According to a report published by the Washington Post, the US government approved compensation for American soldiers for the health damage caused to them by burning waste and waste in unhealthy ways in Iraq, while it did not pay attention to Iraqi citizens, whose damage was much greater than that of American soldiers.

The report said that US forces were burning waste and everything left by soldiers in the open near their military bases, which caused poisoning of the atmosphere and causing health damage to Iraqi citizens and soldiers themselves.

Breathe the same air.

Although U.S. veterans have recently won a long battle for government recognition of the harmful effects of burning garbage, there has been no U.S. effort to assess the local impact, let alone treat or compensate Iraqis who breathed the same air.

President Biden signs veterans welfare bills at White House in Washington (Reuters)

Iraqi citizens interviewed by the newspaper said they developed cancer or respiratory problems while working at or living nearby Balad military base.

Most said they were young and healthy when they fell ill, and had no family history of similar illnesses. Their accounts were supported by experts who studied exposure to fumes from waste fires. Local doctors said they had noticed an alarming rise in diseases consistent with this exposure in the years since the U.S. invasion.

Charter Law

After nearly two decades of toxic U.S. garbage fires in Iraq, President Joe Biden signed legislation called the Charter Act last August recognizing a potential link between exposure to toxic substances and life-threatening medical conditions, dramatically increasing benefits and services for more than 200,<> Americans who believe they have suffered lasting damage from those exposed fires in Iraq and elsewhere.

For Biden, the case is personal, the report says, because he continued to believe that those toxic fires caused the brain cancer that killed his son Beau, who served in Iraq as a member of the Delaware National Guard.

Worst ecological site

The burning pit at the Balad Joint Base is the largest in Iraq, measuring approximately 10 acres, the report said. By 2008, nearly 150 tons of waste had been burned daily. In an internal memorandum to the armed forces in 2006, Lt. Col. Darren L. Curtis, a bioengineer, described the site as the "worst ecological site" he had ever seen.

Iraqi children with cancer practice piano (Reuters)

Those craters burned day and night without a solid waste management plan, and the Pentagon assigned the problem to U.S. and local contractors who dug the pits, then poured the base's waste, added jet fuel and set it on fire.

By 2010, a study found that nearly 7 percent of U.S. soldiers deployed in a country and returned home suffered from respiratory illnesses.

Diseases that were rare before the invasion

Local Iraqi doctors said rates of lung, head and neck cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were rare before the invasion, but suddenly appeared among young people.

By the time U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, they had used more than 150 pits to burn garbage of various sizes nationwide.

The Department of Defense did not keep clear records of what was burned in those pits, meaning the microtoxins released are still unknown, but Lieutenant Colonel Curtis' memo identified 20 "potential contaminants."

Iraqi contractors who worked for the base remember a bewildering array of "things that no one should burn," said Iraqi Marwan Jassim, 32, who spent night shifts filling a hole. There was medical waste, human waste, paint, oil, electrical appliances, and sometimes even unexploded ordnance.