His face wet with sweat beneath his anti-blast visor, Sabah Mustapha carefully scrapes away yet another small slice of the steep hillside.

Despite being high in the Kurdish mountains of Iraq, it's still over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). As if the heat and the hard physical labour weren't enough, Sabah's already overheated torso also has to cope with the extra burden of his body armour. Not that he would ever dream of working without it; in his years of clearing mines, he has seen their devastating effects on the human body.

Sabah is a deminer working for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British charity that specialises in anti-landmine operations throughout the world. MAG has been working here in the Kurdistan region of Iraq for almost 15 years now and Sabah has been doing this for almost as long.

There are 10 deminers on Sabah's team and each of them spends 40 minutes an hour down on his knees, prodding and scraping away the dry, stony earth, hoping to uncover the mines hidden beneath. The job is repetitive and boring but no deminer can afford to switch off for a second - after all, any mistake could well be his last.

After working for 40 minutes under the baking sun, the whistle blows. All of the deminers stop work and follow the previously cleared safe lanes out of the minefield and into the shaded rest area for a well-earned break and a lot of cold water. If the heat gets really extreme - as if 40 degrees isn't extreme enough - the deminers will work for shorter periods and get longer breaks.

When most people think about mine clearance, they conjure up images of men in protective clothing sweeping the ground in front of them with electronic detectors. This is usually the case.

But here in the village of Darband, close to the Iraqi-Iranian border, there was so much fighting that every square metre of ground is contaminated with bits of metal from bombs, mines and grenades. The detectors are useless in such a metal-heavy environment.

The only way to clear this minefield is to painstakingly scrape away every square inch of ground - from one end to the other.

The work is slow but effective. It's taken over a year to clear this hillside but we are finally going to be finished in the next two or three weeks. What an achievement that will be. The deminers feel that the end is near and it's quite a job to keep them moving slowly and steadily.

Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, 17 local villagers have lost their lives in the minefields surrounding this village. One thing is for certain: once this minefield is finished, the local people know they can use this side of the valley with impunity.

It's a shame that the same cannot be said for all of the other hills and valleys around Darband. The Iraqi army planted minefields all over the place to stop the Iranians from infiltrating through the mountains during the war. They even planted mines among the graves in the small village graveyard - which have since been removed, thanks to the work of Sabah and his colleagues.

Once the team has finished working here, they won't have too far to look for their next task. Standing with my back to the minefield - and carefully balancing myself on the steep slope - I look across the valley and see a line of red-painted triangles mounted on posts.

Although they are just too far away to let me see the details, the familiar shape tells me that each red triangle carries the white skull and crossbones symbolising a minefield.

Judging by the distance the minefield markers snake along the hillside, Sabah and his colleagues have enough work to keep them here for well into the foreseeable future.

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