MER - Washington - 6 March:
   With their "depleteduranium" weapons coupled with their boycotts and sanctions, the Americansare the reason for the cancer epidemic now spreading such human miseryacross Iraq.  In a previous article a few days ago Robert Fisk ofTHE INDEPENDENT presented his findings.  In this article he visitsthe cancer ward in Basra.
   It should be rememberedthat before the American war to bring Iraq to its knees Iraq was consideredthe most advanced Arab country.  It's education and medical systemswere among the best in the Middle East.
   The Americans havealready brought about the death of about 5% of the population of Iraq since1991.  If there is any country in the Middle East that can be saidto be using weapons of mass destruction to devastate another, it is theUnited States of America.
   And now the residueof the American assault on Iraq, even while another U.S. armada preparesto do it again, is the epidemic of cancer spreading across the countrylike a communicable disease.
 

  FROM THE CANCER WARD OFBASRA HOSPITAL
       By Robert Fisk

MATAR ABBAS is dying. In the cornerof the cancer ward at the Basra teachinghospital, the wreckage of his emaciated body seems to mock thebroad, pale blue Shatt al-Arab riveroutside the window. He has already lostan eye and is hawking mucus into a handkerchief, his scarf slippingfrom his head to reveal the baldnessof chemotherapy treatment, part of hisface horribly deformed by the cancer that is now eating into hisbrain. He comes from Nasiriyah, thecity whose outskirts were shelled andbombed by the Allied forces in the last days of the 1991 Gulf war,the conflict that drove Saddam Husseinout of Kuwait.

His wife, Ghaniyeh, wears an elaborateblack chador. She is a peasant womanwith tattoos on her face, and stayed throughout the war with Matar- a 60-year-old former taxi-driverwith nine children - on the road betweenAmara and Misan. "We saw the flashes of the bombs but nothingwas bombed near us," she recalled,speaking carefully as if her memory mightsomehow save her doomed husband. "We were safe." But Dr JawadKhadim al-Alia begs to disagree. "Werarely saw these types of tumours beforethe war," he said, gently touching Matar's right ear.

Dr al-Ali smiles a lot, although- from time to time - you notice tears inhis eyes and realise that he might also be a spiritually broken man.He looks a little like Peter Sellers,physically small with thinning hairand a drooping moustache. But there is nothing funny about hiscommentary.

"Because of the tumour in his ear,Matar Abbas is now unable to talk or takefood and is deaf," he said matter-of-factly. "He came for his firsttreatment only on January 16th, witha swelling and an inability to talk ordrink. The biopsy showed cancer. I am giving him cytotoxicchemotherapy - but later on, the cancerwill go to his brain and his lungs.He will probably live one year - not more."

The doctor led me across the roomto where Zubeida Mohamed Ali lay, chadored,on her bed. She comes from Zubayr - close to the Iraqi airbase that was saturated with alliedbombs in a series of raids that
started on the night of 13 February,1998. "She has tumours of the lymph nodesand they have infiltrated her chest," Dr al-Ali said. "She issuffering shortness of breath." Zubeidais 70.

Opposite lay 55-year old Jawad Hassan,diagnosed with cancer of the stomachtwo years ago. He lived almost next to the Basra televisionstation that was the target of Alliedbombing. "He was exposed to fumes andbombs at his home," Dr al-Ali continued. "He was also close to theriver bridges that were bombed. Heis losing weight despite our treatment,which makes his prognosis very bad."

The man, prematurely aged, lookedat me with a blank expression. "Ever sinceI was exposed to the fumes of the bombings, I complained aboutpains in my abdomen," he said. Theimplications of what these cancer victimswere saying was so terrible that I almost wished my visit hadbeen a feeble attempt to set up a visitingjournalist with an easy-to-exposelie, a crude attempt by Saddam's regime to raise a grave
moral question over the entireGulf war.

But Dr al-Ali had no idea that wewere visiting him until the moment we walkedinto his office. His patients did not expect visitors. And ifsome of them were - like so many cancervictims elsewhere in the world - elderly,what was to be made of the flock of men and women, young andold, who were waiting outside Dr l-Ali'soncology department?

"It's a tragedy for me," Dr al-Alisaid, pointing to a tall, handsome youthstanding amid a group of women. "I'm losing friends every day -this boy has Hodgkin's lymphoma. Thisgirl is suffering lung cancer."
She was small, petite, with a big,smiling, moon-like face.

Another, Fawzia Abdul-Nabi al Bader,was a 51-year-old English teacher whowalked into the department office and pulled her collar down to showa suture on her neck and then openedher blouse to show the scar where herright breast should have been. "Why should this have happened tome?" she asked. "My first operationwas in 1993. Until that, my health wasvery good."

In his office, Dr al-Ali's mapstell their own story. "Number of cancer patientsof all kinds in the Basra area," it says over a map of theBasra governorate, sliced up into yellow,red and green segments. The
yellow, mainly to the west of thecity, represents the rural and desert areasfrom which few cancer patients come. A green area to the northindicates an average incidence of cancer.But a large blood-red rectanglein the centre stands for the almost 400 cancer patients whomDr al-Ali had to treat last year alone.It is his thesis that the battlefieldsin the yellow area to the west contaminated the water, thefields, even the fish with depleteduranium and nitrite, contaminating theland not only for survivors of the war but for those still to beborn.

Back in the last days of the conflict,United States strategists were debatingwhether the damage to Iraq's infrastructure - the bombing ofwater pipes, power plants and oil refineries- would take the lives of Iraqisin the months or years to come. But never did they suggest that apolicy of bomb-now, kill-later wouldever involve cancer.

In Baghdad, hundreds of children- most of them from the south - have diedof leukaemia and stomach cancer since the war. Many were sent thereby Dr al-Ali. "Everyone of us is indespair," he said in his Basra cancerward. "It is a great burden on me - I am losing many of thesepatients every day. They need bone-marrowtransplants but we cannot give themto them. I cannot sleep at night for thinking about them."