“Green Iraq”: 4,800 square kilometers are contaminated with mines, and the country needs 15 years to get rid of them.
“Green Iraq”: 4,800 square kilometers are contaminated with mines, and the country needs 15 years to get rid of them.
2026-06-21
Shafaq News – Baghdad
The “Green Iraq” environmental observatory revealed on Sunday that about 4,800 square kilometers of the country’s land are contaminated with mines and war remnants, stressing that this vast area puts Iraq at the forefront of the world’s countries most contaminated with these dangerous projectiles.
The observatory explained in a report seen by Shafaq News Agency that the crisis has been rooted since the first Gulf War, which lasted eight years without a real solution, followed by the second Gulf War in 1991, and then the invasion of a number of cities by the “ISIS” organization in 2014, which exacerbated the problem in the governorates of Nineveh, Anbar and Salah al-Din, in addition to the areas already contaminated in Basra, Maysan, Wasit and Muthanna, indicating that the victims are estimated at tens of thousands of citizens who have died or suffered permanent disabilities, most of them children and shepherds.
According to the report, this contaminated area means the complete disruption of about two million dunams of agricultural land, as farmers were prevented from utilizing it, noting that 70% of the lands of Anbar and Nineveh – which are considered the food basket of Iraq – have become uncultivable due to unexploded ordnance.
The observatory estimated that Iraq needs a period of 10 to 15 years to get rid of this scourge, provided that huge budgets are available from the government or through international funding, while stressing at the same time the difficulty of closing this complex file within the aforementioned period, and its need for a longer time period.
The report criticized what it described as the “complete silence” of the competent authorities, hinting at the existence of major corruption suspicions in the land clearing files from 2004 until now; as the Department of Mine Affairs (which was transferred from the Ministry of Planning to the Ministry of Environment) contracted with foreign and local private companies, which announced that some areas were free of mines without any real achievement, so that the local residents would be surprised by the explosion of remnants a few days after the technical teams left.
shafaq.com
