ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - A landmine suspected to be a remnant of the Iraq-Iran war killed a man on Tuesday in Erbil province’s border town of Sidakan, near the Iranian border, marking the third incident of its kind in the Kurdistan Region in less than a month.

“The person is from the village of Qalitan in the Sidakan subdistrict. He was killed in a landmine explosion on Qalarashi mountain,” Ali Miran, an official from the Iraqi Kurdistan Mine Action Agency (IKMAA), confirmed to The New Region.

Miran added that the deceased had gone to the place to harvest wild herbs.

Every year during spring, people from urban areas flock to the countryside and mountainous areas for picnicking and harvesting wild herbs and plants, running the risk of stumbling across unexploded ordnance.

Unexploded landmines dispersed across the Kurdistan Region’s border areas with Iran continue to be a serious threat, especially during periods of greater footfall in remote areas during the spring and summer.

According to Miran, three people have been killed and three others wounded since last month in landmine explosions in the remote and mountainous regions of the Kurdistan Region.

On March 24, Hawker Salih was killed in a landmine explosion around the village of Siyamewa, Penjwen district, Sulaimani province. 

In a similar fashion, Mohammed Hassan Hamad, 55, was killed in a landmine blast in the highlands of Warte town, Rawanduz district, on March 13 after an excursion to gather spring herbs.

Around three million square meters of the Kurdistan Region’s mine-contaminated areas were cleared in 2024, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) mine agency, with at least four people losing their lives to the explosives during that year.

Jabbar Mustafa Rasul, head of the IKMAA, told The New Region in January that their teams were able to clear around 2,956,000 square meters across the Kurdistan Region’s minefields last year, a slight increase from 2,803,326 square meters in 2023.

A total of “776 square kilometers of the Kurdistan Region are contaminated with mines and remnants of war, of which 559 square kilometers have been demined, and 217 square kilometers are left,” said Rasul, noting that Sulaimani province has the largest land area yet to be demined.

The mine agency has demined approximately 11 million square meters since 2019.

Around 13,500 people have been killed or injured due to landmines in the Kurdistan Region over the decades, according to Rasul, who added that anti-personnel mines make up approximately 90 percent of all the mines in the Region, while the rest are anti-tank mines.

“The mines are from the time of successive Iraqi governments until 2003, and the majority of them are from the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, during which a large area of the Kurdistan Region became a battlefield for the major war between the two regional states,” he said.

The IKMAA director stated that most of the casualties occur during the springtime when families flock to the mountainous areas for picnics. He urged all civilians to contact the mine agency’s hotline whenever they encounter unexploded ordnance.