ican depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.

No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the

radioactive debris. The CSM reporter's Geiger counter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.

The CSM's reporter visited four sites in the city - including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown

planning ministry - and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad.

The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away.

There is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe.

"The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children," says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on

DU at The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution.

US TROOPS AVOID WRECKAGE

While the Pentagon says there's no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking

their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs.

"After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer," says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley,

who asked not to be further identified.

"We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn't go near it, even if it

had important documents inside. We play it safe."

Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact,

and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle.

"We were buttoned up when we drove by that - all our hatches were closed," the US sergeant says. "If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn't stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving."

Despite the troops' bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles,CSM reporter saw black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU.

One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute.

The CSM reporter found the "hot" DU tank round's burned dart and it pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the "red zone" limit.

HOT BULLETS

But the finger-sized bullets themselves - littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking - were the "hottest" items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at

nearly 1,900 times background levels.

Christian Science Monitor, May 15, 2003

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html

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