BASRA, Iraq - `YOU MAY not want to look,'' she says, as her fingers rest on the black cover of the photo album.

The book opens, like the lid rolling back from a tomb in a horror film. But the monsters pictured inside are all too real.

``This one, no head,'' recites Dr. Janan Ghalib Hassan, pointing at a mass of tissue that might, only vaguely, be human. She turns to the next page. ``This one, legs fused together.''

And the next: no limbs, and tiny buds on the misshapen chest, that might have become arms had the little creature lived. Then a face with no eyes, just flaps of skin over the gaping sockets. Another with a huge, water-swollen head masking the absence of a brain. And a body without natural openings or sexual organs.

These, says Hassan, are the children of war, many cursed with unknown mutations that defy the medical catalogue. Nameless beings stillborn in her hospital, only to be recorded and buried.

Iraqi doctors and scientists increasingly suspect the mutations were produced by the radioactive shells that rained down on the country during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and that are still taking a ferocious toll on its adults and children.

Tested for the first time in Iraq, the anti-tank bullets are tipped with depleted uranium that has unprecedented penetration power, and explodes into flames on contact.

Now, the debris lies on the desert floor among the radioactive ruins of the tanks they destroyed, a few minutes' drive from Iraq's southern villages, and two hours from Basra's 1 million people.

In Hassan's Maternity and Children's Hospital alone, the senior gynecologist has seen a threefold increase in malformed children over the decade, and the numbers are still rising. Cancers in children, especially leukemia - a key indicator of radiation damage - are striking more often and at younger and younger ages.

In other parts of the country, too, the figures are escalating. And some of the effects have been seen in the children of British and American soldiers who were sent to the Gulf after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait.

But in Basra, close to the dusty border area where at least 300 tonnes of shells containing depleted uranium were fired, the results are extreme.

``I'm a doctor, not a political person,'' says Hassan, closing her doomsday album, ``but I have terrible feelings of hatred against the people who did this. We were an experiment in warfare. Do they not think we are human beings''

A handful of western scientists, including the distinguished Canadian radiochemist Hari Sharma, has begun to take seriously the Iraqi claim of radioactive contamination.

Sharma, a retired professor from the University of Waterloo who helped American nuclear workers to obtain compensation for illnesses, is studying urine samples from western and Iraqi veterans who are now ill.

``When I tested samples from the American vets, I was quite surprised that there is evidence of radioactivity so long after the war,'' he told The Star.

``Uranium that's soluble is usually taken in through water and excreted quickly. This means they inhaled uranium oxide that was formed at high temperatures. It goes into the lungs.''

Depleted uranium is a metal residue left behind in the refining of natural uranium. It is supposed to be almost free of radioactivity. Even if that is so - a point disputed by some Iraqi physicists - its deleterious effects are vastly magnified. The depleted uranium explodes with the shell, blasting into millions of tiny particles of uranium oxide and causing damage to cells and tissues that develops over a period of years.

After repeated lobbying by Gulf War veterans' groups, the Pentagon and the British defence ministry have launched more detailed studies that take the uranium factor into account, and the United States Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses has admitted that thousands of troops may have been exposed to it.

But this is cold comfort to Hassan, walking the dingy wards of the Basra hospital.

She speaks with the mixture of pain, resentment and resignation common to the doctors who work in Iraq's under-equipped hospitals where the vital medicines they need to save lives have begun to arrive only recently, after eight years of sanctions. Even now, when Iraq is allowed to sell more oil to pay for humanitarian goods, supplies are woefully inadequate.

``Children die in front of me,'' the young doctor says, shaking her head. ``I cry every day. The parents cry. But no amount of tears will help us. What can help us now''

The question lies open, like a knife, as we tour the children's ward of the hospital.

I steel myself. Days before, on a visit to a Baghdad hospital, an American reporter bolted from the room, his face buried in his hands. The children's cancer ward is death row.

The doctors know it, the parents know it and the children, however young and handicapped, understand their fate very well.

