed babies is not confined to the south.

Dr Basma Al Asam has been a gynaecologist for 22 years. She works in the Al
Manoor hospital in Baghdad, one of the city's poorest. "I've been watching
this for seven years now," she says, "and it is increasing and increasing.
We're not just seeing babies born with congenital abnormalities, but very
late spontaneous abortion because of congenital defects. In the past we
used to see maybe one a month. Now it is two or three cases per day. I've
had three cases this morning and it's only 11.20."

The price of cleaning up the radioactive mess in the Persian Gulf is
enormous. It would cost 'billions' even if it were feasible, says Leonard
Dietz, an atomic scientist who wrote a report for the US Energy Department.

In the days that followed the retreat and defeat of Iraqi troops, thousands
of coalition soldiers were on the ground among the radioactive tanks. Some
picked fragments of bullets as souvenirs and wore them around their necks.

"The Gulf war was the first time we saw Soviet tanks," says Chris Kornkven,
who served with the US's 304th Combat Support Group. "Many of us started
climbing around in them."

It was also common practice among British soldiers. "We all did it," says
Darren Office. "A gang of us would go out - not too far from our tanks -
and have a look about. Lads larking around."

So far, only one British soldier has been tested for DU: Ray Bristow, who
served with his unit on the notorious Basra Road. Bristow's test was
carried out by Dr Asaf Darakovic, associate member of the American College
of Physicians and professor of radiology and nuclear medicine at Georgetown
University in Washington DC. He told Bristow last month that a test had
revealed the level of radioactivity in his urine was 100 times greater than
was safe. Dr Darakovic also told Bristow that of 24 servicemen he tested
for radioactivity from the 144 New Jersey Transport and Resupply Corps, 14
out of 24 tested positive for radioactivity.

At a two-day conference held in Baghdad earlier this month to discuss the
use of DU in the Gulf, there was little outside interest. The agency news
reports barely warranted a line of reporting in Britain and the US. "The
problem is that no one is taking this seriously," says Dr Sami-al Arajick,
organiser of the conference. "They are saying it is all Iraqi propaganda.
But it is a nightmare and it is not just us Iraqis who will find that out."

"Do your people in England know about this yet?" asks Professor Selma
al-Taha. "They don't believe us, do they?"

1: Research carried at Oak Ridge National Laboratories which
controversially used uranium compounds to trace the passage of calcium from
the placenta to the foetus.

© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)