Explosive remnants of Syrian civil war pose a daunting challenge

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An EOD team deals with a Russian-made 220mm Uragan thermobaric_rocket rocket found at a site in Luf village, Saraqib district of Idlib governorate in Syria. (The HALO Trust photo)
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Updated 03 February 2025
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Explosive remnants of Syrian civil war pose a daunting challenge

  • Unexploded ordnance and landmines threaten civilians, with children most at risk of death or injury
  • As displaced Syrians return, accidents are expected to rise due to inadequate clearance, experts warn

LONDON: The sudden fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in early December prompted around 200,000 Syrians to return to their war-ravaged homeland, despite the widespread devastation. But the land they have come to reclaim harbors a deadly threat.

Almost 14 years of civil war contaminated swathes of the Syrian Arab Republic with roughly 324,600 unexploded rockets and bombs and thousands of landmines, according to a 2023 estimate by the US-based Carter Center.

In the last four years alone, the Syrian Arab Republic has recorded more casualties resulting from unexploded ordnance than any other country, yet no nationwide survey of minefields or former battlefields has been conducted, according to The HALO Trust.

Those explosives have maimed or killed at least 350 civilians across the Syrian Arab Republic since the Assad regime fell on Dec. 8, Paul McCann, a spokesperson for the Scotland-based landmine awareness and clearance charity, told Arab News.

The actual toll, however, is likely much higher. “We think that’s an undercount because large areas of the country have no access or monitoring, particularly in the east,” he added.

Children bear the brunt of these hidden killers.

Ted Chaiban, deputy executive director for humanitarian action and supply operations at the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, warned that explosive debris is the leading cause of child casualties in Syria, killing or injuring at least 116 in December alone.

According to McCann, the bulk of the documented incidents involving landmines and unexploded ordnance took place in Idlib province, north of Aleppo, and Deir Ezzor, where intense battles between regime forces and opposition groups had occurred.

“There is a long frontline — maybe several hundred kilometers — running through parts of Latakia, Idlib, and up to north of Aleppo, where the government was on one side, and they built large earthen barriers,” he said.

“They used bulldozers to push up big walls and dig trenches, and in front of their military positions they put a lot of minefields.”

McCann said the exact number of landmines, across the Syrian Arab Republic and in the northwest specifically, remains unknown. “We don’t know exactly how many, because there hasn’t been a national survey,” he said.

After the regime’s forces withdrew from these areas, locals discovered maps detailing the location of dozens of minefields. Although it will take time and resources to clear these explosives, such maps make containment far easier.

“There was a battalion command post, and when the troops left, local residents went in and found some maps of local minefields,” McCann said. “So, for that one area, we’ve discovered there were 40 minefields, but this could be repeated up and down this line for all the different military positions.”

Landmines planted systemically by warring parties are not the only threat. HALO reported “huge amounts of explosive contamination anywhere that there might have been a battle or been any kind of fighting.”

One such area is Saraqib, east of Idlib. The northwestern city endured a major battle in 2013, fell to rebel forces, was recaptured by the Syrian Army in 2020, and was then seized during the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham-led offensive on Nov. 30.

“The city was fought over by the government and multiple different opposition groups, who sometimes fought each other,” McCann said. “And in a big spread south of there, there are dozens of villages that we’ve been through which are contaminated with explosives.”

The Carter Center warned in a report published in February 2024 that the “scale of the problem is so large that there is no way any single actor can address it.”

Since Assad’s ouster, HALO has seen a 10-fold surge in calls to its emergency hotline in areas near the Turkish border where it operates.

“Every time our teams dispose of a piece of ordnance… people hear the explosion and they come running to say, ‘I found something in my house’ or ‘I found something on my land, can you come and have a look? Can you come and take care of that?” McCann said.

“We are hoping to be able to increase the size of the program as quickly as possible to deal with the demand.”

As the only mine clearance operator in northwest Syria, HALO is struggling to keep up with surging demand. With funding for only 40 deminers, the organization is desperately understaffed, HALO’s Syrian Arab Republic program manager Damian O’Brien said in a statement. 

HALO urgently needs emergency funding “to help bring the Syrian people home to safety,” he said. “Clearing the debris of war is fundamental to getting the country back on its feet,” he added.

The urgency of clearing unexploded ordnance in Syria has grown as displaced communities, often unaware of those hidden dangers, rush to return home and rebuild their lives.

