ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — An area of 260 square kilometers remain uncleared of landmines in the Kurdistan Region, according to an official. “In the Kurdistan Region, an area of 776 square kilometers was littered with landmines and the remains of war,” Jabar Mustafa, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Iraqi Kurdistan Mine Action Agency (IKMAA), said at a press conference on Monday. “From the 90s until now, the Kurdistan Regional Government through Kurdistan‘s Mine Action Agency have been able to, with [the help of] international organizations and allies, clean most of the area,” said Mustafa, specifying that 516 square kilometers have been cleared since 1991. The press conference took place at a site where a bomb weighing 500 kilograms was detonated by experts this morning in Penjwen’s Gokhlan village, after it was found by a farmer who notified relevant authorities. In 2020, around 18 people became victims of landmines, Obed Ahmed, the director of technical affairs at the landmine agency, told Rudaw English on Monday. There are around 3,000 minefields in the Kurdistan Region and landmine victims have added up to 13,456 people since 1991, according to the agency. “The reason why they are not cleaned is sometimes because of the geographic location, because now we can say that landmines are more in the mountainous and border regions rather than inhabited areas. The geopolitics of Kurdistan is like that, it becomes harder and harder to clean day by day,” said Mustafa. There are tens of millions of unexploded landmines and explosive ordinances across the Kurdistan Region’s borders with Iran, more than three decades after the devastating Iran-Iraq war. The Mine Action Agency, with other NGOs including the UK-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), has cleared huge swathes of the Kurdistan Region. A man died in November due to a landmine explosion in Choman district while collecting wood for heat. A man was also killed in March in the Choman village of Pashkozi after stepping on a landmine while looking for herbs. Just weeks before, a Bradost farmer found a cache filled with more than 300 highly explosive artillery shells said to date from the Iran-Iraq war.