-- `I'm a doctor, not a political person, but I have terrible feelings of hatred against the people who did this. We were an experiment in warfare. Do they not think we are human beings' - Dr. Janan Ghalib Hassan --

Children with leukemia lack up-to-date chemotherapy, transfusions of blood platelets to stop them from bleeding to death, antibiotics for the diseases that attack shattered immune systems, even painkillers.

Others suffering from lymphoma, cancer of the lymph nodes, have surgery in conditions no western hospital would allow. But here, the doctors say wearily, there is no choice.

``Hibe is the happiest,'' says Hassan, as a little girl with a swollen face and wisps of hair barely covering her skull gleefully reaches out her arms for a hug. ``She has Down syndrome and terminal leukemia. She's 4 1/2, but more like a child half her age.''

Hibe croons the same Arabic word over and over. What is she saying ``Amout,'' says Hassan. ``It means, `I will die.' ''

Across the room, the blank, grief-etched face of Hamsam al-Kabla says death is not the worst thing.

In her left arm, she cradles her 2 1/2-year-old child, whose breathing is a series of terrible rasps, like a nail running over sandpaper. Huge protruding eyes stare from a lopsided face. Over shrunken and misshapen legs, I can see a small stomach scarred by an operation to correct internal malformations. A gesture of futile defiance of the odds.

``She has almost no brain,'' whispers al-Kabla, as though breaking the news gently.

In Baghdad, 600 kilometres to the north, Dr. Selma al-Taha is all too familiar with these scenes. The founder of Iraq's Genetics Clinic - and now the only geneticist practising in the devastated country - she lives on the edge of total exhaustion, her face pale and deeply lined.

She has studied the rise in genetic defects, their varieties, and the risks faced by Iraqi parents as they approach parenthood with increasing fear. And the most difficult task of her over-pressured career is facing pregnant women who have learned they will deliver hopelessly impaired babies.

Al-Taha is convinced radioactivity has played a major role in the defects, a result that may be boosted by malnutrition and bad water. ``Some other form of pollution could be responsible,'' she says, ``but radiation has the biggest effect on a small subject like a child or a growing fetus. And it has been known for 50 years that radiation attacks the gonads, which are the organs of reproduction.

``The large number of unexplained miscarriages, and the new varieties of malformations indicate something very serious has happened here since the war.''

The figures in her files are startling. Between January, 1989, and December, 1996, she has seen a doubling of patients coming to her clinic for counselling and testing because of suspected genetic problems.

Chromosome defects leading to Down syndrome have doubled, families with more than one genetically damaged child have risen by one-third and the ages of women giving birth to malformed babies have dropped significantly. The most dramatic increases are in bone disfigurements, which have risen six times, and eye abnormalities, which have tripled.

``Eyes and bones are most sensitive organs when it comes to the effects of uranium,'' says al-Taha. ``That's why its effects are worst on pregnant women.''

One important clue to the genetic diseases, she says, is in the babies' fathers, many of them veterans of the Iraqi forces during the Gulf War, men who breathed contaminated dust and climbed over radioactive tanks.

``There is now a high percentage of abnormal sperm,'' she says. ``And the men suffer from unusual cancers. Many have cirrhosis of the liver, although they are young and have no history of drinking or viral infections.''

In Basra's main teaching hospital, Nadir Khalaf lies sprawled on a stained bed, in a ward reeking of stale urine. The 35-year-old former army medical aide is skeletal - alive, but only just - one of 1,400 Iraqi Gulf veterans known to be suffering from cancer.

Although interviews with Iraqi servicemen are out of bounds for western journalists, The Star has been given rare access.

``He has lymphoma, and we can do nothing for him,'' says Dr. Jawad al-Ali, a senior medical consultant. ``A couple of months ago, he came to Baghdad and attended a conference in a wheelchair. Now, as you see. . . . ''

There is no need for further explanation.

With dull, resigned eyes, Khalaf whispers his story. ``I was on the Saudi border (southeast of Basra). There was continuous bombing and big clouds of dust rising. Flames were everywhere. Some people used masks to breathe, but I didn't bother. I was moving casualties out of the attack zone and I didn't have time to think.''

After the war ended a couple of weeks later, at the end of February 1991, Khalaf remembers feeling sick. ``I was tired all the time. There was vomiting, fever and dizziness. I thought it was just stress.''