“One of the problems we’re finding is the people are coming back now,” McCann said. “They want to plant the land for spring. They want to start getting the land ready because they’re going to need the income to rebuild.

“Millions of homes have been either destroyed by fighting, or they’ve been destroyed by the regime that stripped out the windows and the doors and the roofs and the copper pipes and the wiring to sell for scrap.”

The war in the Syrian Arab Republic created one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with more than 13 million forcibly displaced, according to UN figures. With Assad’s fall, hundreds of thousands returned from internal displacement and neighboring countries.

And as host countries, including Turkiye, Lebanon and Jordan, push to repatriate Syrian refugees, UNICEF’s Chaiban warned in January that “safe return cannot be achieved without intensified humanitarian demining efforts.”

HALO’s O’Brien warned in December that “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.”

He added: “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.”

Unless addressed, these hidden killers will impact multiple generations of Syrians, causing the loss of countless lives and limbs long after the conflict has ended, the Carter Center warned.

Economic development will also be disrupted, particularly in urban reconstruction and agriculture. Environmental degradation is another concern. As munitions break down, they leach chemicals into the soil and groundwater.

But safely demining an area is costly and securing adequate funding has been a challenge. Mouiad Alnofaly, HALO’s senior operations officer in the Syrian Arab Republic, said disposal operations could cost $40 million per year.




Remnants from a ShOAB-0.5 submunition that struck Jisr al-Shughour in Saraqib, Idlib, Syria, on July 22, 2016, killing 12 and injuring dozens. (HRW photo)

Faced with these limitations, locals eager to cultivate their farmland are turning to unofficial solutions, hiring amateurs who are not trained to international standards, resulting in more casualties, McCann warned.

“People are returning and trying to plant, and so we’re hearing reports that they’re hiring ex-military personnel with metal detectors to do some sort of clearance of their land, but it’s not systematic or professional,” he said.

“I met a man a few days ago who said his neighbor had hired an ex-soldier with a metal detector to find the mines on his land. The man (ex-soldier) was killed straight away, and the neighbor was injured.”

McCann emphasized that a field cannot be considered safe until every piece of explosive debris and every landmine has been removed.




Unexploded munitions dug up by farmers at a field in Syria. (The HALO Trust photo)

“If there are 50 mines in a field, and somebody finds 49 of them, the field still cannot be used,” he said. “You can only hand back land when you are 100 percent confident that every single mine is gone.

“So, even in places where some people are removing mines, we don’t know if all of them have been cleared, and we’ll have to do clearance again in the future.”

Although the northwest of the Syrian Arab Republic is riddled with unexploded ordnance, locals remain resolute in their determination to stay and rebuild their lives — a decision that is likely to lead to an increase in accidents.

“We think the number of accidents will increase because a lot of people don’t want to leave their displaced communities in Idlib in the winter,” McCann said. “They’re waiting for the weather to improve.”




Unexploded 220mm Uragan rocket found in the village of Lof near Saraqib, Idlib governorate. (The HALO Trust photo)

In the village of Lof near Saraqib, one resident HALO encountered returned to work on his land just hours after the charity’s team had neutralized an unexploded 220mm Uragan rocket. Had it detonated, it would have devastated the village.

“We took the rocket, dug a big hole, and evacuated the whole village,” McCann said. “We used an armored front loader to take it to this demolition site in the countryside.

“By the time we came back to the village, the landowner had started to rebuild his house where the rocket had been. He couldn’t touch it (before), and the rocket had been there probably since 2021.

“But within three or four hours of us removing the rocket, he had started to rebuild.”




Remnants from a ShOAB-0.5 submunition that struck Jisr al-Shughour, killing 12 and injuring dozens. (HRW photo)

Among the most common unexploded ordnance found in the northwest Syrian Arab Republic are TM-62 Russian anti-tank mines and ShOAB-0.5 cluster bombs.

Despite HALO’s 35 years of work in safely clearing explosive remnants of war, the scale of the problem, compounded by a lack of adequate resources, remains a significant challenge.

“To cover the whole country, there will have to be thousands of Syrians trained and employed by HALO over many years,” said program manager O’Brien.

And until international and local efforts are effectively coordinated to neutralize this deadly threat, the lives of countless civilians, particularly children, will continue to be at risk.
 

