This is a popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to Wim Zwegenberg.

He works for Pax for Peace and he concentrates on conflict and the environment specifically

trying to work out via field visits and research,

how to protect the environment when war is all around infecting people, destroying things

and making things a lot harder for people to live.

As usual if you like what we're doing here at Popular Front please do consider

supporting us on the Patreon that that's patreon dot com slash popular front or there are other

ways you can go to popular front dot co slash support please excuse voice, I'm unwell and sound like I've been smoking correct but I haven't.

I think the best thing maybe you can describe what it is you actually do.

So I work for a Dutch peace organization called PECS and the work we do is focus on peace building and conflict resolution.

And around 10 years ago, our partners in Iraq, we work with a lot of local partners in over 15 different conflict areas.

They were raising concerns over the pollution caused by the war and the potential impact it

had on their health.

In particular, the plea geraniumitions that were used by the US.

So we started looking into that and traveling to southern Iraq and doing field research.

Because there's a lot of different kind of sources of information on this topic,

especially around the EU.

They're like activists claiming it causes like a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East and the other side

there's the US government saying there's no problem at all. So we were trying to

find out like what is the issue here and in the course of our work our field

work in southern Iraq we talk with Iraqi ministries,

...