Landmines these days come in all kinds of different forms, buried and unburied. They range from round, plastic-cased and waterproofed VS-50 anti-personnel mines mostly used in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s; to much larger anti-tank VS-500s; to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that can be tripped in a home with the flip of a light switch or by lifting the lid of a pot on a stove.
In Iraq the landmines problem is vast. Since the early 1940s, the country has been involved in some internal conflict, mostly between the defunct kingdom and pan-Arabists, then with the Kurds, followed by a serious contest against neighbouring Iran and culminating with the two Gulf wars. But none has been as deadly as the seven-year clash of Daesh (or Islamic State) versus the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iraqi Army and, at one point, the US. ‘Iraq is a hugely contaminated country. There are still more than 1,700 kilometres-squared of minefields – an area larger than London – to clear,’ says Jack Morgan, the country director of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British NGO. ‘The government is about to unveil a strategy to make Iraq mine-free by 2028, but the more we survey the more [landmines] we find.’
