From The Independent January 10th, 2001

Robert Fisk

THEY SMILED as they were dying. One little girl in a Basra
hospital even put on her party dress for The Independent's
portrait of her. She did not survive three months.

All of them either played with explosive fragments left behind
from US and British raids on southern Iraq in 1991 or were the
children - unborn at the time - of men and women caught in
those raids. Even then, the words "depleted uranium" were on
everyone's lips. The Independent's readers cared so much that
they contributed more than pounds 170,000 for medicines for
these dying children. Our politicians cared so little that they
made no enquiries about this tragedy - and missed a vital clue to
the suffering of their own soldiers in the Balkans eight years
later.

In March 1998, Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali - trained in Britain and a
member of the Royal College of Physicians - showed me his
maps of cancer and  leukaemia clusters around the southern
city of Basra and its farming  hinterland, the killing fields of the
last days of the 1991 Gulf War that were  drenched in depleted
uranium dust from exploding US shells.

The maps showed a four-fold increase in cancers in those
areas where the fighting took place. And the people from those
fields and suburbs where  the ordnance were fired were
clustered around Dr Ali's cancer clinic in Basra.

  Old men, young women with terrible tumours, whole families
with no history of  cancer suffering from unexplained
leukaemias.

They stood there, smiling at me, wanting to tell their stories.
Their accounts, tragically, were the same. They had been close
to the battle or to aerial bombing. Or their children had been
playing with pieces of shrapne after air raids or their children -
born two years after the war - had suddenly began to suffer
internal bleeding. Of course, it could have been one of Saddam's
bombed chemical plants - or the oil fires - that were to blame.
But a comparison of the location of cancer victims to air raids,
right across Iraq from Basra and Kerbala to Baghdad, are too
exact to leave much doubt. And tragic did not begin to describe
the children's "wards of death" in Baghdad and Basra.

Ali Hillal was eight when I met him - he was to live less than two
months more - lived next to a television broadcasting transmitter
and several  factories at Diala, repeatedly bombed by Allied
aircraft in February 1991. He  was the fifth child of a family that
had no history of cancers - he now had a  tumour in his brain.
His mother, Fatima, recalled the bombings. "There was a
strange smell, a burning, choking smell, something like
insecticide," she told  me.

Little Youssef Abdul Raouf Mohammed came from Kerbala,
close to Iraqi military bases bombed in the war. He had
gastro-intestinal bleeding. There  were blood spots in his
cheeks, a sure sign of internal bleeding. Ahmed Fleah  had
already died in the children's ward, bleeding from his mouth,
ears, nose  and rectum. He took two weeks to bleed to death.

About the same time, the first British "Gulf War syndrome"
victims were telling of their suffering. It was often identical to the
stories - told in Arabic - that I listened to in Iraqi hospitals.
Something terrible happened in southern Iraq at the end of the
Gulf War, I reported. But the British  Government - now so
anxious to allay fears for the health of British soldiers who have
been in contact with depleted uranium shells in the Gulf and in
the Balkans - put their collective nose in the air.

Doug Henderson, then a defence minister - and later to be such
a public supporter of Nato's bombing of Kosovo - wrote in an
extraordinary letter that "the Government is aware of
suggestions in the press, particularly  by Robert Fisk of The
Independent, that there has been an increase in  ill-health -
including alleged [sic] deformities, cancers and birth defects -  in
southern Iraq, which some have attributed to the use of depleted
uranium-based ammunition by UK and US forces during the
1990-91 Gulf conflict.

"However, the Government has not seen any peer-reviewed
epidemiological research date on this population to support
these claims and  it would therefore be premature to comment
on this matter."

And there Mr Henderson lost interest. Had he been able to see
Hebba  Mortaba, the tiny girl in Basra whom I met with a tumour
the size of a  football pushing up from her stomach, perhaps his
reply would have been more  serious. Many of the other children
in this purgatorial hospital were bald and  suffering from
non-Hodgkins lymphoma. All came from heavily-bombed areas
of Iraq. A few knew they were dying; some told me they would
recover. None of  them did. When in 1998 I visited the killing
fields outside Basra, the  burned-out Iraqi tanks still lay where
they had been attacked by Major General  Tom Rhame's US First
Infantry Division, bombed amid the farms and streams.

Many of the local farmers had relatives dying of unexplained
cancers. One of them, Hassan Salman, walked up to me
through the long grass, a man with  a distinguished face, brown
from the sun. "My daughter-in-law died of cancer  just 50 days
ago," he said. "She was ill in the stomach. Her name was Amal
Hassan Saleh. She was very young - she was just 21 years old.
A woman walked  out of a tomato field and offered me an over-
large pale green tomato, a  poisoned fruit according to the Basra
doctors, from a poisonous war, grown on  a dangerous stem,
bathed in fetid water.

Yes, of course, it made good propaganda for Saddam. Yes, of
course, he  gassed the Kurds who had gone over to Iran's side
in the 1980-88 Iran- Iraq  war. Yes, of course, the Iraqis later laid
on a propaganda showcase of  statistics for their dying - and
mock funerals for the infant dead. But the  children I met were
dying - and have died. Their leukaemia was real and  growing.
One Baghdad doctor had just watched a child patient die when I
went  to visit him. He sat in his chair in his clinic with his head in
his hands,  the tears flowing down his face. This was not
propaganda.

In Basra, in the poorest part of the city - still, ironically,  regularly =

attacked by the USAF and RAF - I asked a random group of
women about  the health of their families. "My husband has
cancer," one said. Sundus Abdel- Kader, 33, said her aunt had
just died suddenly of leukaemia. Two other women  interrupted
to say that they had younger sisters suffering from cancer. And
so  it went on, in a society where merely to admit to cancer is
regarded as a  social stigma. Why had so many Iraqis -
especially children - suddenly fallen  victims, I asked myself, to
an explosion of leukaemia in the aftermath of the  1991 Gulf
War?

Of course, the victims were Iraqis. They were Muslims. They
lived -  and died - in a far-away country. They were not
Caucasians or Nato soldiers. But I do wonder if I'm going to have
to tour the children's wards of Bosnia and Serbia in the years to
come, and see again the scenes I witnessed in Iraq.  Or
perhaps the military wards of European countries. That's why I
asked Nato just after the Kosovo bombing in 1999 for the
locations of depleted uranium  munition explosions. The details,
I was told, were "not releasable".