The Continuing Destruction of Falluja

Iraq's government has built a new hospital in Fallujah, but the city's obstetricians have complained that they are still overwhelmed by the sheer number of serious defects. The US military has long denied that it is responsible for any contaminant left behind in the city, or elsewhere in Iraq, as it continues its steady departure from the country it has occupied for almost eight years.

[...]

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

  UK Guardian

Of course, this isn’t the first time the subject has come up. It never caused much of a ripple in our part of the world, though.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.

Now that sounds like something that might be welcomed by certain people in charge of TWOT; perhaps even a goal.

"We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent," said one of the report's authors, environmental toxicologist Mozhgan Savabieasfahani. "We don't know what that environmental factor is, but we are doing more tests to find out."

I’d think it would have had to been exposed very heavily and for some time to affect the birth rate, but then I’m not a chemical expert. Perhaps they’ve been blanketed with something airborne? Or something has been put in their water supply? I do know that even when I studied agricultural chemicals back in the early 90s, research showed a marked “feminization” of the environment – both in animals and humans – attributed to the use of a number of those chemicals, facts which didn’t seem to draw much concern outside environmentalist circles. That surprised me, since I figure anything threatening man’s “manliness” would be a very serious concern indeed in this country.

At any rate, as it has been argued that the atomic bomb was deployed at the end of WWII, not to end the war, which was already by many accounts about to be ended by a Japanese surrender, but to test our latest weaponry, and as it has been reported that we used something akin to the banned napalm - white phosphorus - on the people of Falluja, it occurs to me that there may even be other experimental weaponry unleashed on these people in the heat of a widely accepted retaliation.

The findings are likely to prompt further speculation that the defects were caused by depleted uranium rounds, which were heavily used in two large battles in the city in April and November 2004.

The WHO and NATO say DU is practically harmless. Others disagree: CADU; Gulf War Syndrome & DU; Contamination of Persian Gulf War Veterans and Others by Depleted Uranium

Iraq's government has built a new hospital in Fallujah, but the city's obstetricians have complained that they are still overwhelmed by the sheer number of serious defects. The US military has long denied that it is responsible for any contaminant left behind in the city, or elsewhere in Iraq, as it continues its steady departure from the country it has occupied for almost eight years.

Of course.