Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

From Iraq Indymedia - Living by the Fence

Jo Wilding | 27.12.2003 09:00 | Anti-militarism

The November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Committee (UMRC) said: "Witnesses living next to the airport report 3,000 civilians were incinerated by one morning's attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs...."

December 25th

Dr Jinan at the clinic in Abu Ghraib says there are patients coming in with illnesses that she and her colleagues can't diagnose. Patients are referred to the main hospital complex at Baghdad Medical City but they return with still no diagnosis and having had no treatment. In particular, there have been patients presenting with bubbles on the skin. They "become hot, like burning coals, get hard and spread." She said they don't understand it.

There's been an enormous increase in allergenic respiratory and skin problems with no apparent trigger. In particular there has been a rise in three conditions - alopeicia (hair loss), psoriasis and viteligo (skin problems). These are not infections spreading through the community but auto-immune, caused by the body attacking itself, to put it simply. They are related to nerves, so fear and stress could be a factor in the increase, but environmental factors are also believed to be important.

In the row of houses closest to the airport fence every single household reported some kind of skin or breathing problem. Probably the most common was white patches on the skin, which started, for most people, between April and July. Or spots on the skin, which turn black and then the skin peels off. Or the blisters or bubbles on the skin that Dr Jinan mentioned, with or without fluid.

Women brought us inside, away from the men, took off their hijabs and showed us bald patches on their heads. The water is contaminated and, to combat that, it's filled with chemicals. It means you can drink it without spending the rest of the week in the toilet but it wrecks your skin. One of the women brought us to her small son whose scalp was like a toadstool of red skin and white pustules under the hair, insanely itchy but too painful to touch.

Immediately after the bombing of the airport, people said, thousands of trucks started removing the soil from the complex. No one can tell us where it was dumped. Other trucks brought fresh soil from elsewhere to replace it and tarmac trucks came in to cover it over. About a month after the bombing, the trucks started leaving their loads closer to the fence, tipping rubble, metal, broken crockery and general debris in the 1st June sector. Kids play and men forage in the heaps between the houses.

One said "There are no jobs. Sometimes useful things are dumped and we come and find them and sell them." Some of the kids told us about sweets, food and mineral water being thrown out. They go and eat the sweets and bring home the water and military ration MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). "No you don't," scolded one of the mothers. "I do," the child said with a gleeful grin. She went red and said "Well, sometimes."

The November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Committee (UMRC) said: "Witnesses living next to the airport report 3,000 civilians were incinerated by one morning's attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since the cessation of the main phase of battle, several of the Baghdad area battlefields. [were] landscaped by the US forces and Iraqi contractors, thus preventing a thorough examination."

One family living near the fence told us that all their chickens died on the day of the bombing. "There was no harm to their bodies, they were still complete, but they were dead." The grandmother's eye ruptured during the bombing. A thermobaric weapon - stop eating before you read this - is essentially a fireball which sucks out all the oxygen in the area. Among other things it sucks out eyeballs and suffocates victims.

"On the day of the bombing the smoke went in his eye and it ran for a week and then stopped and the doctor said he can't operate because the nerves are already destroyed." The five-year-old boy watched us with his other eye and his 22-year-old sister stood in silence as their mother told us she was already deaf and mute from birth. She had her first fit during the bombing at the airport and has had them regularly, every week or ten days, since then. The mother is one of the women who have had several miscarriages in recent years.

The Dairy Buildings on the other side of the airport are a little further from the fence, the Dairy provided a buffer. Less illness was reported there: the same conditions but less concentrated. In 1st June sector as well, the frequency of problems seemed to decrease in the second and third rows of houses as you move back from the fence.

Health statistics are few and basic. We could get the rate per year of cancers, all types and all ages, for in patients at the hospital (one or none each year from 1991 to 1996, 7 in 1997, 3 in 1998 and then 11, 16, 15, 19 and 20 respectively for each of the last five years). We could get the monthly incidence of skin and breathing problems for in patients at the hospital.

We could get nothing about out-patients treated in the clinic, nothing to compare the monthly data for this year with previous years, nothing about the geographical distribution of sufferers, let alone any details of the majority who never go for diagnosis or treatment because they can't afford it, which is why we were chatting about health with the women of the community in the first place.

Because of the threats made, we weren't able to test water, soil and air to map the environmental contaminants which might be responsible and to work out a clean up scheme, but I didn't come here to whine about the nigh-impossibility of doing any research so I'll give it a rest there. What we did achieve was a general picture of health conditions and some of the environmental clean up work that might be needed.

Zakia asked us, "Why don't you tell them to tarmac the road?" That would be an improvement over the mud slide in front of her home, but they need decent drainage as well to get rid of the pools of manky water. They need the piles of rubble taken away so the kids can play somewhere safe and clean.

And they need and they need and they need. A tiny child called Melaak (Angel) was carried by her mum and her brothers and sisters, too weak to walk, suffering from a failure to thrive. She needs vitamins. Her mum's pregnant again with the ninth child, the oldest being 17, out of school and working in a shop so now they've got a heater, after 8 years without even that.

Christmas day has been quiet after a night of low flying planes, rather than the usual helicopters, and frequent explosions. At the shop last night Ali said the Sheraton Hotel had been hit. This morning our neighbours told us it was hit again about 6am. In the Dora area there was bombing from the air and fire from an anti aircraft gun.

Baghdad's Christians are mostly having a quiet one. Clusters of people by the churches on a Thursday and longer-than-usual queues in the international telephone centres are the only real clue. Firas celebrated last night with basturma. It's meat, mixed with garlic, stuffed in socks to make it the right shape. He says they use women's socks. Somehow this is supposed to make it sound better. The full sock is hung on a line to dry out and then the mixture is sliced and fried with eggs. He says it's the best thing. The sock thing is putting me off. Maybe I'm just too squeamish.

We celebrated Reema's 18th birthday instead. Parties happen in the daytime because it's too difficult and dangerous to go out at night, so we went to a restaurant and ate cake. It was great. It was normal.

To subscribe to this groups send a message to du-list-subscribe (at) yahoogroups.com. In the body of the message type subscribe and send.

See also:

 http://www.bristolfoe.org.uk/wildfire/iraq/
 http://www.pandora.project.on.to/

Jo Wilding
- Homepage: http://www.almuajaha.com

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech