August 4, 2004
Japan Today
Shinya Ajima and Shinsuke Takahashi

HIROSHIMA - An Iraqi doctor left his war-battered country in April. His destination was Hiroshima, and the purpose of his trip was to obtain knowledge and data on radiation effects in the city once devastated by the first atomic bombing in the world.

Hussam Mahmood Salih, 34, a pediatrician from Basra, said the number of child cancer cases jumped eightfold in the southern Iraqi city between 1988 and 2002, suspecting it was caused by the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces used depleted uranium shells.

There are also reports in Iraq about newborn babies lacking limbs or craniums. Depleted uranium has been long blamed for such birth defects in babies believed exposed to radiation while in the womb.

“We don’t have any decent facilities in Iraq to check the amount of radiation in human bodies. But we can see the incidences of cancer increased greatly during the first four to five years of the 1990s,” said Salih, now studying at Hiroshima University Hospital at the invitation of a Japanese civic group.

Under economic sanctions on Iraq that followed the war, Iraqi hospitals were prohibited from obtaining essential drugs as well as new medical equipment like tools for radio therapy because the international community feared they might be used for military purposes, he said.

“So, death and disease, and death and disease…this is the life of people in Iraq. I want to save Iraqi children,” said Salih.