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Witnesses "confirmed the wholesale killing of unarmed civilians inside their houses and in mosques. Some were shot after being handcuffed. Others (were) blown up inside their own homes."
Many children saw their parents shot. Adults also witnessed their spouses and children killed. Both Iraqi National Guards and US Marines participated in looting homes and stores. Thousands of others were destroyed. A government committee found 26,000 houses damaged, another 3,000 completely demolished, including 70 mosques, 50 schools, the city's power plant providing electricity, 50% of the drinking water distribution system, and 70% of the sewer system.
Overall, indiscriminate slaughter and destruction occurred, followed by looting, mass arrests, torture, and deaths from ill treatment, as well as vast environmental contamination, thereafter causing "a significant increase in the number of cancer cases and congenital malformations."
Official Fallujah health statistics showed the following:
-- in 2006, 5,928 documented cases of "previously unknown or rarely seen diseases;"
-- in the first half of 2007, 2,447 seriously ill patients (half of them children) had mostly little known symptoms;
-- research studies determined sharp increases of leukemia, other cancers, infant mortality, abnormal deliveries, and injuries similar injuries to Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, clearly from DU radiation and other toxic chemical exposures;
-- a February 2010 field study found cancers had multiplied fourfold, ones similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors;
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