An international effort to remove millions of cluster munitions, landmines and unexploded munitions is urgently needed to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of returning Syrians and pave the way to sustainable peace, the global landmine clearance charity, The HALO Trust said today.
Damian O’Brien, HALO Syria Program Manager who has decades of experience working in war zones, warned:
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Tens of thousands of people are passing through heavily mined areas on a daily basis causing unnecessary fatal accidents. The fighting forces have melted away from the front lines, leaving vast areas littered with explosives.
Returning Syrians simply don’t know where the landmines are lying in wait. They are scattered across fields, villages and towns, so people are horribly vulnerable. But with funding for only forty deminers, HALO is desperately understaffed. We urgently need emergency funding to help bring the Syrian people home to safety. Clearing the debris of war is fundamental to getting the country back on its feet.”
This heat map is HALO’s best estimate of the likely hotspots for deadly landmines and other explosive ordnance across Syria.
Swathes of Syria are covered with cluster munitions, missiles, landmines, grenades and other deadly explosive ordnance, following 14 years of protracted civil war. For the last four years Syria has had more victims of landmines and explosive debris than any other country and is ranked as one of the most dangerous places in the world. To date, there has been no nationwide survey of the front lines and locations of minefields.
HALO is operating an emergency hotline in the northwest of the country, near the border with Turkey, where people can report finding discarded landmines and other suspicious explosive objects that might kill or maim them. Emergency HALO demining experts then neutralize the items.
Mouiad Alnofoly, HALO Syria Operations Manager, said:
“In the past week, as people have tried returning to their homes and farmland, we have had a ten-fold increase in calls to the hotline. The phone is ringing non-stop.
Some of the callers are refugees coming back to Syria. Others are people who were displaced inside the country and are now making their way back home. But they’re all in mortal danger if they take the wrong pathway. None of them know where the landmines are hidden.”
O’Brien and Alnofoly said their immediate priorities were to offer advice about the risks of landmines to aid agencies helping war-displaced people - and then to start the work of clearing the explosives.
“The HALO Trust has over 35 years’ experience making landmines and other explosives safe. The challenge in Syria is the sheer size of the problem. We could easily employ 100 deminers right now, just in the area where we have already been working for the past few years. To cover the whole country, there will have to be thousands of Syrians trained and employed by HALO over many years,” O’Brien said.
The HALO Trust said that it will begin a digital landmine safety education program using as many social media platforms as possible.
