Zainab Abdul Latif moves wearily between her three children, wiping their foreheads and propping them up in their wheelchairs. “Every day, they need intensive care,” the 29-year-old Fallujah mother says. Neither her two sons, Amar, 5, and Moustafa, 3, or daughter, Mariam, 6, can walk or use their limbs. They speak two words — “mama, baba” — between them. All are in diapers.
Zainab is one of many faces of Fallujah’s postwar years overwhelmed by a workload that she has no means to change. “They cannot eat, or drink by themselves and every day I have to take Mariam to the hospital. She is very sensitive to flu and regularly gets diarrhea and other ailments. The doctors have told me they are mentally retarded and have nerve paralysis. They say it is congenital. I really can’t take care of them like this and I need help.”
One of few people she can turn to is Bassem Allah, the senior obstetrician who is chief custodian of Fallujah’s newborns. During medical school he had to search Iraq for case studies of an infant with a birth defect. “It was almost impossible during the 80s,” he says. “Now, every day in my clinic or elsewhere in the hospital, there are large numbers of congenital abnormalities or cases of chronic tumors.”
He pauses, his thoughts seemingly interrupted by the gravity of his words, then slowly continues. “Now, believe me, it’s like we are treating patients immediately after Hiroshima.”
Across Fallujah, neonatal wards and centers for disabled people are facing such an influx of infants or children aged under 5 with chronic deformities that they are fast running out of space and staff to help. After two years of anecdotal reports suggesting a spike in birth defects, more precise data is painting a picture of a deeply disturbing phenomenon.
The Guardian asked Samira Abdul Ghani, a specialist at Fallujah general hospital, to compile data from all the newborns she supervised over the three weeks from Oct. 11. She reported 37 cases of serious deformities, many of them neural tube defects [birth defects of the brain and spinal column including spina bifida and anencephaly], with accompanying heart problems. A sharp rise in the number of infant tumors is also being chronicled by hospital staff but, because tumors usually materialize months or years after birth, doctors are reluctant to quantify their research.
“There is ... a very marked increase in the number of pediatric cases of less than two years with brain tumors,” said the hospital director, Ayman Qais. “This is now a focus area of multiple tumors. We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies, especially neural tube defects.”
Before 2003, he had been seeing sporadic deformities in babies. Now the frequency had increased dramatically. Most were in the head and spinal cord, but many were in lower limbs.
At Fallujah General, doctors who care for newborns are dealing with phenomena none can explain.
The city was the site of the two most savage and prolonged battles in Iraq during the past six years. The potentially toxic residue of precision munitions that rained down on the city for up to two months in 2004 has left many medical professionals questioning the long-term impact of modern weaponry, although few are willing, so far, to directly blame the war.
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