This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 9 ALBUHISHMA, Iraq - The smoke above the American air base was sometimes thick enough to blot out the sun. At first, residents had no idea what the foreign troops were burning. Before long, they were struggling to breathe. Farmers would return home with soot streaks on their forearms and stories about what soldiers had tipped into the burn pit that day: batteries, human waste, plastic ration packs, even refrigerators. "We were always coughing," recalls Tamim Ahmed al-Tamimi, who worked the fields back then outside Joint Base Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. "But we didn't know that this smoke could kill people. We thought that only rockets could kill people." Twenty years on from the American-led invasion of Iraq, the scars are still visible in shot-up walls and bombed out buildings. But there is another legacy too, more insidious and enduring … [Read more...] about U.S. veterans won justice for burn pit exposure. Iraqis were forgotten.