Mine-hunters of Iraq slowly clear Saddam's legacy

Even in comparison with other landmines, the Valmara 69 is a menacing object. Five horns stick out of its head making it look like a miniature Dalek.

Even in comparison with other landmines, the Valmara 69 is a menacing object. Five horns stick out of its head making it look like a miniature Dalek.

Touch any of them and, propelled by a small charge, the device jumps into the air to waist height and explodes, spraying 1,200 lethal metal fragments 50 yards in all directions.

"The Valmara is one of the most dangerous of the mines and difficult to defuse," said Gafar Gafor Abbas Wariyah, a veteran Kurdish peshmerga, famous in northern Iraq for defusing 107,000 mines, before a premature explosion tore off his hands.

The mountains and plains of Iraqi Kurdistan compete with Afghanistan for the title of the most mine-ridden country in the world. By one calculation, there are four or five mines for every one of the four million Kurds in northern Iraq.

Mine clearance has been agonisingly slow. Under Saddam Hussein, mine detectors were often banned from entering areas where they were most needed. After the US invasion in March 2003 the campaign to clear Kurdistan of mines should have speeded up. Instead it has slowed down as the US, in effect, took over responsibility from the United Nations for funding mine clearance.

Only some of the money needed for clearing mines in Kurdistan has materialised, although the State Department has contributed $9m to the demining activities of a British-based organisation, the Mines Advisory Group in northern Iraq over the last two years.

In an old Iraqi army fortress overlooking a green plain outside Sulaymaniyah in eastern Kurdistan, Twana Bashir, the operations head of the General Directorate of Mine Action said he had been forced to stop operations for four months because of lack of money. This time, he was back in business, having just procured enough money to issue tenders for clearing 50 minefields out of an estimated 4,000.

The oldest active minefields date from 1974 and were laid by the Iraqi army suppressing the Kurdish rebellion. Mines protected every Iraqi army post. During the eight-year war with Iran, Saddam, short of troops, tried to defend his northern front with great belts of minefields.

The worst place in Iraq for mines today is Penjwin, a small town in a basin between the mountains, surrounded on two sides by Iranian territory. Captured and recaptured by the Iranian and Iraqi armies, both sides laid gigantic minefields which are still exploding.

Tahir Mahmoud, in a wheelchair at his house in the Penjwin, returned to his village near by in 1992. It was in ruins, he said. "But I thought the narrow road to my farm had been cleared." He was wrong. A mine exploded causing injuries so severe that both legs had to be amputated.

Awad Mustapha, a neighbour, shows an artificial right foot. He lost his own when he was six, treading on a mine in his back-yard while he was playing football. In Penjwin alone, there are 600 to 700 disabled mine victims. Many were trying to farm or gathering firewood in the hills. Plastic anti-personnel mines float and they are often washed down into the villages by the melting snow so women washing clothes in the streams step on them.

But the villagers, often on the edge of starvation in the 1990s, also had an occupation among the most dangerous in the world. They would dismantle the Valmara to sell the explosive charge, and the small piece of aluminium in which it is wrapped, for about one dollar. Given that the five horns of the mine need only to be moved 3mm in any direction to detonate the explosive, many salvagers died.

Mr Wariyah, now a plainclothes policeman, neatly dressed and with realistic-looking plastic hands, said that in the hamlet he came from 12 people were killed by mines and more were seriously injured, For all his skill with mines, his hands were amputated after a mine blew up in 1999.

Mr Wariyah used a screwdriver to prod the soil for mines, though most are on the surface. The UN mine-clearers mostly used a steel rod or dogs who are trained to sniff out explosives, then lie down close to the spot. Mine detectors are often ineffective because in Kurdistan the soil is full of shrapnel and spent ammunition which the detector cannot distinguish from a mine. Often, only two or three square metres are cleared in a day.

For Khabat Zangana, a Kurdish engineer, this is far too slow. He used to build roads and bridges for the Iraqi army and would watch them plant 20,000 mines in an afternoon. He believes the only way to deal with mines in Kurdistan and elsewhere is with special machinery cheap enough for local authorities to buy.

To his workshops in the Sulaymaniyah industrial estate, Mr Zangana brings second-hand bulldozers and tractors. He scours the country for armour plate - taken from old Iraqi army personnel carriers - and bulletproof glass to protect the driver. He shows with pride a bulldozer which has an extra engine to operate a flail with chains that detonate mines, much like the ones used in the Normandy landings in 1944.

Near by is a trailer into which earth riddled with mines and shells is dumped by a specially armoured excavator. The soil falls on vibrating steel mesh which lets the earth fall but retains the mines. "We can clear 400sq metres a day compared to two or three square metres by a man with a detecting rod," he says. Late last year, Mr Zangana won a contract to supply his de-mining machinery to Basra at the other end of Iraq. A heavily protected convoy survived the snipers and broken bridges.

Mr Zangana says that if professional mine-clearers do not remove the mines the villagers do it themselves. "They are good at it but out of every 2,000 mines in a field they find only 1,900."

In Penjwin, doctors say things are improving, and every month they get only two or three villagers whose feet or legs have been blown off; before, they used to have to treat scores of them.