Iraq: Birth defects blamed on US

Issue 

The article below is abridged from the British Morning Star.

Fallujah, in central Iraq, has suffered an epidemic of birth defects since US-led forces laid siege to the city in 2004, doctors and parents have said.

A hospital paediatrician in the city told the BBC on March 4 that three new cases of birth defects are seen every day.

BBC reporter John Simpson said he saw a young girl with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

The US military denies the birth defects are related to weapons used by its forces in the conflict. But Simpson implied defects were being under-reported, saying: "It was hard to find doctors at the brand-new, US-funded hospital in Fallujah who were prepared to talk about the problem."

The US has helped fund reconstruction of Fallujah after the US military destroyed it and Simpson said people were "scared to speak because the Iraqi government did not want to create trouble for the Americans".

In February 2004, Fallujah residents drove US forces out of their city. The following month, they defeated a three-week long attempt by 4500 US soldiers to reoccupy it.

In November 2004, 10,000 US soldiers mounted a full-scale assault on the city in an apparent act of collective punishment.

At the time, Iraqi health ministry official Dr Khalid ash Shaykhli told a news conference that fleeing residents described "seeing corpses that had melted, which suggests that US troops used napalm gas, a poisonous compound of polystyrene and aircraft fuel which melts bodies".

Ash Shaykhli also said that his researchers had found evidence of the use of mustard gas and nerve gas. "We found dozens, not to say hundreds, of stray dogs, cats, and birds that had perished as a result of those gases."

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