We’re not going to ask you to change the way you’re living! You’re safe with us! We just want to introduce you to the top three suspects for soaring birth defects in Iraq.
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Chemical Agents.
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Imagine you are hanging out with your family on a much anticipated Friday evening in the Spring 1988. All the neighborhood kids are playing football in the street. Dinner is almost ready. It’s been a long week and you can hardly wait to all be in the same room enjoying each other’s company. The hardest decision for the night should be deciding between the new-to-VHS A Fish Called Wanda, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Rain Man.
But just as you’re setting out the final plate on the dinner table, the windows to your entire house are blown out by bombs suddenly dropping all around. Some of your neighbors run outside to see what’s going on. You grab your family and one of the neighbor kids and hunker down in the bathtub with a mattress over you. But none of it matters. As your dinner burns on the stove, mustard gas and nerve agents are seeping into your house, tracking you down, seeking you out. Timmy, the neighbor boy, starts laughing uncontrollably. You thought it was a coping mechanism until you look at him. Within minutes his laughter has stopped. The same gassed that made him laugh finally took his life. Remarkably, your entire family survives. But as you walk outside the next morning you realize that thousands of others in your neighborhood were not so fortunate. The father in the house to your left lay dead clutching his two-year-old to his chest by the door of his car. He was apparently trying to hide from the fumes inside the sealed vehicle. You are at once terrified and grateful that your family is fine. You have no idea that 20 years later all three of your children will have children with various congenital heart defects and cancers. Saddam Hussein’s 40 alleged chemical attacks and experiments on the Kurds of northern Iraq contribute to the high rate of life-threatening heart disease among children in the region today. The CIA reports1 that Saddam Hussein used mustard gas in various Kurdish villages inside Iraq, including Haij Umran and Panjwin (in 1983) and Halabja (1988) during the Iran-Iraq War. Human Rights Watch adds2 Bargloo and Saosenan to the list of villages against which the Ba’ath Party used chemical weapons. The Halabja bombing took place on March 16-17, 1988 with an initial wave of conventional bombs, allegedly used to maximize exposure to the chemical weapons that followed. The 5,000-7,000 residents of Halabja that died on March 16 are widely reported to have died in various ways with various symptoms, showing no signs of shrapnel or bullet wounds, suggesting the presence of multiple kinds of chemical agents. In a testimony to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, geneticist Dr. Christine M. Gosden notes the presence of mustard gas and nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX in the attack.3 She is quoted in the Washington Post as saying,
The Council on Foreign Relations notes that “mustard gas also attacks a cell’s DNA, increasing the risk of cancer and birth defects”5 and a 2010 report, “Childhood Physical Abnormalities Following Paternal Exposure to Sulfur Mustard Gas in Iran” concludes “the overall frequency of physical abnormalities is significantly associated with children whose fathers were exposed to mustard gas.” A chart attached to the report shows a greater than 4:1 ratio of congenital heart defects in particular among the group exposed to mustard gas during the Iran-Iraq War.6 1 Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5.html 2 Whatever Happened To The Iraqi Kurds? http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1991/IRAQ913.htm#_ftnref12 3 Testimony of Dr. Christine M. Gosden Before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Chemical and Biological Weapons Threats to America: Are We Prepared? http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_hr/s980422-cg.htm 4 “Why I Went, What I Saw” by Christine Gosden, The Washington Post, Wednesday 11 March 1998; Page A19 5 Mustard Gas http://www.cfr.org/iraq/mustard-gas/p9551 6 Childhood physical abnormalities following paternal exposure to sulfur mustard gas in Iran by Hassan Abolghasemi, Mohammad H Radfar, Mehdi Rambod, Parvin Salehi, Hossein Ghofrani, Mohammad R Soroush, Farahnaz Falahaty, Yousef Tavakolifar, Ali Sadaghianifar, Seyyed M Khademolhosseini, Zohreh Kavehmanesh, Michel Joffres, Frederick M Burkle, Jr, and Edward J Mills http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917398/table/T2/ |
Depleted Uranium.
