SAID JABAR, Iraq — Sadiqa Foroon has lost two brothers, her right foot and 32 sheep to landmines and other explosive remnants of the three wars that have raged through her village since 1980.
Burns from the mine she stepped on contort the right side of her face. "And my horse is missing a hoof," she said with a weary laugh. "So is my donkey."
Still, every morning she trudges back into the sun-scorched scrubland behind her house — one of the most densely contaminated minefields on the planet, according to international aid organizations — to collect firewood in order to cook for 12 children, and to harvest whatever scrap metal she thinks she can sell.
That scrap trade, and the fear that desperate villagers are selling harvested explosives to Iraq's many insurgents, prompted the Ministry of Defense to halt all mine-clearing operations last December.
International relief organizations and Iraq's Environment Ministry opposed the ban, saying it delays desperately needed cleanup work in perhaps the most mine-ridden country in the world.
Some critics even accuse the Defense Ministry of exploiting the trafficking concerns to win control of the millions in foreign aid that's coming into the country to help clear mines.
"You know how much corruption we have in Iraq," said Alaa Abul Majeed, who runs a government-licensed de-mining company in Basra, in southern Iraq. His funding, about $9 million for the next four years, comes from the United Nations Development Program. "The security services think we have a lot of money from foreigners, and they think they can get some."
Ministry of Defense spokesman Muhammad al Askari, the only Defense Ministry official authorized to speak to the news media, didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.
As the bureaucrats in Baghdad wrestle over turf and treasure, villagers are left to pay the price, local officials said. They estimate that one Iraqi loses a limb, or his or her life, to unexploded ordnance each day.
Most of the casualties go unreported, however, and untreated by the failing national health system, because they occur in far-flung villages in Kurdistan, along the Iranian border and especially in the southern province of Basra, where U.S. forces began the 2003 invasion.
The U.N. estimates that during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, American planes dropped 54 million "cluster bombs," small, grenade-like explosives scattered from a single shell. Most fell in southern and central Iraq.
Deputy Environment Minister Kamal Latif said that an estimated 16 percent of those cluster bombs — more than 8 million — failed to explode and now litter the ground. They rest on top of 25 million landmines that the late dictator Saddam Hussein planted during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s and before the Gulf War and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Perhaps no village is more tormented by remnants of the wars than is Said Jabar, a 20-minute drive east of Basra. Once it was a riverside oasis dense with palm trees, but fierce shelling during the Iran war cut down the orchards. Mines also make the land too dangerous to irrigate, leaving it barren except for the explosives.
More than 400 of the 2,500 residents have lost limbs or been killed by mines, said Ayad al Kanan, the sheik of one of the largest tribes in the area. "There is not a single house that has not been affected," he said.
People who lose limbs have little hope of finding jobs or getting married, so they're deemed expendable, and relatives often send them back into the minefields to forage for firewood or metal scrap, Kanan said. "Multiple injuries are not uncommon," he said.
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