The city was also the site of a fierce battle to oust militants two years later. Some of the doctors say that depleted uranium used in artillery is the likely cause.

A group of British and Iraqi medical experts alerted the United Nations last month of the upswing in birth deformities.

They said that 24 percent of children born at the city’s general hospital in September died within seven days.

Three-quarters of them had deformities such as two heads, no head, a single eye or missing limbs.

Some young women whose children have been born with, or soon develop, such mutations say they wish their children would have died at birth rather than lived to suffer in such a condition.

Data for August 2002 shows that only one of 530 children born there died, and only one had deformities.

A Fallujah grave digger recently told documentary producers that of the four or five new-born babies he buries every day, most have deformities.

In the letter to the U.N., the group urged that toxic materials used by occupying forces be cleaned up, including depleted uranium and white phosphorus.

There is no proven link between depleted uranium and significant health issues. But its use has been blamed for cancers found in troops returning home from Iraq.

Photo: Journeyman Pictures (ZZ Productions)