 


’Hell worse than what we have already?’ Gazans reject Trump plans

Updated 5 sec ago
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’Hell worse than what we have already?’ Gazans reject Trump plans

  • Under Trump’s scheme, Gaza’s about 2.2 million Palestinians would be resettled and the United States would take control and ownership of the coastal territory, redeveloping it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”
  • Any suggestion that Palestinians leave Gaza — which they want to be part of an independent state also encompassing the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital — has been anathema to the Palestinian leadership for generations

CAIRO/RAMALLAH/GAZA: With his Gaza home destroyed in Israel’s military offensive, Shaban Shaqaleh had intended to take his family on a break to Egypt once the Hamas-Israel ceasefire was firmly in place.
He changed his mind after US President Donald Trump announced plans to resettle Gaza’s Palestinian residents and redevelop the enclave, and said they should not have the right to return.
The Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, where dozens of multi-story buildings once stood, is now largely deserted. There is no running water or electricity and, like most buildings there, Shaqaleh’s home is in ruins.
“We are horrified by the destruction, the repeated displacement and the death, and I wanted to leave so I can secure a safe and better future for my children — until Trump said what he said,” Shaqaleh, 47, told Reuters via a chat app.
“After Trump’s remarks I canceled the idea. I fear leaving and never being able to come back. This is my homeland.”
Palestinians fear that Trump’s plan would enforce another Nakba, or Catastrophe, when they experienced mass expulsions in 1948 with the creation of Israel.
Under Trump’s scheme, Gaza’s about 2.2 million Palestinians would be resettled and the United States would take control and ownership of the coastal territory, redeveloping it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“The idea of selling my home or the piece of land I own to foreign companies to leave the homeland and never come back is completely rejected. I am deeply rooted in the soil of my homeland and will always be,” Shaqaleh said.
Any suggestion that Palestinians leave Gaza — which they want to be part of an independent state also encompassing the West Bank with East Jerusalem as its capital — has been anathema to the Palestinian leadership for generations. Neighbouring Arab states have rejected it since the Gaza war began in 2023.

SATURDAY DEADLINE
After Hamas said on Monday it was suspending the release of Israeli hostages set out in the ceasefire deal due to alleged Israeli violations, Trump said the Palestinian militant group should release all those it still holds by noon on Saturday or he would propose canceling the truce and “let hell break out.”
“Hell worse than what we have already? Hell worse than killing?” said Jomaa Abu Kosh, a Palestinian from Rafah in southern Gaza, standing beside devastated homes.
One woman, Samira Al-Sabea, accused Israel of blocking aid deliveries, a charge denied by Israel.
“We are humiliated, street dogs are living a better life than us,” she said. “And Trump wants to make Gaza hell? This will never happen.”
Israel began its assault on Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people while some 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.
The operation has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, by Gaza authorities’ counts, and obliterated much of the enclave.
Some Gazans said Palestinian leaders must find a solution to their problems.
“We don’t want to leave our country but also need a solution. Our leaders — Hamas, the PA (Palestinian Authority) and other factions — must find a solution,” said a 40-year-old carpenter who gave his name as Jehad.

’DOES HE OWN GAZA?“
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians were also aghast at Trump’s words.
“Does he own Gaza to ask people to leave it?” said Nader Imam. “Regarding Trump I only blame the American people. How can a country like this, a superpower, accept a person like Trump? His statements are savage.”
“What will Trump do? There is no fear, we rely on God,” said another West Bank resident, Mohammed Salah Tamimi.
The proposal shattered decades of US peace efforts built around a two-state solution and added pressure on neighboring Egypt and Jordan to take in resettled Palestinians.
Both countries, who receive billions in aid from the United States, rejected the plan citing concerns for national security and their commitment to the two-state solution.
For Jordan, which borders the West Bank and has absorbed more Palestinians than any other state since Israel’s creation, the plan is a nightmare.
Trump said he might withhold aid to Jordan and Egypt if they refused to cooperate. Jordan’s King Abdullah is set to meet Trump in Washington on Tuesday and is expected to express his rejection of the plan.
“Jordan can never accept resolving this issue at its expense.” said Suleiman Saud, the chairman of the Palestine Committee in Jordan’s House of Representatives. “Jordan is for Jordanians, and Palestine is for Palestinians.”

