North remains heavily mined

It is early morning in Tawila, a town straddling the Iran-Iraq border in the northern mountainous region of Hawraman in northern Iraq. On the main street, the shops are just opening, and local farmers make their way down the valley to the steep terraces where they grow vegetables and poplar trees for use in building. The huddled group of men could be mistaken for stragglers. But then you see the body they are carrying, a shepherd killed at first light when he stepped on a mine. His wife and family have yet to be told. Such sights are painfully familiar to the Kurds who inhabit Iraq's three northernmost provinces. The region's decades of war may have ended but according to demining NGOs they have left more than 3,000 minefields, not including those on the only partially-surveyed Green Line dividing Kurdish-controlled areas from the rest of the country. A frontline during the war that pitted Iran against Iraq from 1980 to 1988, the northern governorate of Sulaymaniyah has suffered far more than most. At the general directorate of demining in the city of Sulaymaniyah, officials reel off statistics to prove it: 1,818 minefields, they say, have put over 200 sq.km. out of bounds. With the exception of 2003, when the heavily-mined Green Line area was opened up after the fall of the Baathist regime, over half of mine-related accidents and deaths mines in Iraq since 1991 have happened in the province, according to local officials. The death toll has been highest in the border towns of Pencwin, Mawat and Sharbajar, they say. Although it is difficult to give reliable statistics on the number of mines and related deaths, observers estimate the number of mines and units of UXOs (unexploded ordnance) to be 10 million in the north of the country alone, which could take up to 15 years to clear under UN standards. More than a million mines and UXOs have been cleared since July 2003 from northern Iraq by the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British NGO, which has been operating in the country for more than a decade. The painstaking job of clearing up this mess has fallen to nine organisations, four of them local. The newest of these is Bawaji Demining Organisation, working in the northern half of Sulaymaniyah governorate. In the two years since it was set up it has, according to Managing Director Azad Sabir Ismail, cleared 17 minefields. Work is in progress on another 22. For an NGO that has 377 operational staff, divided into 15 teams of 12 deminers, that doesn't sound much. It is only when you visit the town of Baski Drezh, just off the main road joining Sulaymaniyah to the popular resort town of Dokan, that you see the reality behind the statistics. Less than a mile from the nearest village, the Baski Drezh minefield lies on a hill where blue thistles mingle with red warning posts. "As is often the case, it was the locals who warned us of it," team leader Dilshad Maruf told IRIN. "They estimated its size at 80,000 sq.m. We narrowed that down to 31,000." After three months of work, his team has cleared 7,000 sq.m. Kitted out in protective helmet and Kevlar body armour, deminer Aram Mustafa says he can clear five to 10 sq.m. a day. "What is the point of working to save lives if you kill yourself in the process," joked Maruf. "Every team has a resident doctor but, touch wood, Bawaji hasn't had any need of them yet." He expects work to continue at Baski Drezh until the end of September. Like other locally based demining organisations in Kurdish-controlled areas, Bawaji was funded until last year with money from the United Nations' now defunct Oil-for-Food programme. Since then, money has been channelled directly from the US Treasury, via the intermediary RONCO organisation which specialises in demining. "Our budget for 2004 is US $2.4 million," Bawaji's director of logistics Shwar Anwar told IRIN at the organisation's headquarters in a disused Baathist fort off the Dokan road. "Proposals are reviewed every three months, and with the arrival of new mine clearance and dog teams, we expect that figure to rise to $3 million." Like others in the demining business, though, he acknowledges that the job itself is one part of the process of reducing civilian casualties. "Even if the demining organisations increase the volume of their work slightly, it'll be 50 years before Iraq is free of mines," he believed. If deaths caused by mines in the province have fallen from 563 in 1991 to 33 last year, he added, "that's largely thanks to the work of groups like KOMA [Kurdistan Organisation for Mine Awareness]". "The dramatic fall in casualties also has an economic source," Deputy Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Jamal Mirzi Aziz told IRIN at his office in Sulaymaniyah city. "In 1991, the economic situation here was dire - there was no power, there were no jobs. Villagers had no alternative but to forage for firewood on mined land," he said, adding that things more or less work now and they no longer need to do that. Words that are no comfort to Nawzad Ahmad, Bawaji's training manager. He holds up one of the Italian-made anti-personnel mines found in the Baski Drezh minefields. "They call this a fragmentation mine, one of the nastiest," he said. "Put pressure on it, and it is catapulted 40 centimetres above the ground." He fishes inside the mine and pulls out a handful of sharpened ball bearings. "These are fired out over a radius of 15 metres, killing or maiming anybody there," he explained. "My dream is to eradicate every one of these from Iraq."