Ten years after the start of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, doctors in some of the Middle Eastern nation’s cities are witnessing an abnormally high number of cases of cancer and birth defects. Scientists suspect the rise is tied to the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus in military assaults.
On the war’s ten-year anniversary, Democracy Now! spoke with Dahr Jamail, an Al Jazeera reporter who recently returned from Iraq. Jamail recounts meeting Dr. Samira Alani, a doctor in the city of Fallujah focusing on the issue of birth defects.
Jamail says that the current rate of birth defects for the city of Fallujah has surpassed those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear attacks at the end of World War II.
Echoing Jamail’s findings, a September 2012 study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology that focused on maternity hospitals in the cities of Basra and Fallujah recorded a devastating number of birth defects in the past decade. The study also indicated that childhood leukemia and other types of cancers are on the rise.
As David Kenner notes in Foreign Policy, the numbers of miscarriages and birth defects are much higher than before the start of the war and are also “wildly out of proportion†to numbers collected in the rest of the world.
Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the 2012 study and a toxicologist at the University of Michigan, told The Independent in 2012 that there is “compelling evidence†to connect the growing number of defects at birth to the military assaults in Basra and Fallujah.
In a new op-ed for Al Jazeera, Savabieasfahani writes that the cancer and birth defect “epidemic†constitutes an “extraordinary public health emergency in Iraq†and that large-scale testing of the environment in the affected cities is of utmost urgency.
Watch Democracy Now!’s interview Dahr Jamail in the video above, and see the Democracy Now! website for more coverage.
U.S. Secertary of State Colin Powel holds up a vial that he said could contain anthrax during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council at the United Nations headquarters on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
An Iraqi man looks at his mother in a bus as others load luggage on the top of the vehicle bound for neighboring Syria at a bus station in Baghdad, Iraq on Sunday, March 9, 2003. Bus lines increased their trips to Syria from 4 to 20 a day at this station, carrying passengers fleeing amid the threat of a US-led invasion as well as others headed to the holy Shiite Muslim shrine of Sayeda Zeinab in the Syrian capital. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
Smoke rises from the Trade Ministry in Baghdad on March 20, 2003 after it was hit by a missile during US-led forces attacks. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
U.S. Army Bradley fighting vehicles travel in a convoy through the dust carrying infantrymen just after crossing the border into southern Iraq on Friday, March 21, 2003. (AP Photo/John Moore, File)
U.S. Marines with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, take cover after a mortar attack during a sandstorm on a road south of Baghdad, Iraq on Wednesday, March 26, 2003. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch, File)
U.S. Army Stf. Sgt. Chad Touchett, center, relaxes with comrades from A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, after a search of one of Saddam Hussein’s bomb-damaged palaces in Baghdad on Monday, April 7, 2003. (AP Photo/John Moore, File)
A looter rests on a fountain in the lobby of a smoke filled Sheraton hotel in Basra, Iraq on Monday, April 7, 2003. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
A U.S. Marine watches a statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in Firdaus Square in downtown Baghdad on April 9, 2003 file photo. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)
Piles of torn and burned Iraqi currency bearing the portrait of Saddam Hussein lie in ashes on the floor of the burned Baghdad Central Bank on Friday, April 18, 2003. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
U.S. President George W. Bush gives a thumbs up as he visits the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on Thursday, May 1, 2003. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Moments after the explosions, a youth runs past the victims and burning debris at the site of several bomb blasts in densely-occupied areas during the holy day of Ashoura, a Shiite festival, in the holy city of Karbala, Iraq on Tuesday, March 2, 2004. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)
An Iraqi man celebrates on top of a burning U.S. Army Humvee in the northern part of Baghdad, Iraq on Monday, April 26, 2004. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)
This late 2003 image obtained by The Associated Press shows an unidentified detainee standing on a box with a bag on his head and wires attached to him at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/File)
The mother of Samah Hussein cries over his body in a Baghdad, Iraq morgue on June 13, 2004 after he was killed when a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb outside the U.S. military camp Cuervo. (AP Photo/Samir Mizban, File)
A U.S. soldier aims his weapon at a man who a soldier had just shot in the neck as he attempted to flee down a narrow alley in a van, across the street from the scene of Tuesday’s intense shootout on a house in Mosul, Iraq on Wednesday, July 23, 2003. (AP Photo/Wally Santana, File)
A U.S. soldier demonstrates access to a shaft used by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein before he was captured two days earlier, on a farm near Tikrit, northern Iraq on Monday, Dec. 15, 2003. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours, File)
Captured former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein undergoes a medical examination in Baghdad on Dec. 14, 2003 in this image made from video. (AP Photo/US Military via APTN, File)
This image made from video released by Iraqi state television shows Saddam Hussein’s guards wearing ski masks and placing a noose around the deposed leader’s neck moments before his execution on Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006. (AP Photo/Iraqi state television, File)
Relatives of Iraqi National Guard soldier Ryaad Khudayar grieve at the morgue in the Baqouba hospital, some 65 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, after he was killed in a car blast on Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2004. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed, File)
Demonstrators chant anti-American slogans as charred and mutilated bodies of U.S. contractors hang from a bridge over the Euphrates River in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, on March 31, 2004. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed, File)
U.S. Army Nurse supervisor Patrick McAndrew tries to save the life of an American soldier by giving him CPR on a stretcher as he arrived at a military hospital in Baghdad, Iraq on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004. The soldier was fatally wounded in a Baghdad firefight with insurgents. (AP Photo/John Moore, File)
U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Timothy Dupuis, of Dover, N.H., climbs the stairs at an outpost in Fallujah, Iraq, 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Baghdad, on Tuesday, May 2, 2006. (AP Photo/Jacob Silberberg, File)
This image made from a video from a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gun sight, posted at Wikileaks.org and confirmed as authentic by a senior U.S. military official, shows two men in the streets of the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad after being fired upon by the helicopter on July 12, 2007. Among those killed in the attack was Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver Saeed Chmagh, 40. Two children also were wounded. According to U.S. officials, two helicopters arrived at the scene to find a group of men approaching the fight with what look to be AK-47s slung over their shoulders and at least one rocket-propelled grenade. A military investigation later concluded that what was thought to be an RPG was a telephoto lens and the AK-47 was a camera. (AP Photo/Wikileaks.org, File)
An Iraqi prisoner of war comforts his 4-year-old son at a regrouping center for POWs captured by the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division near Najaf, Iraq on March 31, 2003. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju, File)
In this Dec. 14, 2008 file photo, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, an Iraqi journalist, throws a shoe at U.S. President George W. Bush during a news conference with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
A volunteer puts flowers next to a cross at the Arlington West Iraq war memorial display on the beach next to the Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, Calif. on Saturday May 27, 2006. (AP Photo/Stefano Paltera, File)
