The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.

According
to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth
Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are
experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and
sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US
atomic bomb strikes in 1945.

The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.

The
assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one
of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population
resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq—a war of neo-colonial plunder
launched on the basis of lies—Washington determined to make an example
of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective”
punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.

The new
public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been
suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault
contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to
increase their effectiveness.

In a study of 711 houses and 4,843
individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris
Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that
the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five
years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those
found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were
exposed to intense fallout radiation.

In Fallujah the rate of
leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times
higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in
Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and
brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births,
the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher
than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Strikingly,
after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased
sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls.
But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US
assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births.
This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after
the US atomic attack of 1945.

The most likely reason for the
change in the sex ratio, according to the researchers, is the impact of a
major mutagenic event—likely the use of depleted uranium in US weapons.
While boys have one X-chromosome, girls have a redundant X-chromosome
and can therefore absorb the loss of one chromosome through genetic
damage.

“This is an extraordinary and alarming result,” said
Busby, a professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Ulster
and director of scientific research for Green Audit, an independent
environmental research group. “To produce an effect like this, some very
major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks
happened. We need urgently to find out what the agent was. Although many
suspect uranium, we cannot be certain without further research and
independent analysis of samples from the area.”

Busby told an
Italian television news station, RAI 24, that the “extraordinary”
increase in radiation-related maladies in Fallujah is higher than that
found in the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US atomic
strikes of 1945. “My guess is that this was caused by depleted uranium,”
he said. “They must be connected.”

The US military uses depleted
uranium, also known as spent nuclear fuel, in armor-piercing shells and
bullets because it is twice as dense as lead. Once these shells hit
their target, however, as much as 40 percent of the uranium is released
in the form of tiny particles in the area of the explosion. It can
remain there for years, easily entering the human bloodstream, where it
lodges itself in lymph glands and attacks the DNA produced in the sperm
and eggs of affected adults, causing, in turn, serious birth defects in
the next generation.

The research is the first systematic
scientific substantiation of a body of evidence showing a sharp increase
in infant mortality, birth defects, and cancer in Fallujah.

In
October of 2009, several Iraqi and British doctors wrote a letter to the
United Nations demanding an inquiry into the proliferation of
radiation-related sickness in the city:

“Young women in Fallujah
in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing
number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a
single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In
addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous
cancers and leukemias.…

“In September 2009, Fallujah General
Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the
first seven days, a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were
classified as deformed.…

“Doctors in Fallujah have specifically
pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of
birth defects, but premature births have also considerably increased
after 2003. But what is more alarming is that doctors in Fallujah have
said, ‘a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop
severe disabilities at a later stage.’” (See: “Sharp rise in birth defects in Iraqi city destroyed by US military”)

The
Pentagon responded to this report by asserting that there were no
studies to prove any proliferation of deformities or other maladies
associated with US military actions. “No studies to date have indicated
environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” a Defense
Department spokesman told the BBC in March. There have been no studies,
however, in large part because Washington and its puppet Baghdad regime
have blocked them.

According to the authors of “Cancer, Infant
Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” the Iraqi authorities
attempted to scuttle their survey. “[S]hortly after the questionnaire
survey was completed, Iraqi TV reportedly broadcast that a questionnaire
survey was being carried out by terrorists and that anyone who was
answering or administering the questionnaire could be arrested,” the
study reports.

The history of the atrocity committed by American
imperialism against the people of Fallujah began on April 28, 2003, when
US Army soldiers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of about 200
residents protesting the conversion of a local school into a US military
base. Seventeen were killed in the unprovoked attack, and two days
later American soldiers fired on a protest against the murders, killing
two more.

This intensified popular anger, and Fallujah became a
center of the Sunni resistance against the occupation—and US reprisals.
On March 31, 2004, an angry crowd stopped a convoy of the private
security firm Blackwater USA, responsible for its own share of war
crimes. Four Blackwater mercenaries were dragged from their vehicles,
beaten, burned, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

The
US military then promised it would pacify the city, with one unnamed
officer saying it would be turned into “a killing field,” but Operation
Vigilant Resolve, involving thousands of Marines, ended in the
abandonment of the siege by the US military in May, 2004. The victory of
Fallujah’s residents against overwhelming military superiority was
celebrated throughout Iraq and watched all over the world.

The
Pentagon delivered its response in November 2004. The city was
surrounded, and all those left inside were declared to be enemy
combatants and fair game for the most heavily equipped killing machine
in world history. The Associated Press reported that men attempting to
flee the city with their families were turned back into the
slaughterhouse.

In the attack, the US made heavy use of the
chemical agent white phosphorus. Ostensibly used only for illuminating
battlefields, white phosphorus causes terrible and often fatal wounds,
burning its way through building material and clothing before eating
away skin and then bone. The chemical was also used to suck the oxygen
out of buildings where civilians were hiding.

Washington’s desire
for revenge against the population is indicated by the fact that the US
military reported about the same number of “gunmen” killed (1,400) as
those taken alive as prisoners (1,300-1,500). In one instance, NBC News
captured video footage of a US soldier executing a wounded and helpless
Iraqi man. A Navy investigation later found the Marine had been acting
in self-defense.

Fifty-one US soldiers died in 10 days of combat.
The true number of city residents who were killed is not known. The
city’s population before the attack was estimated to be between 425,000
and 600,000. The current population is believed to be between 250,000
and 300,000. Tens of thousands, mostly women and children, fled in
advance of the attack. Half of the city’s buildings were destroyed, most
of these reduced to rubble.

Like much of Iraq, Fallujah remains
in ruins. According to a recent report from IRIN, a project of the UN
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Fallujah still has
no functioning sewage system six years after the attack. “Waste pours
onto the streets and seeps into drinking water supplies,” the report
notes. “Abdul-Sattar Kadhum al-Nawaf, director of Fallujah general
hospital, said the sewage problem had taken its toll on residents’
health. They were increasingly affected by diarrhea, tuberculosis,
typhoid and other communicable diseases.”

The savagery of the US
assault shocked the world, and added the name Fallujah to an infamous
list that includes My Lai, Sabra-Shatila, Guérnica, Nanking, Lidice, and
Wounded Knee.

But unlike those other massacres, the crime
against Fallujah did not end when the bullets were no longer fired or
the bombs stopped falling.

The US military’s decision to heavily
deploy depleted uranium, all but proven by “Cancer, Infant Mortality and
Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” was a wanton act of brutality, poisoning
an entire generation of children not yet born in 2004.

The
Fallujah study is timely, with the US now preparing a major escalation
of the violence in Afghanistan. The former head of US Afghanistan
operations, General Stanley McChrystal, was replaced last month after a
media campaign, assisted by a Rolling Stone magazine feature, accused him, among other things, of tying the hands of US soldiers in their response to Afghan insurgents.

McChrystal
was replaced by General David Petraeus, formerly head of the US Central
Command. Petraeus has outlined new rules of engagement designed to
allow for the use of disproportionate force against suspected militants.

Petraeus,
in turn, was replaced at Central Command by General James “Mad Dog”
Mattis, who played a key planning role in the US assault on Fallujah in
2004. Mattis revels in killing, telling a public gathering in 2005 “it’s
fun to shoot some people…. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”