 


Friends of Italian priest long missing in Syria hope for news

Updated 19 min 3 sec ago
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Friends of Italian priest long missing in Syria hope for news

  • Tens of thousands of people have been detained or gone missing in Syria during more than a decade of conflict, many disappearing into Assad’s jails

NABEK, Syria: In a centuries-old monastery on a rocky hill north of Damascus, friends of missing Italian priest Paolo Dall’Oglio carry on his legacy, hopeful Bashar Assad’s ouster might help reveal the Jesuit’s fate.
“We want to know if Father Paolo is alive or dead, who imprisoned him, and what was his fate,” said Father Jihad Youssef who heads Deir Mar Musa Al-Habashi, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Damascus.
For years, Dall’Oglio lived in Deir Mar Musa — the monastery of St. Moses the Ethiopian — which dates to around the 6th century. He is credited with helping restore the place of worship.
A fierce critic of Assad, whose 2011 repression of anti-government protests sparked war, he was exiled the following year for meeting with opposition members, returning secretly to opposition-controlled areas in 2013.
He disappeared that summer while heading to the Raqqa headquarters of a group that would later become known as the Daesh, to plead for the release of kidnapped activists.
Conflicting reports emerged on Dall’Oglio’s whereabouts, including that he was kidnapped by the extremists, killed or handed to the Syrian government.
Daesh’s territorial defeat in Syria in 2019 brought no new information.
Tens of thousands of people have been detained or gone missing in Syria during more than a decade of conflict, many disappearing into Assad’s jails.
His December overthrow has enabled his friends at the monastery to openly discuss suspicions Dall’Oglio might have been “imprisoned by the regime,” Youssef said.
“We waited to see a sign of him... in Saydnaya prison or Palestine Branch,” Youssef said, referring to notorious detention facilities from which detainees were released after Assad’s toppling.
“We were told a lot of things, including that he was seen in the Adra prison in 2019,” Youssef said, referring to another facility outside Damascus, “but nothing reliable.”

Dall’Oglio, born in 1954, hosted interfaith seminars at Deir Mar Musa where Syria’s Christian minority and Muslims used to pray side by side, turning the monastery into a symbol of coexistence.
Youssef said it became a bridge for dialogue between Syrians in a country that “the former regime divided into sects who feared each other.”
Some 30,000 people visited in 2010, but the war and Dall’Oglio’s disappearance scared them away for more than a decade.
The monastery reopened for visitors in 2022.
“I didn’t know Father Paolo,” said Shatha Al-Barrah, 28, who came to Deir Mar Musa seeking solace and reflection.
But “I know he reflects this monastery, which opens its heart to all people from all faiths,” said the interpreter as she climbed the 300 steps leading to the building, built on the ruins of a Roman tower and partly carved into the rock.
Julian Zakka said Dall’Oglio was one of the reasons he joined the Jesuit order.
“Father Paolo used to work against associating Islam with extremists,” said the 28-year-old, “and to emphasize that coexistence is possible.”

After Islamist-led rebels ended half a century of one-family rule, the new authorities have sought to reassure minorities that they will be protected.
Assad had presented himself as a protector of minorities in multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Syria, but largely concentrated power in the hands of the Alawite community to whom his family belonged.
This month, Jesuits in Syria emphasized the need for healing, noting in a statement that fear had “shackled” the community for years.
Youssef said that while “the regime presented itself as protecting us, in fact it was using us as protection.”
He expressed optimism that “at last, the load has been lifted from our chests and we can breathe” after decades of “political death,” adding that he hoped the new authorities would be inclusive.
For now, Youssef is intent on spreading Dall’Oglio’s message.
“We will return to organizing activities like he loved to do,” Youssef said, including a march in Homs province, home to Alawites, Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
“The regime caused deep wounds between the Islamic sects” in Homs, he said.
“Father Paolo wanted to organize a large procession there — to pray at the mass graves, to be a bridge between people — to let them listen to each other’s pain, grieve and cry together, and stand hand in hand.”
 

 


Lebanon PM says ‘state must extend authority’ to all areas

Updated 21 min 12 sec ago
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Lebanon PM says ‘state must extend authority’ to all areas

  • Nawaf Salam’s government faces the daunting task of overseeing the fragile Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s prime minister said Tuesday the state must be in control of all Lebanese territory, in a televised interview days before a deadline to implement the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire agreement.
Nawaf Salam’s government, which was officially formed on Saturday after more than two years of caretaker leadership, faces the daunting task of overseeing the fragile ceasefire and rebuilding a war-scarred country.
The Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire has been in place since November 27, after more than a year of hostilities including two months of all-out war.
“When it comes to the areas south of the Litani and north of the Litani, across the entire area of Lebanon... what should be implemented is.... the Lebanese state must extend its authority through its own forces across the (Lebanese) territory,” Salam told journalists in the interview aired on state television.
“We want the Israeli withdrawal to happen... and we will continue to mobilize all diplomatic and political efforts until this withdrawal is achieved,” he added.
Under the deal, Lebanon’s military was to deploy in the south alongside UN peacekeepers as the Israeli army withdrew over a 60-day period, which has been extended until February 18.
Hezbollah was also meant to leave its positions in the south, near the Israeli border, over that period.
Salam said that World Bank estimates had put the cost of reconstruction of war-hit areas of Lebanon “at between $8 and $9 billion, but today it has risen to between $10 and $11 billion.”


