Focus on dog demining

At first sight, they could pass for the ground plans of an outlandish formal garden. But the roped-off squares and lines scattered around a bend in the river are not for future flowerbeds; they are for training dogs to detect mines and unexploded ordnance. There are no reliable statistics on how many mines have been laid in Iraq, but the north is the most heavily mined area in the country. Some NGOs estimate that there are 3,000 minefields there. Three hours north of Arbil in northern Iraq, Soran fort was converted into a dog-training centre by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1998. In January this year it was taken over by Ronco, a consulting group specialising in demining and responsible for channelling US State Department funding into the creation of a new National Mine Action Authority (NMAA). As NMAA senior adviser Emmanuel Deisser told IRIN at the Regional Mine Action Centre in Arbil, the change of name and international partner also entailed a radical reworking of the structures put in place. He explained that, previously, working on the assumption that it would be present for 20 years and under pressure from Saddam Hussein's government not to cooperate too closely with Kurdish staff, the UN programme was top-down and secretive. "International staff prepared all the plans, and then told the locals, 'here's your salary and here's your job'," said Deisser. "Local staff had to empty bins to find out what was going on," he added. That atmosphere has since changed. "We have no intention of staying here for years, so priority number one is to build the capacity of local staff and institutions." Priority number two, he added, is to integrate the various different branches of de-mining operations: ground-clearing machines, and human and dog teams. "UN plans to develop what we call in the trade the 'tool-box approach' were severely hampered by its distant relation with local staff," he explained. "Now it is locals who integrate work. That is the only way they will learn the most economically efficient way of demining." Few transformations have been more radical than the one wrought by George Conrad and his staff at Soran fort. "Dogs bring huge benefit to demining", said Conrad, who has worked for Ronco sub-contractor Global Training Academy for 14 years. "A good human deminer can clear five square metres a day. A dog can clear over 400 to 600 square metres." Trained to smell and react to explosives, dogs are also a means to avoid one of the major factors slowing human de-mining. Working with metal detectors, de-miners are obliged to check out every sign of metal contamination. Often, they unearth only scrap or rubbish. "You've got to be able to trust the dogs, though," Conrad added. "Under the old system, that trust was not total. Before the liberation of Iraq, we used a search technique that depended on the dogs' natural hunting instinct," Youel Marwan, Soran's top local instructor, told IRIN. "Leads were not used, and dogs were allowed to search along lines up to 40 metres in length. The trouble was, they sometimes missed mines." Now, dogs are trained to work in what the de-miners call "boxes", 10 by 10 metre squares of cordoned-off ground. Working with a long lead, the handlers work the box using a crosswind pattern. Once the dog has walked in a straight line out and back across the box, the handler takes one 50 centimetre step to the side and repeats the process. If the dog smells explosives, it sits, enabling handlers to note the spot on a chart they carry. "It's a technique we've perfected over more than a decade," international trainer Tyrone Green told IRIN. "The crosswind pattern ensures that the dogs don't step on mines before they smell them. It's also a way of avoiding one shortcoming of working into the wind: if a large anti-tank mine and an anti-personnel mine were laid close to each other, we found that dogs often missed the anti-personnel mine." With just four instructors to train 185 handlers and 93 dogs, George Conrad's team has been obliged to set up different groups. A total of 26 dogs have already passed "Licence One", the basic but most difficult stage of learning the box technique, and 33 are currently being trained. They will also have to pass "Licence Three", the verification of land cleared by machines. Of the dogs left at Soran by Mechem, the South African de-mining organisation previously in charge of the programme here, around 30 have been rejected. "It's not that the dogs were not of a good quality; they were," explained Conrad. "But the techniques we are teaching require a close collaboration between dog and handler which just doesn't exist with the free-search technique. Not all dogs can make that leap." He added that Ronco was also phasing out the dog-breeding programme put in place by Mechem. "Local breeding schemes can work, but we're specialised in training, not breeding," he said, adding that of the 74 puppies born here, only four have made the grade. "That's a small return on a lot of time and effort." Most of the dogs, German shepherds and one lone spaniel are imported from special breeders in Holland. Conrad's colleagues jokingly describe him as more dog than man. With 34 years of dog-training behind him, you can see why. Yet, while he is a veteran of other schemes to bring national demining structures up to international standards, he insists that Iraq has presented him with challenges he has never faced before. "In the past, we usually arrived in a country to find our dogs waiting for us there - it was just a question of training local staff to use them," he said. "The programme here is not just bigger. We were also faced with training a totally unknown quantity: the dogs," he explained. "I'm pleased to say they are coming on very well indeed," he added.