Marking the 20-year anniversary of the start of the US invasion of Iraq, Louisa Loveluck, the Baghdad bureau chief in The Washington Post, and Mustafa Salim, a reporter in The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau, highlighted in a report on the US' toxic burn pits-- just one tiny piece of the horrors of the US invasion and later occupation which displaced and killed millions of Iraqis. 

US troops stationed in Iraq have long practiced "burning their trash in the open, poisoning the air all around them,"  most notably Iraqis. The items that went into the burn pits included batteries, medical waste, plastics, ammunition, even amputated body parts, rubber, and chemicals.

US' toxic burn pits: "More insidious and enduring than violence"

The scars of the American-led invasion of Iraq are still evident in shot-up walls and bombed-out structures 20 years later. But there is another legacy that is more pernicious and long-lasting than violence. Soldiers burnt their rubbish in the open where they erected military bases, polluting the air around them. As US doctors and scientists began to worry about the health of returning troops, Iraqis began to fall ill and die.

No US effort has been made to study the local consequences, let alone treat or compensate Iraqis who breathed the same toxic air.

More than a dozen locals told Washington Post reporters that they suffered cancer or respiratory ailments while working on the Balad base or living nearby. Most reported being young and fit when they became ill, with no family history of such ailments. 

Experts who have examined burn pit exposure and local doctors who observed an alarming increase in ailments consistent with such exposure in the years following the invasion corroborate their accounts.

Justice for US veterans, Iraqis die due to life-threatening diseases

Nearly two decades after American burn pits first smolder in Iraq, US President Joe Biden inked legislation last year acknowledging a possible link between toxic exposure and life-threatening medical conditions, dramatically expanding benefits and services for more than 200,000 Americans who believe they were permanently harmed by the US invasion's open trash fires.

The Pact Act, as it is known, changed how Washington treats exposure victims in the United States, whose injuries and illnesses sometimes take years to develop.

The burn pit at Joint Base Balad was the largest in Iraq, encompassing about 10 acres. According to the Military Times, almost 150 tons of garbage were burnt there every day by 2008.

In a memo to colleagues in 2006, Lt. Col. Darrin L. Curtis, a bioenvironmental engineer, described it as “the worst environmental site” that one teammate had ever seen, according to the report.

Signing the report, the aeromedical services chief, Lt. Col. James Elliot, strongly warned: “The known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and a chronic health hazard to our troops and the local population.”

Prior to the US invasion, rates of lung, head, and neck cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were uncommon, according to local experts, but they were suddenly appearing in young individuals. 

Doctors reported seeing the same symptoms at the health center in Albuhassan, a community on the base's southeastern perimeter. However, the issue of waste management dropped further and further down the priority list.

Read next: Babies born deformed: The US' toxic burn pits in Iraq

US forces used more than 150 burn pits of varying sizes nationwide in 2011, as per the Burn Pits 360 advocacy group. Iraqis who couldn't flee were plagued by illness. Medical bills were frequently crippling, the report added.

It took nearly 13 years for US veterans to successfully advocate for the official recognition of burn pit exposure. Airborne particle research on its effects on human health is allegedly neglected or suppressed by the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs, according to advocates.

The Defense Department and Veterans Affairs have refuted these claims.

In the towns surrounding Balad, about 2,400 miles away, nobody knew about the PACT Act or that US soldiers had also developed illnesses. “I think they consider those soldiers more human than us,” Zakaria Tamimi said as quoted by The Washington Post. “There’s no door for us to knock on.”

A photo of Mehdi, his little nephew who died due to a burn pit exposure, still hangs on the wall of his brother’s living room. He would have been 17 this year. “He would have been in school,” his mother tells people.

"When she kneels down for prayer, she thinks of him."

Read next: Job of US Marine corps was killing people: Iraq War veterans speak up