However, consider Figure 1 at
http://www.consang.net/index.php/Summary#Figure_1 .
No records were kept under Saddam, and there's a strong resistance to saying that consanguineous marriages are bad. It's an important cultural trait, and defects are invariably the woman's fault--not the man's, not the custom's.
Such marriages are very common in some parts of the world, and yield a wide variety of birth defects. We make fun of cousins marrying cousins in Appalachia. Sorry, but marriage practices in parts of the Mid-East and SW Asia make Appalachians look positively ultra-progressive.
The map probably overstates the prevalence in Iraq, but at the same time shows that it's uniform over the territory. It's not. It's probably most concentrated in the Sunni portions.
The reason that you get more birth defects with consanguineous marriages is that often "normality" depends on having at least one working copy of a gene, and consanguineity serves to increase the number of babies with two defective genes.
It's impossible to judge any increase or decrease in birth defects over the last decade--all you get is anecdotal information, and the existence of such babies is often denied. It's a dishonor to bear such a kid. Now, that's all well and good, but it has a problem: First, there's a handy excuse, the Americans, so such babies can be more readily admitted. Second, anything to make the Americans look bad is good. In other words, there are two good excuses for "memories" to be wrong in a way that would yield the same outcome as a real significant increase in birth defects. So do we trust anecdotal information? Eh.
I wouldn't be surprised in the least if there was an increase over the short term, however. I have three reasons for this. First, there were chemicals--DU among them, in all likelihood--used. Second, there were dietary deficiencies in recent years caused by, well, war-time deprivation. Third, in times of conflict you trust your own tribe more and are less interested in forging inter-tribe bonds than in reinforcing intra-tribe and intra-clan bonds. In other words, I'd expect that there were more consanguineous marriages in recent years (forced marriages by militans aside) than in the decade before.
However, it lacks the simplicity of saying, "It's our fault! Well, not *mine*, but it's the fault of my political enemies, and serves to make me more outstandingly good and them more evil." As I said, in wartime you tend to want to strengthen not inter-tribal but intra-tribal bonds.
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