“When we discovered the mines, I thought it would take weeks and weeks to clear them and that we would have to cancel this project,” she said.
Finding out about the mines from IOM, MAG sent two members of technical staff to the remote mountain to assess the area and the level of contamination.
They found the gulley perfect territory for mines to “migrate” during heavy rainfall – shifting where they were laid and often travelling some distance down to a new resting place – perhaps in one of the terraced orchards of fig and walnut trees being cultivated further down the mountain.
A local man working for IOM also told MAG’s mine clearance experts that one of his relatives had lost his leg by triggering a mine close to the area where the karez was being built.
When they got there they saw four anti-personnel blast mines that had already been collected and disarmed by one of the villagers. MAG’s team then found six more of the mines on the surface of the gulley, indicating they’d been washed downstream from where they were originally buried.
“It is highly likely that this process of mines being washed down the mountain would have happened almost every year since they were first laid some 30 years or so ago,” said Mark Thompson, MAG’s Technical Operations Manager in Iraq.
“I was sure there were more mines buried sub-surface, and so we had no choice but to advise IOM to halt the project for their own safety."
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