China training Afghans, Iraqis in mine clearance

BEIJING — China’s army is training Iraqi and Afghan soldiers to clear land mines, a sign of Beijing’s desire to expand engagement with the two countries despite wariness over the presence of U.S. forces.

The two-month course is the first known instance of China offering such training to troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are home to close to 200,000 U.S. troops.

Twenty officers from each country are being hosted by a People’s Liberation Army academy in the eastern city of Nanjing, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. On graduation, they will return to their home countries with large amounts of mine detection and clearing equipment donated by China, Xinhua said.

The Defense Ministry did not reply to faxed questions and no telephone numbers were listed for the PLA’s University of Science and Technology where the course was taking place.

Afghanistan remains heavily mined from the anti-Soviet guerrilla war and the internal conflict and U.S. invasion that followed. The devices kill and wound scores of people every year.

Large stretches of Iraq’s borders still contain mine fields left over from the 1980s war against Iran, the 1991 invasion of Kuwait and the 2003 U.S. invasion. In addition, improvised explosive devices made from mines and other ordnance are a major killer of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians.

China opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and has remained aloof from multinational military operations to stabilize Afghanistan and combat a resurgent Taliban. Beijing is especially unhappy with the presence of American forces in Afghanistan, with which it shares a narrow border.

Beijing has pursued strong bilateral ties with Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan is the source of 95 percent of the world’s heroin, and abuts China’s volatile Xinjiang region where cheap Afghan heroin has fueled high levels of drug addiction. Chinese authorities also say radicals among the region’s Uighur Muslim minority have trained in Taliban camps in Afghanistan.

Beijing’s policy has been to promote Afghan stability through economic means and China was quick to offer aid following the 2001 fall of the Taliban regime. The U.S. has praised China’s work on road building and fiber optic cable installation in Afghanistan along with a Chinese firm’s plans to develop copper deposits that could create 10,000 jobs and annual revenues of $400 million for the Afghan government.

In Iraq, China’s state petroleum companies are developing oil fields on which the government in Baghdad relies almost entirely for its revenues.

Gestures such as the de-mining training are a way to further build bridges and the course “showed the positive attitude of the Chinese government to assist the two countries’ economic recovery and social reconstruction,” Xinhua said.