Killer Mines in Kuwait Keep Gulf War Alive and Deadly
The shadow of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991 still looms over the Gulf emirate.
The Israeli military has said that it has planted landmines along parts of the Gaza-Israel fence to prevent further infiltrations of the Palestinian armed group Hamas following its attack on southern Israel on October 7.
But laying mines has far-reaching consequences — especially for civilians — long after conflicts have ended.
More than three decades after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991 by 100,000 Iraqi soldiers under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, landmines and unexploded military ammunition still kill and injure civilians, some of whom were born after the end of the Gulf War.
While a United States-led international air and ground military operation defeated Iraqi troops in 43 days and forced them to retreat from Kuwait on February 28, 1991, it is estimated that Iraqi soldiers laid about two million landmines in Kuwait’s deserts, coastlines and cities, and abandoned large quantities of unexploded ordnance.
In the years that followed the end of the war, mine clearance operations took place in Kuwait and removed an estimated 1.65 million mines. Yet, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimates that the country’s desert areas “remain contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance” and that the remaining 350,000 landmines are “yet to be located”. UNMAS did not respond to a request for an interview.
“I came to Kuwait because my dream is to travel the world, but instead I ended up in a desolate desert with landmines. On top of that, snakes and scorpions get into the tent where I live”, said Sunil Kumar. The 24-year-old Indian shepherd looks after a flock of sheep in the desert areas bordering a road linking Kuwait to Iraq, dubbed the “Highway of Death” since Operation Desert Storm’s forces bombed retreating Iraqi army units there in February 1991.
“My biggest fear is that if something happens to me, my body will likely not be repatriated to India. That is what happens to us, the poor people,” Kumar, 24, told Al Jazeera. Migrant workers who account for about 96 percent of Kuwait’s private sector workforce, face widespread labour rights abuses, including delayed or unpaid wages and long working hours. “It is my destiny to be here, so may God protect me,” added his co-worker, Younus Ali, a 30-year-old Bangladeshi shepherd who has been working in Kuwait’s desert for seven years.
Kuwait is not alone. Globally, landmine contaminations affect nearly 70 countries and kill or injure 10 to 15 people each day, more than half of them children. ‘Communities that live close to a minefield live in fear. They are scared at any moment of explosion or any hazard against their children or livestocks,’ said Mohammed Zorab, weapon contamination coordinator at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Iraq.
Zorab told Al Jazeera that ICRC’s three recommendations when civilians discover landmines is ‘do not approach, do not touch and inform local authorities’. In Failaka Island, about 25km (15 miles) off the shores of Kuwait’s capital, war remains including tanks (pictured) and armored vehicles have been turned into an attraction for visitors. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Many shepherds posted in the deserts to look after sheep, goats and camels are unaware of looming risks. ‘I am not aware that there was a war here. Who fought against who?’ asked Munian, 50. The Indian shepherd who does not wish to mention his family name flew from south India’s Chennai to Kuwait eight months ago to look after a herd of camels for 80 Kuwaiti dinars ($260) a month.
The father of three plans to keep on working in Kuwait’s desert for the next three years to pay for his eldest daughter’s dowry, a practice illegal since 1961 but that remains widespread in India. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
‘Once my Kuwaiti employer walked beside me in the desert and warned me to stay away from a metal object nearby. It is a landmine, he told me,’ said Hassan Ahmad (pictured). The Sudanese shepherd, 31, has been living for four years without air conditioning in a desert area where the temperature often soars past 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer. ‘I am strong, I am not scared,’ he told Al Jazeera. Despite the risks, and living conditions near the limits of human survival in summer, Ahmad said Kuwait is ‘safer’ than Sudan where a civil war between Sudan’s armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023 has left more than 9,000 civilians dead and 5.6 million displaced. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Several high-ranking Kuwait Army officers in service in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity that verifications for landmines are conducted prior to any work at major construction sites. Yet, they acknowledged that additional mine clearance is still required. ‘As a country, we have to claim that it is all safe. But the reality is that we still need to be cautious because we do not have the resources to check every square meter of desert… We have done our best, what more can we do?’ a source said. Kuwait’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comments. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Operations are ongoing to verify that no unexploded ordnances or landmines are left where oil exploration will take place. The oil industry accounts for more than 90 percent of Kuwait’s government revenues. Over six years of operations in Kuwait (2006-2007 and 2014-2019), The Development Initiative (TDI), a Bermuda-based landmine clearance company, found five landmines, three of which inactive. The contract to verify oil lands is now handled by SafeLane, a British landmine clearance company. ‘What we did find a lot of was unexploded ordnance, particularly cluster munitions.
That was a far bigger threat,’ said Stephen Saffin, regional operations manager for TDI’s Kuwait project at the time. Yet Saffin told Al Jazeera: ‘We are not talking vast sums of contamination here. It is not as if there are landmines in every single corner […] Minefields were largely cleared in the 1990s, it was a monumental effort. Still, the standard of mine clearance was not particularly high at the time, and sand movements or rain can bury them deeper.’ [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Away from Kuwait’s core economic interests, uncertainty still prevails. ‘I am afraid of going deep into the desert. It is better to stay on the road, because only God knows what can happen there… Only God knows why the Iraqis mined my country,’ said Abu Mohsen, 57, a stateless Bidoon. Kuwait bars this community from obtaining citizenship and subjects its roughly 100,000 members to ‘systematic’ discrimination according to human rights group Amnesty International.
