SULAYMANIYA, IRAQ – A bright blue games console, identical to ones found in living rooms across Britain, sits on a table in northern Iraq. It looks innocuous – until you get closer.
This was once a child’s toy, but it is now a deadly bomb, rigged up by Isis to kill anyone who plays with it.
Sink taps, bags of rice and bottles of oil – all are items Isis transformed into explosives to target innocent civilians or unsuspecting soldiers during their reign of terror in Iraq and Syria.
Many were believed to have been made by children, used by Isis in bomb building because they have smaller hands. Some of these children were likely villagers who were unable to flee the occupation.
A decade after their rise to power shocked the world, i travelled to the former Isis heartlands of northern Iraq to discover the inside story of their bloody occupation from those who lived through it – and the ongoing impact still felt today.
It comes as the group claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack in Moscow which killed at least 137 people, showing once again the global reach of its deadly ideology.
Off a dusty road in Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish city close to the border with Iran, is a Mines Advisory Group (MAG) base which trains civilians to find and defuse explosives.
The base houses a range of real improvised explosive devices (IEDs) left by Isis across Iraq and Syria during their occupations between 2014 and 2017.
Iraq is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, with decades of conflict leaving the land littered with unexploded devices.
But these Isis bombs were altogether different – and aimed at women and children.
“Military devices are normally located outside the cities, outside the population. But what happened since 2014, after Isis left, was that they left behind IEDs. The dangers of IEDs are much more than the commercial or military ones, because there is no specific shape or size or make,” technical instructor Chnur Ezzet said.
“[Isis] used whatever they found, as a component, a switch, a power source. They put items… seen to be attractive to kids or adults, or some items which are valuable for them, there as a boobytrap.”
Here, the target wasn’t “military or strategic, it was there for everybody”, Ms Ezzet said.
“Most of the time, children and women became a victim. I’m a mother, and I feel terrible that these types of things may affect kids. I saw one kid in primary school who lost her legs, who lost her eyes. She destroyed her full body with one of these items. When [civilians] returned, they thought they returned to… a safe home, but they found the house was booby-trapped, full of items.”
On the other side of the base is a single storey white house, akin to thousands of family homes across Iraq.
But this house is far from ordinary. Inside, it has been rigged up with replicas of real Isis devices found by MAG teams in homes, schools and healthcare facilities across the region, in order train bomb disposal experts.
From tripwire, as thin and clear as fishing wire, stretched over the front step, to a movement sensor hidden in a concrete block on the patio, impossible to view until it has already triggered a blast, the house recreates Isis’s dark methods of killing civilians as they returned home.
Behind each door is another example of what would have been one of Isis’s sadistic tricks. In the bedroom, curtains, the bed, and even a pair of shoes are all rigged up to dummy explosives, which sound screeching alarms if triggered.
A large gun, staged to be desirable to advancing military forces, is strapped with an mock bomb.
And in the kitchen doorway, a trigger is hidden under the flooring – invisible except to a metal detector. Once inside, lifting a pot left full of food will trigger an anti-lift device on its base.
“Nothing is safe,” said Mohamed Fatih, national training manager at the base.
“Everything should be pulled out and dealt with. We have a hook and a line; you tie it on to something and pull everything to a safe area.
“It can take three or four days to clear one house. If it’s bigger, 10 days or 15 days. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, the most important thing is for the teams to be safe and those who return to their house to know they’re safe.”
But some have been lured into a false sense of security.
“In one case, the house has been cleared by a company, so the family returned back,” said Mr Fatih. “They turned the electricity on, it triggered and the house collapsed. The whole family was dead.”
Karl Greenwood has worked with MAG since 2016. He has cleared 23 schools in Syria alone, some with up to 30 mines.
In many cases, Isis had warned villagers not to use the schools – but some of the bombs had killed children playing there or soldiers hoping to use them as a base.
“In one particular school outside a refugee camp, three children had gone in and picked up a bucket which was once a tile. The device was underneath the bucket. They were killed. We went in, there was another device on the other side of the school, exactly the same set up,” he said.
“They were all homemade bombs. 95 per cent of everything we picked up was improvised. Occasionally we’d find TM62 mines, anti-tank mines… conventional mines, but even those were adapted so they were on a different switch or something else. Nothing was conventional, as you’d expect to see it, when Isis put it in the ground.”
The mines were built to last. Some of the batteries in explosives Mr Greenwood found had been in the ground for four years and still had full power.
“Like any mine, [they were designed] to disrupt, to kill, to defend, to attack. [Isis] weren’t stupid in what they did and the way they placed them. They were important, and the long-term effect is still there now, ten years on.”
