Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing. Cancer rates and congenital birth malformations in Fallujah, attributed to what many doctors and scientists believe to be weapons used by the US military during two brutal sieges against the city in 2004, have been referenced as "the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied. Birth defect incidence rates in Fallujah are approximately 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki areas of Japan, where the US dropped nuclear bombs."

Image: Russell Lee Klika