ERBIL (Al Jazeera) – Shireen, a 53-year-old Syrian refugee living at the Kawergosk Camp in Erbil, Iraq, started to have cancer symptoms in March 2020.
“In the beginning, I had a lot of pain in my breast, back and arm. I ignored the pain because I thought it could be muscle spasms or an infection,” she said.
The only option for her to seek treatment was the camp’s health centre, where services were limited. She could not leave the camp due to a COVID-19 lockdown, and private clinics were too expensive for a jobless refugee.
It was only in the summer of 2020, when she was finally able to visit a doctor in one of Erbil’s biggest hospitals, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“My nipple was bleeding, and I had to get a biopsy immediately,” she said. She later underwent surgery and started chemotherapy, which, although completed, she continues to feel pain from.
Shireen is not alone. Nine other women in her block at Kawergosk have been diagnosed with cancer.
Doctors operating in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and residents believe that flaring – the process of burning off petroleum gas by setting alight any excess in a jet of fire – by a nearby oil refinery may be contributing to a rise in cancer rates. The refinery is operated by KAR Group, Iraq’s largest private-sector energy company. The KAR Group did not respond to a request for comment.
A study published last year in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention (APJCP) found that the number of patients with cancer doubled between 2013 and 2019 in Erbil and Duhok, also in northern Iraq, correlating with a resumption in production at oil facilities in the region following the end of the conflict with Daesh.
Several residents shared their health records, with diagnoses ranging from respiratory disorders to cancer.
Shireen’s life has changed in the last decade. “We were happier in the village because everything we ate was organic, and our life and mental health were better when we lived there,” she said, referring to the village of Sheir in Qahtaniyah, Syria where she had been living.
Daesh attacked the area in 2013, forcing villagers such as Shireen to flee, leaving their livestock and farmland, to the Iraqi side of the border.
About 1,200 tons of ammunition were dropped on Iraq during the Persian Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, making it difficult to distinguish between cancer cases caused by flaring and those originating from the depleted uranium left by the bombing.
But experts were still very concerned that the 8,000 refugees living at Kawergosk were exposed to dangerous chemicals such as benzene because of the flaring.
“[Benzene] is a potent carcinogen that causes leukaemia,” said Laura Cushing, presidential chair in Health Equity at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “I do think it is concerning that people are being exposed nearby.”
Pregnant women living near natural gas and oil wells that burned off excess gas through flaring were 50 percent more at risk of premature birth than women with no exposure, a 2020 UCLA study headed by Cushing found.