The malaise never left him. And seven years later he developed the lymphoma that will shortly kill him.

Amran Abed-Ali is praying to avoid that fate.

A husky, ruggedly good-looking man of 26, he was sent to Kuwait at 18 for what Saddam promised would be the mother of all battles. As the retreating Iraqi troops murdered and pillaged their way through Kuwait City, Abed-Ali was sent to bolster the elite Republican Guards as their units moved back into Iraq.

``They were bombing the Republican Guard less than 100 metres from me,'' he says. ``As the shelling ended, I could smell something very bad, a strange rotten smell where the shells had landed. Then I made it back to my base (about 100 kilometres west of Basra) and found everything had been destroyed. Tanks were smashed and metal was lying everywhere. Nobody told us to avoid the area.''

Once on base, Abed-Ali had peculiar symptoms, which he put down to the shock of the battle. ``I just kept losing weight. I was tired all the time, as though I'd been walking too much. I had fever, and my body shook uncontrollably.''

He opens the neck of his shirt to show the telltale swelling that means a recurrence of lymphoma. Before it's too late, he hopes, he will be able to buy newly developed chemotherapy medicine from Jordan. But in the mud hut he shares with his parents and five brothers in one of Basra's poorest suburbs, it's difficult to see how.

In the large, rundown teaching hospital, al-Ali is tired of adding up the depressing statistics.

``In 1988, we had 34 deaths from cancer in our hospital,'' says the specialist who, in better days, trained at London's Royal College of Physicians. ``Last year, we had 405 deaths. The numbers are increasing by about 30 per cent a year.''

Bone cancer and kidney failure are two of the most common illnesses, he says. Both could be related to depleted uranium, which leeches into the water system and is swallowed and flushed through the kidneys, causing fatal damage as it goes.

``There was a lot of debris lying around,'' recalls Ali Abdul, an auto mechanic in the desert town of az-Zoubayr, south of Basra. ``People picked it up and took it home, maybe for souvenirs, or maybe they thought it could be used for something.

``There was a yellow haze in the air, and lots of people got sick. My wife began to bleed internally. Later, we had a brain-damaged baby who died. Now we have only one child, who is also handicapped. The doctors say he will die by the age of 4.''

Al-Ali, the doctor, believes radioactivity has gone up through the food chain, poisoning vegetables and animals. Increasing reports of abnormally formed plants and animals add to his suspicions.

-- The most dramatic increases are in bone disfigurements, which have risen six times, and eye abnormalities, which have tripled. `Eyes and bones are most sensitive organs when it comes to the effects of uranium.' - Dr. Selma al-Taha --

The doctors would like to see wider studies to link more of their isolated results. But Iraq's priorities today are survival and military rebuilding, two goals that now seem bitterly at odds.

Iraqi officials give conflicting reports about how much war debris they have cleaned up and how long it was left to lie in towns and villages before they removed it. Now, most of the material sits in a radioactive compound near the Kuwaiti border, where dust storms are fast and frequent.

``We think up to 800 tonnes of uranium shells were left in Iraq,'' says Dr. Sami al-Araji, an engineer and member of Iraq's committee on assessing Gulf War damage. ``In the Basra area and the south, radioactivity levels have risen to 10 times normal levels in water and soil.''

But there is no money for the kind of massive clean-up that would take billions of dollars and years of concentrated effort. And, it appears, little government interest. Perversely, Saddam uses the suffering of Iraqi civilians as a tool to rid the country of the hated sanctions.

Nor can the beleaguered population expect any help from the West, or wealthy Arab countries Saddam has alienated with belligerent rhetoric. Meanwhile, eight years after the war, the silent carnage goes on, mysterious and relentless.

``Murder, extermination . . . or other inhuman acts done against any civilian population'' constitute a crime against humanity, according to the Nuremberg Principles of World War II.

But in the tangled web of the Gulf conflict, who is responsible Who would ever be brought to justice

``There's another sad case in labour now,'' says al-Ali, returning from his ward rounds.

``She'll deliver any moment. We are preparing her as best we can. The baby has no head.''