Israeli kibbutz says elderly hostage held in Gaza dead

Updated 46 min 10 sec ago
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Israeli kibbutz says elderly hostage held in Gaza dead

  • The kibbutz called on the Israeli government and world leaders “to continue acting with determination to bring back all the hostages, both the living and the dead, and not to allow painful stories like Shlomo’s to repeat themselves”

JERUSALEM: An elderly Israeli man taken hostage by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, has been declared dead, a statement from his kibbutz said on Tuesday.
“With heavy hearts, we, the members of the kibbutz, received the news this morning about the murder of our dear friend, Shlomo Mansour, 86 years old, who was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Kissufim during the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023,” the community said of the Iraqi-born Israeli.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday that the “decision to confirm his death was based on intelligence gathered in recent months.”

Shlomo Mantzur, an Israeli hostage who was kidnapped in the deadly October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas and announced that he was killed on that same day, by Israel authority today, is pictured in this undated handout photo. (REUTERS)

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X that Mansour had been “murdered in captivity” by Hamas on October 7.
One of the founders of Kibbutz Kissufim, Mansour was kidnapped from a henhouse during Hamas’s attack on southern Israel.
His wife Mazal Mansour, with whom he lived for 60 years, managed to escape the attack. The couple have five children and 12 grandchildren.
The Israeli hostage forum said in a statement that Mansour, born in Baghdad, was a survivor of the Farhud pogrom — a 1941 attack on Iraq’s Jewish community — and immigrated to Israel with his family at 13.
“This is one of the most difficult days in the history of our kibbutz,” the community of Kissufim said in a statement.
“Shlomo was much more than a community member to us — he was a father, grandfather, a true friend and the beating heart of Kissufim.”
“Our hearts are broken that we couldn’t bring him back to us alive.”
The kibbutz called on the Israeli government and world leaders “to continue acting with determination to bring back all the hostages, both the living and the dead, and not to allow painful stories like Shlomo’s to repeat themselves.”
In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he and his wife, Sara, “share in the family’s deep mourning.”
“We will not rest and will not be silent until he is returned to a burial in Israel. We will continue to act with determination and without pause until we return all of our hostages — both the living and the fallen,” he said.
A fragile ceasefire reached last month between Hamas and Israel appeared strained on Tuesday, a day after Hamas threatened to postpone the release of Israeli hostages scheduled for Saturday.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump warned that “all hell” would break loose if every Israeli hostage is not released from Gaza within the coming days, a threat Hamas said “further complicates matters.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by the Hamas attack, the deadliest in Israel’s history, which resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 35 that Israeli officials say are dead.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the war has killed at least 48,208 people in the territory, figures which the UN considers reliable.
 

 


Turkmenistan reaches deal with Turkiye to ship natural gas via Iran

Updated 11 February 2025
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Turkmenistan reaches deal with Turkiye to ship natural gas via Iran

  • Turkiye imports gas via pipelines from Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan: Turkmenistan has struck a deal to ship natural gas to Turkiye via Iran, a government daily reported Tuesday.
The official daily Neutral Tyrkmenistan said that Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the chairman of the country’s People’s Council, welcomed the deal in a phone call with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Berdymukhamedov said it was a major development in the regional energy cooperation.
Gas supplies under the contract that was signed between the state-run Turkmengas company and Turkiye’s state-owned BOTAS will begin on March 1.
“With this agreement, which we have been working on for many years, we will strengthen the natural gas supply security of our country and our region, while furthering the strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said in a statement.
Turkiye imports gas via pipelines from Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran.
Last year, Turkmenistan signed a contract with Iran for 10 billion cubic meters (353 billion cubic feet) of natural gas to be shipped on to Iraq.
The ex-Soviet Central Asian country relies heavily on the export of its vast natural gas reserves. China is the nation’s main customer for gas and Turkmenistan also is working on a pipeline to supply gas to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.