Kurdish analyst faults 1991 Kurdistan Front talks for failing to secure Iraqi mine maps

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Kurdish analyst Aryan Ibrahim Shewkat has argued that negotiators representing Kurdish forces in 1991 talks with Saddam Hussein’s government in Baghdad failed to request maps documenting mines laid across Kurdistan, a gap that continues to cost lives in rural areas 35 years later. Writing on the eve of the anniversary of those negotiations, Shewkat contrasted the Kurdish approach with the Safwan Tent Agreement signed in 1991, under which the Kuwaiti delegation secured maps of land and sea mines planted by Iraqi forces as the agreement’s first item. He said Kuwaiti territory was subsequently cleared, while rural Kurdistan, where millions of mines were laid during the Iran-Iraq War and later campaigns against Peshmerga forces, remained uncharted. Shewkat said farmers, herders and children in Kurdistan’s countryside continue to fall victim to those mines because no documentation of the minefields was ever obtained. He criticized the negotiation teams for acting on revolutionary enthusiasm rather than state-level reasoning and for lacking technocratic support. The analyst also linked the issue to wider institutional weaknesses in the Kurdistan Region, including a personnel system based on personal and party loyalties rather than long-term state building. He rejected the argument that Baghdad would have refused such a request, calling it incompatible with standard military documentation logic.