The deadly illusion of border tranquility

ATTENTION to detail can be lifesaving.

It’s a skill. None more so than for anyone who enters a minefield. And so it was with some trepidation (and possibly stupidity and against my editor’s wishes) that this intermittently un-coordinated journalist reluctantly decided to enter a live landmine field in rural Iraq.

The former Saddam Hussein military base of Sheramar in the eastern Iraqi province of Sulaymaniyah lies just a few kilometres from the Iranian border. During the 1980s, fierce fighting continued for eight years between the countries (the war was the longest conventional one in the 20th century) along their borders, which both ploughed full of landmines.