Deadly Harvest

Clearing Iraq's Killing Fields

by Lorna Tychostup, June 25, 2008

It looks like any normal construction site. A pattern of foundations line trenches cut deep into the earth. Workers are busy handmixing and applying fresh cement to the newly minted cinder blocks that line and cover the crude broken stones of the foundation. The blocks will grow to form walls of a housing complex for dozens of families. Except this site is anything but normal. Aside from its location in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, just over the Azmar Mountain range from Sulaimaniyeh, a young child recently lost three fingers here when an unexploded unidentified piece of ordnance left over from the days of the Iran-Iraq war blew up at his touch.

If not for this tragedy, the story reads like a “things gone right” tale of Iraq. The housing under construction here in Samsawa is meant for 1,500 Kurdish internally displaced persons (IDPs), forced to leave their homes as part of Saddam Hussein’s retaliatory “Arabization” of Kurdistan after the First Gulf War. In addition to draining the southern Mesopotamian Marshlands in an effort to remove Shiite Marsh Arabs from the region and destroy their 7,000-year-old culture, Saddam’s campaign forced Kurds from Kurdistan while at the same time enticing Arabs north to take the Kurd’s homes, virtually replacing them—ethnic cleansing tactics that have created a tense legacy in today’s already intense Iraq.

The Kurdish IDP families are a minute representation of the estimated one million Iraqis displaced by Saddam’s regime pre-2003 and the current conflict. At present, these families live in a makeshift shanty village immediately next to the construction site, which in the 1980s and `90s was an Iraqi military base. Located close to the Iranian border, it housed the infamous Peshmerga—Kurdish freedom fighters who date back to fall of the Ottoman Empire, include women within their ranks, and whose name literally means “those who face death”—who currently provide security to northern Iraq. The site is also home to munitions, the exact amount yet to be discovered, buried when Iranians threatened to overrun the area.

A BURIED WAR
“So far we’ve removed 240 mortars, a combination of 105 and 122mm artillery projectiles, type 63 107mm Chinese rockets, and mortars sized 120 down to 60mm, an assortment of RPG tail heads, fuses, and other items, all ready to be fired save for a fuse,” says Mick Beeby, on-site technical field manager of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) Iraq. A neutral and impartial international humanitarian organization with fundraising arms in both the US and UK, MAG has been working to remove such leftovers from various conflicts and wars—former and current—in 35 countries (out of an estimated 82 known to be mined) since 1989.

Mostly funded by institutional donors, governments, and foundations and other charities, MAG’s income—$8 million in 1995, growing to $62 million by 2007—is project-specific, meaning the funds can only be spent on predetermined projects and activities. However, it also benefits from public donations and fundraising campaign like a recent “Celebrity Shoe Auction” in the UK. Such “unrestricted” income enables it to react quickly to emergencies, or to fund projects where other funding isn’t available.