Boston.com / News / Rebuilding Iraq

CHAMCHAMAL, IRAQ

BBC cameraman killed by land mine

By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 4/3/2003

etreating Iraqi troops laced the ridges and roads in northern Iraq with lethal land mines. A cameraman for the British Broadcasting Corp. was killed by one of them yesterday, and a producer was injured. Kaveh Golestan, 52, an Iranian freelance cameraman, was respected by colleagues for his insightful work in the Iranian Revolution and for his intrepid documentation of Saddam Hussein's horrific use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages in 1988.

The BBC team had been traveling near the Kurdish village of Kifrey, which had been undergoing artillery shelling by Iraqi soldiers.

Golestan stepped on a mine as he climbed out of the four-wheel-drive vehicle the team was using. He was killed instantly. He leaves behind his wife and their 19-year-old son.

Producer Stuart Hughes, 31, was injured in the foot by the explosion. BBC correspondent Jim Muir and their translator were not injured, the BBC said. Hughes was being treated in a nearby US military medical facility.

All along the ridge line from which the Iraqi troops withdrew last week, there was evidence of land mines, some of them visible and barely covered with earth, others hidden deeper beneath the ground. The roads were sabotaged with antitank mines.

Yesterday, a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a British nongovernmental organization, was carrying out the dangerous and painstaking work of clearing these mines on the road that leads to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Adnan Khourshid, a Kurdish supervisor of the MAG project here, said two teams of 12 were working the area and that scores more sappers would begin clearing mines in the coming days.

He estimated that there are tens of thousands of land mines along the front line that stretches some 300 miles from Iran to Syria, and that it would take many years to clear them all.

Khourshid said that the effort was an "emergency" response to clear the road so Kurdish and US special forces troops could more safely shore up positions on the heels of the withdrawing Iraqi troops.

They were using metal detectors to locate the mines and marking them with small red flags before delicately removing them with special digging tools.

Khourshid, who is from Kirkuk and whose family is among the tens of thousands of Kurds who fled the city, said that he sees his job as part of the broader Kurdish effort to reclaim northern Iraq from Hussein's regime.

"It is my pleasure to do this work," he said, wearing a heavy Kevlar vest to protect him in the dangerous work. "Whatever will get us to Kirkuk, we will do."