A Landmine Survivor's Resilience, in "Carpenter"
CISR
This headline is brought to you by the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery (CISR) which works to support resilience and recovery in global communities affected by war and conflict.
(New Yorker) When the Iran-Iraq War ended, in 1988, after eight years of combat, the conflict had killed hundreds of thousands of people, and left more than a million injured or disabled. During the fighting, land mines were planted in the hills and fields of the border regions—today, unexploded mines dating from the war still endanger civilians and clean-up personnel. In 2017, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor found that landmines in Iran had injured seven thousand people and killed around three thousand more since the end of the war. Millions more of the explosives remain hidden in the landscape. In rural communities, individuals who are disabled from mine explosions can find themselves socially isolated when they are unable to access adequate care or economic opportunity.
The Kurdish filmmaker Khalil Sahragard grew up in Sheykh Sharbati, Iran, familiar with the reverberations of the war. Several years ago, he began to think about something “unusual” that he’d seen in a park. A friend and distant relative named Hossein Mahmoudi, a carpenter who had lost his leg in a mine explosion after the war, had a prosthetic leg made out of wood…