Shafaq News
The Iran-Iraq War that planted the mines around Al-Tayeb, in Iraq’s southern Maysan province, ended in 1988. Nearly four decades later, one of them claimed a man's life in April 2026.
Al-Tayeb, a sub-district east of Al-Amarah along the Iranian frontier, has continued to record deaths and injuries since the guns fell silent. Raed Shamil, commissioner of Al-Amarah district, told Shafaq News that nobody holds an accurate map of where every mine lies.
In Iraq, wars end, but their weapons stay. Landmines, unexploded shells, and cluster-munition remnants still lie beneath borderlands, deserts, farmland, and grazing routes. A shepherd looking for pasture, a farmer crossing an open field, or an oil worker driving through the southern desert can still meet a weapon from a war fought before they were born.
Each Conflict Left Its Own Layer
The 1980-1988 war with Iran seeded legacy minefields, concentrated along the eastern frontier, while the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 US-led invasion added unexploded ordnance and cluster munitions, and the fight against ISIS scattered improvised mines and explosive devices across large parts of northern and western Iraq.
Seasonal floods can uncover explosives buried for decades or carry them into areas once considered safer, and shifting sand changes how deep they lie and where.
According to Mustafa Hamid, media director at the Iraqi Environment Ministry's Directorate for Mine Action, about 2,400 square kilometers of Iraqi land remain contaminated with mines and other explosive remnants of war. Teams are currently working across roughly 300 square kilometers of it.
Basra holds the country's "largest concentration of contaminated land," Hamid told Shafaq News, much of it along frontier zones that served as battlefields in earlier wars. Minefields and war remnants also line Iraq's borders with Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
That national figure shifts constantly. Survey teams strike areas from the suspected-contamination database, confirm new hazardous zones and find explosives no one had recorded. In January 2026, the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) put the area still suspected of explosive-ordnance contamination at about 2,583 square kilometers. The headline number, then, works less like a countdown than a moving target: clearance shrinks the known problem while fresh surveys expose sites that were never on the books.
Systematic long-term data collection has been inconsistent, so Iraq has no definitive cumulative casualty count. Available records point to at least 35,000 people killed or injured over the decades, and probably thousands more, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor. The Monitor recorded 166 casualties from mines and explosive remnants in 2024 alone, 60 of them fatal.
UNMAS and UNICEF reported in April 2025 that at least 314 children had been killed or injured by explosive ordnance over the previous five years. Contamination also cuts families off from schools, livelihoods and land, the agencies warned, and can keep displaced people from returning home safely.
Hamid sees some progress in the tools. Drones and other technologies are increasingly helping teams detect and map hazardous ground, he said, “though they have yet to become a standard part of clearance operations nationwide.”
The response draws in the ministries of defense and interior, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), along with national mine-action authorities, UN agencies, and local and international humanitarian organizations.
Al-Muthanna's Desert Inheritance
In the open desert of Al-Muthanna, in the southwest, most of the contamination traces back to 1991. Ahmed Al-Jashaami, a member of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Association, told Shafaq News that large stretches of the province remain littered with unexploded rockets, bombs, mines and cluster-munition remnants from the Gulf War and the Iraqi army's withdrawal from Kuwait.
By his estimate, these remnants have killed, injured or disabled more than 4,500 people over the decades, though some of the statistics behind that figure date to 2021.
Roughly two decades of work by local environmental and civil-defense bodies, alongside mine-action organizations, have still left significant parts of the desert without a comprehensive survey or clearance, Al-Jashaami said. Some contaminated areas remain out of reach for government teams and humanitarian groups alike.
Mine Action Review estimated that about 228 square kilometers of such contamination remained at the end of 2025, with the largest known concentrations in Al-Muthanna at approximately 94.7 square kilometers, Basra at 74.3 and Dhi Qar at 37.4.
In Basiyah, a remote district of Al-Muthanna, around 180 square kilometers of contaminated land have been cleared after decades in which mines and unexploded weapons menaced local communities, district director Hayef Saleh Muzhir told Shafaq News.
Before clearance and awareness campaigns gathered pace, the district recorded dozens of deaths and injuries linked to explosive remnants. That number has dropped sharply as land has been cleared, warning signs have gone up around ground that remains unsafe, and non-governmental organizations have widened risk-awareness campaigns, he said.
The work now also runs through Iraq's economic ambitions. Some contaminated land falls inside oil-exploration zones, and energy companies operating there have had to clear explosives along access roads and operational routes before drilling can begin.
Maysan's Wandering Minefields
Back in Al-Tayeb, the explosives endanger residents as well as border personnel, gravel-plant workers and staff of the state-owned Maysan Oil Company, Shamil said. In some areas, minefields and other war remnants "extend for kilometers."
"Water descending from higher ground during winter can dislodge mines and carry them away from their original locations," Shamil said, sometimes for tens of kilometers. The edges of a minefield, in other words, can move.
"International humanitarian organizations began working in the area after 2003, but the scale of clearance remained small compared with the territory believed to be contaminated," he added.
Large tracts therefore remain off limits. For farmers and shepherds, that means fertile land they cannot safely plant or graze, and for local authorities, it means development and tourism projects can stall before the first foundation is laid.
Read more: War remnants haunt Iraq as Basra leads in contamination
Racing 2028 Deadlines
Iraq faces two international deadlines. Under the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, it has until February 1, 2028, to meet Article 5 clearance obligations, following an extension granted by states parties, and its deadline under the Convention on Cluster Munitions falls on November 1, 2028.
Mine Action Review assessed Iraq as off track for its anti-personnel mine deadline and said in its August 2026 assessment that the scale of cluster-munition contamination would likely require further extensions beyond 2028.
International mine-action funding surged during the campaign to stabilize areas retaken from ISIS, then contracted. Donor funding channeled through UNMAS Iraq fell from about $77 million in 2019 to around $6 million in 2024, according to Mine Action Review, while the number of donors dropped from 21 to eight. Much of that earlier effort also went to the north and west, while the south holds most of Iraq's known cluster-munition contamination.
UNMAS said in January 2026 that Iraq remained among the countries most heavily affected by explosive ordnance, with contamination still restricting agriculture, infrastructure, and essential services more than four decades after successive wars.
Read more: Spoiled by the coil: Iraq's mines battles take their toll
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.