At least 80 civilians, including 12 children, have been killed by landmines and other explosive debris of war in the month since the Syrian strongman Bashar Al-Assad was toppled on December 8 last year.
The world’s largest landmine clearance charity, The HALO Trust, called for a major funding uplift to train more deminers to prevent “these unnecessary and tragic deaths”
Mouiad Alnofaly, HALO’s Operations Manager in Syria, said:
“Syria’s war has left a deadly legacy which will kill and maim for generations to come. Millions have been made homeless. I myself was exiled and did not see my family for many years.
HALO knows how to stop these bombs and landmines from exploding, making it safe for loved ones to be re-united and start rebuilding a shattered economy.
But safe demining costs money. We estimate that a demining and explosive ordnance disposal operation of $40m per year would save thousands of lives and help Syria to become a middle-income country once again. It’s not a huge price to pay for such a prize.”
The figures for the number of dead from the debris of war, from the widely respected Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, broadly reflect the experience of HALO’s demining teams on the ground in Syria.
The numbers include real-life stories of two children killed while picking olives in the northwestern province of Idlib and a war-displaced family of three who were all killed by a landmine when they returned to check the state of their home.
The numbers of civilians confirmed killed in the past month is certainly an underestimate because of under-reporting and accidents taking place in remote areas. The number of life-changing injuries caused by landmines is also certain to be more than the number of deaths.
With funding for only forty deminers on the ground, The HALO Trust is overwhelmed with calls to its emergency call-out number, as Syrian families beg for assistance in removing dangerous explosives.
The HALO Trust is the world’s largest landmine clearance charity. It was made famous in 1997 when Princess Diana visited a minefield it was clearing in Angola. HALO employs some 12,000 deminers around the world. It has large programmes in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Cambodia, and also works in dozens of other countries.
The organisation is well practised at providing a rapid response to unforeseen events: in 2022 it expanded its operations in Ukraine from 400 deminers in the Donbas region in the southeast to over 1,500 deminers across the entire country after it received a massive uplift in funding from governments, corporations and philanthropists.
