Allies blamed for Iraq cancer torment

SEVEN YEARS after the end of the Gulf war, a nightmare "epidemic" of leukemia and stomach cancer is claiming the lives of thousands of Iraqi civilians who live near the former war zone, including children so young that they were not even born when hostilities ended. Iraqi doctors in the southern city of Basra have recorded a fourfold increase in cancer - especially among young children - since 1991.

Doctors fear that farms which produce most of the city's food have been contaminated by depleted uranium shells used by the Allies during the last tank battles of the war. But some Iraqis suspect that American and British bombing of Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare factories may be to blame - or that US aircraft may themselves have used some form of chemicals in their attacks.

The mother of Ali Hillal, an eight-year-old child, who lay dying in the al-Mansur hospital in Baghdad last week, told me that after Allied aircraft had bombed a broadcasting station near their family home in Diala in 1991, she smelt "a burning, choking smell, something like insecticide". Two doctors interviewed by The Independent believe that the fumes from burning oil refineries may have contained carcinogens; another spoke of "radiation" from bombs during the war.

Even child cancer patients who might survive, however, are in some cases dying for lack of vital medicines that could save their lives. At the al-Mansur hospital - which has treated hundreds of children in the past three years - Dr Yasser Raouf, the chief resident doctor, told me of the desperate need for Vincristine and Methortrexate for leukemia patients. Some children are receiving the left-over medicines of infants who have already died.

Five-year-old Latif Abdul Sattar, from Babylon, also bald from chemotherapy - he looks like a Chernobyl victim - was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma three months ago but has been given only a 60 per cent chance of survival because he is being treated with a substitute for Vincristine.

Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali, a member of the Royal College of Physicians who is a cancer specialist at Basra's largest hospital, says that in 1997 he treated 380 cancer patients in his own clinic - compared to scarcely 80 per year before 1991.

In a country which is disintegrating under the effect of sanctions, there are no official government statistics on the startling increase in cancer reported by doctors. Perhaps fearing that cities may have been polluted by bio-chemical warfare products from bombed factories, the Iraqi health ministry has made no effort to publicise the tragedy. And since most of the victims are Shiites - the Muslim sect which rebelled against Saddam Hussein's rule in the aftermath of the war - there is little incentive for the Iraqi regime to care.

In his hospital oncology department, Dr al-Ali has pinned to the wall a set of maps of Basra governorate and Nasiriyah city, showing that most new cancer cases come from areas immediately to the east of the tank battles between US and Iraqi forces in February of 1991.

"There are canals as well as farms throughout this area," Dr al-Ali said. "There are rivers there. And always the wind comes from the west, towards Basra." When Dr al-Ali finished showing me his maps, we walked into the hallway outside to find a mass of young women and several old men waiting to see him, all of whom had developed cancer in the past five years.

A woman with a crutch had a bone tumour in her thigh. A young woman in a black chador - a non-smoker with no history of cancer in her family - was suffering from lung cancer; a woman of 51 wearing an Islamic scarf, a schoolteacher and mother of five children, suddenly pulled up her blouse to reveal a missing right breast. "I have breast cancer," she sobbed. "Four years ago, they removed my right breast. Then I had a re-occurrence on my neck. Now I have pain in my left breast. Please help us. We are human beings like you." Like most cancer patients in Iraq, she is likely to die. "Cancer isn't contagious," Dr Raouf says. "But it's moving from south to the north of the country as if it was an infectious disease."

t This was a joint investigation with Channel 4, whose report on Iraq's cancer "epidemic" will be screened at 7pm tonight.

The war children, page 13