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MAG Iraq's Conventional Weapons Disposal response team, near Mosul. |
"When we returned to the village, we started rebuilding the houses. But when we discovered that there were large numbers of weapons’ ammunition and explosives left over from the war buried in the ground, we had to move far from our land and build our houses elsewhere."
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Abdulla Ibrahim is a labourer from the village of Sekanyan in Bashiqa, Mosul.
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In 1975, Sekanyan and its surroundings were evacuated as the area became occupied by the Iraqi military and turned into a military base, used to store large amounts of ammunition during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. Residents were forced to move to the city of Mosul 35 kilometres away.
When security worsened in Mosul following the Allied Forces’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, many displaced families – around 250 people in total – returned from the city to Sekanyan. A few houses were rebuilt by the returnee population, but the presence of unguarded stockpiles of conventional weapons restricted the amount of land that could be used for housing and agricultural development.
"When we returned to the village, we started rebuilding the houses. But when we discovered that there were large numbers of weapons’ ammunition and explosives left over from the war buried in the ground we had to move far from our land and build our houses elsewhere," said Abdulla.
Educating the returning population
MAG aims to educate internally displaced people (IDPs) about the risks posed by remnants of conflict. IDPs returning home are vulnerable as, following their time away, they are often unaware of suspected dangerous areas.
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Ahmed (right), a shepherd from Sekanyan, identifies hazardous items he found near his house. [Photo: MAG Iraq] |
In 2009, a Community Liaison team visited the Sekanyan area to deliver Mine Risk Education (MRE). During the MRE sessions, villagers reported more than 100 dangerous areas where they had seen hazardous items.
Said Ahmed Abdulrahman, a shepherd from Sekanyan: “Since 2003, many families have returned to Sekanyan due to the bad security in Mosul. The residents have limited safe land to build their houses on. We need more land to be freed from the left over ammunition. We are living with this threat.”
Conventional weapons disposal
The Community Liaison staff started gathering information about the stockpiles and this information was passed on to MAG Iraq’s Conventional Weapons Disposal (CWD) response team.
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Sekanyan's village leader and his family receive Mine Risk Education from MAG Community Liaison staff. [Photo: MAG Iraq] |
From June 2009 to December 2009, the CWD response team safely removed and destroyed 549 hazardous items from 12 stockpiles in Sekanyan village, in coordination with the director of Bashiqa sub-district's police Hikmat Kuchar and Sekanya's village leader Majeed Younis.
"From June 2009, the CWD response team kept going back to Sekanyan village on a daily basis,” said Wirya Mustafa, MAG Iraq's Field Operations Manager in Dohuk. “There are more tasks to complete and more stockpiles to remove and destroy." The team is planning to safely remove and destroy all the unguarded stockpiles in 2010.
"We know that MAG is committed to destroying all these dangerous items, therefore we thank them for all the great work they have done in our village," said the shepherd, Ahmed.
The work in this article was carried out thanks to funding from the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, US Department of State.
22 July 2010
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