A group of Kuwaitis camping in the al-Salmi desert shouts: ‘It is like in the 1990s!’ as three US military helicopters fly over (pictured). Approximately 13,500 American soldiers are based in the Gulf emirate. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
‘The Iraqi army took over this desert back then, but there will always be people living here after they are gone, and they will explode on their mines, and that is unfair. The army knows where the mines are, but we do not know. Humanity always ends up paying the price of wars,’ Sunil Kumar (left) said. The US Army Central EOD officer in Kuwait told Al Jazeera in a statement that ‘there is currently no effort of cleaning up remnants of the Gulf War’. Kuwait is dealing with ‘the final drag’, Saffin added. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Although migrant workers toiling as shepherds bear the brunt of the presence of landmines, Kuwaiti citizens are not spared. In 2017, a Kuwaiti man was killed by a landmine in the western part of the country. In winter, desert areas morph into a playground for dozens of thousands of Kuwaitis who set up mobile homes there to enjoy the annual camping season (like Abdalrahman Nahar Al Matrefi, 29, pictured).
For others, like Abu Nawaf Alajeel, 65, the desert is a hot spot for truffle-hunting. The fungi grows in Kuwait’s deserts after winter rains. ‘When the Iraqis mined my desert where I have precious childhood memories, it affected me psychologically because I am so attached to it. There were landmines all around, so we had to stop going for truffle hunting at that time,’ Alajeel told Al Jazeera, noting that most truffle spots are now cleared from landmines. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Landmines injuries are often the result of a lack of awareness and knowledge about what the explosives look like. ‘One day we were in al-Mutlaa’s desert and some sheep dug up what we thought was metal rubbish. One of my cousins took it and threw it away, without knowing it was a landmine. We were so lucky that it did not detonate. God gave us an extended life that day,’ said Mohammed al-Ajmi (on his phone in the picture), a member of Kuwait’s national guard who loves camping in the al-Salmi desert each winter.
The explosion of landmines killed one of al-Ajmi’s cousins and injured one of his uncles. He told Al Jazeera: ‘Each accident reopens the wounds of the Gulf War. It reemerges, and it is painful.” including the fate of hundreds of Kuwaitis abducted by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Gulf War and whose whereabouts remain unknown to date. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Ali Aasad has turned his Gulf War’s wounds into a life motto: ‘I know I will go to heaven, because I did my time in hell.’ The Kuwaiti firefighter, now aged 66 (pictured), was part of the Kuwait Wild Well Killers team that extinguished 41 of the more than 700 oil wells ignited by Iraqi forces as they retreated from Kuwait. While doing so, Aasad battled to stay at a safe distance from landmines. He told Al Jazeera: ‘It was the apocalypse. There were landmines everywhere ! Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams will go ahead and clear 8 meters-wide roads for us to access the burning oil wells.’ [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Landmines injuries are often the result of a lack of awareness and knowledge about what the explosives look like. ‘One day we were in al-Mutlaa’s desert and some sheep dug up what we thought was metal rubbish. One of my cousins took it and threw it away, without knowing it was a landmine. We were so lucky that it did not detonate. God gave us an extended life that day,’ said Mohammed al-Ajmi (on his phone in the picture), a member of Kuwait’s national guard who loves camping in the al-Salmi desert each winter.
The explosion of landmines killed one of al-Ajmi’s cousins and injured one of his uncles. He told Al Jazeera: ‘Each accident reopens the wounds of the Gulf War. It reemerges, and it is painful.” including the fate of hundreds of Kuwaitis abducted by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Gulf War and whose whereabouts remain unknown to date. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Ali Aasad has turned his Gulf War’s wounds into a life motto: ‘I know I will go to heaven, because I did my time in hell.’ The Kuwaiti firefighter, now aged 66 (pictured), was part of the Kuwait Wild Well Killers team that extinguished 41 of the more than 700 oil wells ignited by Iraqi forces as they retreated from Kuwait. While doing so, Aasad battled to stay at a safe distance from landmines. He told Al Jazeera: ‘It was the apocalypse. There were landmines everywhere ! Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams will go ahead and clear 8 meters-wide roads for us to access the burning oil wells.’ [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
For most Kuwaitis, memories of the Iraqi invasion have faded. Traces of the conflict are barely visible in Kuwait, with the exception of a few places, like the Al-Qurain Martyrs Museum (pictured) that commemorates one of the battles. ‘The issue of landmines and unexploded ordnances is also dying down slowly because most landmines and unexploded ordnances are now buried deep underground, so they will probably not explode even if you walk over it,’ Mohammed al-Ajmi said. Therefore, dozens of thousands of unexploded landmines will likely never get located and destroyed. According to Saffin from TDI: ‘It is not impossible to clear every single landmine, but that means you have to dig up the entire desert… And even so, there is always the risk that one or two are going to be missed. Mine action is just not an exact science.’ [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
In Kabd, a farm house area in the southern outskirts of Kuwait’s capital city where the explosion of a landmine injured an eight-year-old child in 2017, a group of Kuwaiti men gather to attend a cultural event. Amid joyful songs and dances that celebrate Kuwaiti traditions predating oil discoveries, the Iraqi invasion is a distant memory that once imperiled the country’s oil-fuelled economic development. Aasad, the firefighter, remembers: ‘The next generations’ only income was being burnt.’ [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
The next threat facing Kuwait’s population is likely to come from the atmosphere, not from the ground, in the form of climate change. It costs between $3 and $75 to produce a landmine and between $300 and $1,000 to clear it, according to UNMAS estimates, but the cost for Kuwait of coping with climate change will be higher. If global temperatures rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius (36.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2070, the emirate will have more than 80 percent of its population exposed to extreme heat, mainly migrant workers, without whom the country’s economy would come to a standstill. Even a 1.5C global warming, in line with the Paris Agreement, would cost Kuwait 1 percent of all working hours lost to heat stress by 2030, International Labour Organization projections showed. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Source: Al Jazeera
