ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A landmine explosion on Sunday at an Iraqi border guard command in Erbil killed three, an army spokesperson said. The blast near Erbil’s Kani Qirzhala subdistrict initially “killed two soldiers, Abdulkarim Jalal and Masoud Ali, while another soldier, Rizgar Majeed, was wounded,” Sami Ismail, spokesperson for the border guard command, told Rudaw’s Sidad Lashkri. Ismail later told journalists that the injured soldier succumbed to his wounds after being admitted to hospital. The explosion occurred during a training session at the engineering unit of the border guard command. The victims were landmine experts who were overseeing the training, Ismail said. The mines were remnants from the eight-year-long war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and were from the demined areas on the border between the two countries. There are countless unexploded landmines and ordinances littered across the Kurdistan Region’s border with Iran. These remnants date back more than three decades to the devastating Iraq-Iran war of 1980 to 1988. Over 13,000 mine victims have been recorded since the 1990s, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Mine Action Agency. Mine clearing teams are working on clearing the explosives, but the task is difficult as the contaminated area is vast. On Friday, a decades-old landmine in Kirkuk province exploded and claimed the life of one person while injuring another, prompting Kirkuk’s police directorate to warn people not to visit areas suspected to be contaminated with landmines.
