Demining at the foot of Mount Sinjar
Sinjar, Iraq, December 2015. Major Adel Sleman poured more sweet tea into a small glass. It was cold outside the half-built shed we were sitting in, and we inched closer to the jet-black stove. Kurdish men stood next to small mattresses they had arranged on top of cinder blocks around the stove. Each man seemed to have a different style of camouflage. The pot-bellied major with his loose-fitting fatigues looked dressed ready to blend into a jungle. His colleague Major Hussein Yusuf wore forest green. Even though it was cold, the two men didn’t put on coats. ‘I’ve spent 19 years working in demining,’ said Sleman. Born in 1963 in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, he had been a Peshmerga, or Kurdish soldier, since the 1990s.
