ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Nine people were injured on Friday when a suspected war remnant exploded in a farmer’s field in Sulaimani province’s Penjwen district, according to local health officials. “The incident took place at 8:30 a.m. this morning in an agricultural field,” Khalid Abdullah, director of Penjwen’s health department, told Rudaw. He said nine people were taken to hospital in Penjwen and three of them, in critical condition, were transferred to Sulaimani city for treatment. The cause of the blast has not been confirmed. According to Abdullah, injured farmers told health workers they had found what appeared to be an old grenade while harvesting their crops. Penjwen is located on the Kurdistan Region’s border with Iran, an area dotted with landmines and explosive ordnances left from the devastating Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. In addition to the Iran-Iraq war, vast areas of the country still need to be cleared of explosives from the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 invasion by the US-led coalition, and the occupation of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014. Since 2003, mine removal teams in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region have cleared 4,540 of the 6,600 square kilometers that are contaminated with landmines, Mustafa Hameed, head of media at the Iraqi Directorate for Mine Action (DMA), told Rudaw last year. The Iraqi DMA and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s mine agency, IKMAA, have been working together since they signed a memorandum of understanding last year, outlining their cooperation and mutual technical support until 2028.
