IDLIB: Suleiman Khalil was harvesting olives in a Syrian orchard with two friends four months ago, unaware the soil beneath them still hid deadly remnants of war.
The trio suddenly noticed a visible mine lying on the ground. Panicked, Khalil and his friends tried to leave, but he stepped on a land mine and it exploded. His friends, terrified, ran to find an ambulance, but Khalil, 21, thought they had abandoned him.
“I started crawling, then the second land mine exploded,” Khalil told The Associated Press. “At first, I thought I’d died. I didn’t think I would survive this.”
Khalil’s left leg was badly wounded in the first explosion, while his right leg was blown off from above the knee in the second. He used his shirt to tourniquet the stump and screamed for help until a soldier nearby heard him and rushed for his aid.
“There were days I didn’t want to live anymore,” Khalil said, sitting on a thin mattress, his amputated leg still wrapped in a white cloth four months after the incident. Khalil, who is from the village of Qaminas, in the southern part of Syria’s Idlib province, is engaged and dreams of a prosthetic limb so he can return to work and support his family again.
While the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war came to an end with the fall of Bashar Assad on Dec. 8, war remnants continue to kill and maim. Contamination from land mines and explosive remnants has killed at least 249 people, including 60 children, and injured another 379 since Dec. 8, according to INSO, an international organization which coordinates safety for aid workers.
Mines and explosive remnants — widely used since 2011 by Syrian government forces, its allies, and armed opposition groups — have contaminated vast areas, many of which only became accessible after the Assad government’s collapse, leading to a surge in the number of land mine casualties, according to a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
‘It will take ages to clear them all’
Prior to Dec. 8, land mines and explosive remnants of war also frequently injured or killed civilians returning home and accessing agricultural land.
“Without urgent, nationwide clearance efforts, more civilians returning home to reclaim critical rights, lives, livelihoods, and land will be injured and killed,” said Richard Weir, a senior crisis and conflict researcher at HRW.
Experts estimate that tens of thousands of land mines remain buried across Syria, particularly in former front-line regions like rural Idlib.
“We don’t even have an exact number,” said Ahmad Jomaa, a member of a demining unit under Syria’s defense ministry. “It will take ages to clear them all.”
Jomaa spoke while scanning farmland in a rural area east of Maarrat Al-Numan with a handheld detector, pointing at a visible anti-personnel mine nestled in dry soil.
“This one can take off a leg,” he said. “We have to detonate it manually.”
Psychological trauma and broader harm
Farming remains the main source of income for residents in rural Idlib, making the presence of mines a daily hazard. Days earlier a tractor exploded nearby, severely injuring several farm workers, Jomaa said. “Most of the mines here are meant for individuals and light vehicles, like the ones used by farmers,” he said.
Jomaa’s demining team began dismantling the mines immediately after the previous government was ousted. But their work comes at a steep cost.
“We’ve had 15 to 20 (deminers) lose limbs, and around a dozen of our brothers were killed doing this job,” he said. Advanced scanners, needed to detect buried or improvised devices, are in short supply, he said. Many land mines are still visible to the naked eye, but others are more sophisticated and harder to detect.
Land mines not only kill and maim but also cause long-term psychological trauma and broader harm, such as displacement, loss of property, and reduced access to essential services, HRW says.
The rights group has urged the transitional government to establish a civilian-led mine action authority in coordination with the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) to streamline and expand demining efforts.
Syria’s military under the Assad government laid explosives years ago to deter opposition fighters. Even after the government seized nearby territories, it made little effort to clear the mines it left behind.
‘Every day someone is dying’
Standing before his brother’s grave, Salah Sweid holds up a photo on his phone of Mohammad, smiling behind a pile of dismantled mines. “My mother, like any other mother would do, warned him against going,” Salah said. “But he told them, ‘If I don’t go and others don’t go, who will? Every day someone is dying.’”
Mohammad was 39 when he died on Jan. 12 while demining in a village in Idlib. A former Syrian Republican Guard member trained in planting and dismantling mines, he later joined the opposition during the uprising, scavenging weapon debris to make arms.
He worked with Turkish units in Azaz, a city in northwest Syria, using advanced equipment, but on the day he died, he was on his own. As he defused one mine, another hidden beneath it detonated. After Assad’s ouster, mines littered his village in rural Idlib. He had begun volunteering to clear them — often without proper equipment — responding to residents’ pleas for help, even on holidays when his demining team was off duty, his brother said.
For every mine cleared by people like Mohammad, many more remain.
In a nearby village, Jalal Al-Maarouf, 22, was tending to his goats three days after the Assad government’s collapse when he stepped on a mine. Fellow shepherds rushed him to a hospital, where doctors amputated his left leg.
He has added his name to a waiting list for a prosthetic, “but there’s nothing so far,” he said from his home, gently running a hand over the smooth edge of his stump. “As you can see, I can’t walk.” The cost of a prosthetic limb is in excess of $3,000 and far beyond his means.
‘I thought I’d died’: How land mines are continuing to claim lives in post-Assad Syria
https://arab.news/npap9
‘I thought I’d died’: How land mines are continuing to claim lives in post-Assad Syria
- Contamination from land mines and explosive remnants has killed at least 249 people, including 60 children, and injured another 379 since Dec. 8
- Farming remains the main source of income for residents in rural Idlib, making the presence of mines a daily hazard
What 2026 holds for Sudan as conflict drags on and famine deepens
- Hopes after Khartoum’s recapture dimmed as El-Fasher fell to RSF atrocities and ceasefire efforts stalled
- Armed factions consolidated control over different regions, splitting the country and prolonging the fighting
LONDON: When the Sudanese Armed Forces recaptured Khartoum from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in late March, soldiers and many of the capital’s remaining residents took to the streets to celebrate.
