ALMATY. Sept 26 (Interfax-Kazakhstan) - An engineering unit from the Kazakh peacekeeping force in Iraq has found and defused around 30,000 artillery shells.
"Our peacekeepers are working at full capacity and are in good spirits," General Mukhtar Altynbayev, Kazakhstan's defense minister, told the press in Almaty on Friday.
The peacekeepers are in Iraq "to help, not to fight," he said. People ask them to dispose of ammunition that remains from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, as well as from the recent U.S.- led campaign, he said.
The Kazakh engineering unit has been based in an area not far from Baghdad and the Iranian border since late August.