| Six months ago, when I visited the site of what
has become known as the Battle of Rumaila, with a scientist carrying a
Geiger counter, the needle threatened to burst out of its casing as he
repeatedly ran it over sand and wreckage, gun barrels, tank parts and spent
DU detritus. Which may, of course, prove nothing. Dr Jawad Khadim al-Ali is a British-trained doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. He works in Basra's main hospital. He showed me his maps of cancer and leukaemia clusters which coincide with the most intensive use of DU weapons in the war. Again, connection could be coincidental. The doctor also showed me the book of horrors kept by the medical staff - photographs of the grotesque, mis-shapen, stillborn children born in the hospital. There are kids with no brains, some with one eye in the middle of the head, others with extra limbs. It is the most diverse collection of malformations and deformities I have ever seen - and, I suspect, any doctor anywhere outside of southern Iraq. According to Dr Jawad there has been a four-fold increase in cancers in the area where the use of uranium-tipped weapons was most severe. Two in a hundred children in Basra are now being born with birth defects. If could be, of course, as my old pal Doug Henderson has alluded, propaganda. When he was a defence minister he poured doubt on any increase in cancers and birth defects in southern Iraq. "The government has not seen any peer-reviewed epidemiological research data on this population to support these claims," he said.
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