The RSF, which seized the city soon after the civil war erupted in April 2023, had ruled with an iron fist. When its fighters were finally dislodged, much of the population was glad to see the back of them.
There was even hope that the army’s victory could mark a turning point in the conflict, setting in train a series of events that would lead to an end to the fighting. Such optimism, however, looked misplaced as the rest of the world welcomed 2026.
Seven months after the SAF had reclaimed Khartoum, RSF fighters unleashed a fresh wave of violence against the population of another city, El-Fasher, 800 kilometers away on the other side of the country.
The RSF’s capture of North Darfur’s capital and the days of bloodletting that followed marked one of the darkest chapters in Sudan’s history.
Fighters carried out mass executions, torture and rapes reminiscent of the 2003-05 genocide inflicted on Darfur by the Janjaweed — the predecessor of the RSF.
Far from being the year when Sudan’s fortunes began to turn, 2025 will likely be remembered as the year when the vast nation, already bifurcated by the independence of South Sudan in 2011, was split once more, this time between a SAF-controlled east and a RSF-dominated west.
The International Crisis Group recently warned that the war “could settle into a prolonged stalemate that will morph into a durable partition.”
“Neighboring countries fear that such a failed-state scenario would spell even more long-term instability that spills beyond Sudan’s borders,” the think-tank added.
El-Fasher was the SAF’s last holdout in Darfur. Its strategic significance was reflected in the RSF’s brutal 18-month siege to break the city.
When the group finally succeeded on Oct. 26, it consolidated its hold over Darfur and cemented the dividing line running through the middle of Sudan.
The RSF now controls most of western Sudan and large areas of the Kordofan region.
The SAF, meanwhile, controls the central areas around Khartoum, the north and the east, including Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
Kordofan, a vast agricultural area made up of three states and home to the nation’s oil fields, has now become the focus of the fighting.
The violence there has escalated in recent weeks, with hundreds of civilians killed since late October, according to the UN.
On Dec. 4, a children’s nursery and a hospital in Kalogi were hit by a drone strike, killing 114 people including 63 children.
Another drone strike on Dec. 13 killed six Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers, who had been deployed to South Kordofan to oversee disputed territory between Sudan and South Sudan.
Sudan’s largest oil field, Heglig, which is located near the border and supplies both countries, has now fallen to the RSF.
Kordofan is also strategically significant because it spans the supply lines to the west of the country.
With the world’s gaze distracted by Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan’s humanitarian crisis continued to spiral in 2025.
UN agencies say the conflict is now the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and largest displacement crisis, while the International Rescue Committee describes it as the largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, more than 12 million displaced, and 30 million — two thirds of the population — are in need of aid. Half the population faces acute hunger. Areas of Darfur and Kordofan are already in the grip of famine.
“We’re really looking at the most devastating war in Sudan’s history,” Ahmed Soliman, senior research fellow at Chatham House, said in a recent podcast. “It’s shocking and globally the worst humanitarian crisis without a doubt.”
Speaking shortly after the fall of El-Fasher, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the conflict was “spiraling out of control.”
But the conflict had spiraled long before the horror of the RSF’s onslaught. El-Fasher just represented a sickening nadir.
About 260,000 people were trapped in El-Fasher when it was finally overrun. The RSF had recently completed an earth barrier encircling the city to block people from leaving.
The group’s fighters videoed themselves gunning down residents both in the city and as they tried to flee.
In one incident, more than 460 men, women and children at the Saudi Maternity Hospital were massacred.
Satellite images analyzed by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab showed pools of blood on the ground and piles of bodies in the hospital car park.
Victims and witnesses recounted sickening acts of brutality and sexual violence.
One woman told Amnesty International that she had tried to flee the Abu Shouk neighborhood with her five children and a group of neighbors but were stopped by RSF fighters.
Both she and her 14-year-old daughter were raped. Her daughter died a few days later after reaching a clinic outside the city.
A 34-year-old man told the human rights monitor that he was among a group of 20 men who had managed to cross the earth berm but were caught by RSF fighters.
They were forced to lie down before the gunmen opened fire, killing 17 of them.
“The RSF were killing people as if they were flies,” he said. “It was a massacre. None of the people killed that I have seen were armed soldiers.”
The International Criminal Court said last month it was taking immediate steps to preserve and collect evidence related to the El-Fasher atrocities for use in future prosecutions.
Even before El-Fasher, the RSF had been widely accused of carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the US government determining that the group had committed acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The shocking images that emerged from El-Fasher have given new impetus to international efforts to try to end the conflict.
The war stems from the aftermath of the downfall of President Omar Bashir amid mass protests against his rule.
After the civilian aspect of a power sharing agreement was shut out of the transitional process in 2021, a power struggle emerged between SAF commander Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and RSF chief Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.
The rivalry eventually led to the outbreak of war in April 2023.
Since El-Fasher fell, the “Quad” group of mediators of Saudi Arabia, the US, Egypt and the UAE have intensified efforts to secure a ceasefire and a peace settlement.
During his visit to Washington last month, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman encouraged US President Donald Trump to help bring the conflict to an end.
The RSF has said it would agree to the Quad’s roadmap, which includes an initial three-month humanitarian truce leading to a permanent ceasefire and transition to civilian rule.
On Dec. 16, Al-Burhan declared he was ready to work with the Trump administration to resolve the conflict.
For those suffering in Sudan’s conflict zones, it is a faint glimmer of hope after a year of unfathomable suffering.
Whether 2026 will see a change in the fortunes of Sudanese, only time will tell.