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U.S. & British veterans of the Gulf War and the Iraq War in 2003 – along with Iraqi residence of heavily bombarded areas of Iraq (particularly the areas surrounding Basra, Baghdad, and Fallujah) – have reported increased illness among themselves and their offspring and believe Coalition weapons made from depleted uranium are leaving behind a chemically toxic legacy in the soil and gene-pool of those exposed in combat and in post-combat daily life. “Many UK and US veterans of that war believe exposure to DU has damaged their health, and in some cases killed their comrades,” reports Alex Kirby of the BBC.1 The questions and allegations surrounding DU’s chemical toxicity and radioactivity are highly contentious. It’s hard to get a handle on the various perspectives. But if you strip away the politics and the obvious vested interests of some of the so-called “independent” research institutes, the anecdotal evidence seems to be pretty compelling: U.S., British, and Iraqis adults – plus children from all three groups – are all coming down with congenital birth defects and various forms of cancer in numbers that were not present before the introduction of DU weapons in the first Gulf War. For more on the nature of depleted uranium and its possible effects on the environment and population, please take a few minutes to consider the video below. |
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If you have an extremely high tolerance for grotesquely graphic images beyond anything you can imagine, do a Google Image Search for “Depleted Uranium”. The photos that come up cannot scientifically be linked to DU, but it will at least provide photographic “evidence” that something is indeed going under-reported in mainstream media about the long-term environmental conditions in which the people of Iraq are now living. There is no known cure for many of the conditions that are allegedly resulting from DU usage in Iraq. But for those children born with congenital heart defects in these areas, a single surgery can, in most cases, save their lives and usher their families into a set of relationships where reconciliation with our American and British volunteers can begin. 1 UK to Aid Iraq DU Removal, British Broadcasting Corporation, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2970503.stm |
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Malnutrition & U.N. Sanctions.
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Some cite U.N. sanctions and the massive spike in infant and child mortality throughout the mid-nineties for many of the problems among children and youth in Iraq today. Widespread corruption and the deliberate withholding of essential human services led to rampant malnutrition and disease in Iraq on a scale so vast that it led to the resignations of the U.N. Coordinator for Iraq and other U.N. leaders. The sanctions were ostensibly designed to increase the amount the Ba’ath regime spend on humanitarian services from 25% to 72%,1 but were widely criticized by U.S. and world policy-makers for contributing to horrific conditions for the people of Iraq (and failing to slow Saddam’s militaristic pursuits). In 1995 – just five years into the sanctions – a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that 567,000 children died as a result of malnutrition and lack of access to medicine as a result of U.N. sanctions but later withdrew their conclusion. Columbia University’s Richard Garfield published a lower estimate of 106,000-227,000 children under five dead due to sanctions.2 UNICEF came out with the first authoritative report in 1999, based on a survey of 24,000 households, concluding “Children under 5 years of age are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago.”3 Sanctions were extended for an additional eight years before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and the sanctions were not fully lifted until December 2010. When pregnant mothers do not take in the proper calorie and nutritional requirements, children are at a greater risk of dying in utero or of being born with congenital birth defects. Studies show a relationship between folate deficiency and a higher incidence of non-syndromic congenital heart defects against control groups. “If these associations are causal, the results suggest that approximately one in four major cardiac defects could be prevented by periconceptional multivitamin use.”4 Whether you blame Saddam Hussein or the United Nations, infant mortality more than doubled in central and southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime during the sanctions era.The 1990-2003 era of sanctions had some effect on every family outside of the northern Kurdistan region (at least). Every mother in Iraq with a child between 7-21 years old in 2011 was at a greater risk of giving birth to a child with congenital birth defects owing to malnutrition, absence of essential medicines, and poor prenatal care. 1 Sanctions on Iraq: A Valid Anit-American Grievance?, Michael Rubin, Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2001) |
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