The poverty-stricken locals have spent weeks drinking milk and water kept in hundreds of barrels that had previously been used to store a dangerous uranium compound.

Initial tests by Iraqi scientists suggest that entire villages are contaminated with radiation, including the buildings, water supply, lakes, crops and livestock.

The villagers of al-Wardia near the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, have been told that they are all at risk of cancer and that the entire area may have to be evacuated and decontaminated.

Dr Hasham Abd al-Mlek, Iraq’s national nuclear inspector, who has worked at Tuwaitha since 1988 and is now working with the American authorities, told The Times: “There are around 2,000 people in the villages, and most of them are affected. More than a thousand people will get cancer. They need medication and the area needs decontamination. Really, this is the Iraqi Chernobyl.”

The coalition civilian administration of Iraq, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, is planning to give emergency health tests to thousands of people in the area to find out how contaminated they are with uranium.

The US military has set up a special “nuclear disablement team” to reclaim the radioactive material from the villagers and to make the area safe, although they are unable to give assurances that all the material has been accounted for and is not in the hands of terrorists.

The Tuwaitha nuclear plant was the centre of Saddam’s nuclear bomb-making programme, which he abandoned in 1981 after Israeli jets bombed the first, large French-built nuclear reactor on the site. The French and Russians then built two smaller nuclear reactors for Saddam, which had insufficient capacity for a nuclear weapons programme.

The Americans bombed those reactors in the 1991 Gulf War and Tuwaitha has not been operational since. Originally, about 1,000 tonnes of a uranium oxide, called yellow cake, which Saddam needed to make a nuclear weapon, was stored there, but in recent months there were believed to be only 94 tonnes. Two tonnes of enriched uranium were left untouched by the looters.

The low-lying plant, which lies in a densely populated dusty plain, is set in the middle of a vast arid complex, surrounded by razor wire and was kept strictly off limits to locals by large security gates. During the war, however, the security gates were destroyed, the Iraqi guards fled and the entire compound was left unguarded for five days after the Americans arrived on April 5.

The villagers had lived in grinding poverty in wrecked houses just outside the compound boundaries when suddenly, for the first time, they could enter.

As he sat with other men in a local wicker-walled café, Wardia al-Jabouri, a village elder, said: “The Americans opened the doors and they knew what was inside, but they just left again, so all the people went inside.”

The locals arrived in beaten-up cars and donkey carts, carrying lock-cutters to get through the internal fences, and looted most of the facility. They took not only computer equipment and furniture, but also about 200 large blue plastic barrels, each of which contained around 250kg of yellow cake.

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