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
US embassy in Tripoli denies report of planned relocation of Palestinians to Libya
- Palestinians vehemently reject any plan involving them leaving Gaza
TRIPOLI: The US embassy in Libya denied on Sunday a report that the US government was working on a plan to relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.
On Thurdsay, NBC News said the Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate as many as one million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya.
NBC News cited five people with knowledge of the matter, including two people with direct knowledge and a former US official.
“The report of alleged plans to relocate Gazans to Libya is untrue,” the US embassy said on the X platform.
The Tripoli-based interionationally-recognized Government of National Unity was not available for immediate comment.
Trump has previously said he would like the United States to take over the Gaza Strip and its Palestinian population resettled elsewhere.
Palestinians vehemently reject any plan involving them leaving Gaza, comparing such ideas to the 1948 “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” when hundreds of thousands were dispossessed of their homes in the war that led to the creation of Israel.
When Trump first floated his idea after taking the presidency, he said he wanted US allies Egypt and Jordan to take in people from Gaza. Both states rejected the idea, which drew global condemnation, with Palestinians, Arab nations and the UN saying it would amount to ethnic cleansing.
In April, Trump said Palestinians could be moved “around to different countries, and you have plenty of countries that will do that.”
During a visit to Qatar this week, Trump reiterated his desire to take over the territory, saying he wanted to see it become a “freedom zone” and that there was nothing left to save.
Trump has previously said he wants to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Libya’s PM says eliminating militias is ‘ongoing project’ as ceasefire holds
- The United Nations Support Mission in Libya expressed concern on Friday about the escalation of violence in Tripoli, calling on parties to protect civilians and public property
TRIPOLI: Libyan Prime Minister Abdulhamid Al-Dbeibah said on Saturday that eliminating militias is an “ongoing project,” as a ceasefire after deadly clashes this week remained in place.
“We will not spare anyone who continues to engage in corruption or extortion. Our goal is to create a Libya free of militias and corruption,” Dbeibah said in a televised speech.
Dbeibah is the country’s internationally recognized leader in the west, based in Tripoli.
After Dbeibah on Tuesday ordered the armed groups to be dismantled, Tripoli was rocked by its fiercest clashes in years between two armed groups. The clashes killed at least eight civilians, according to the United Nations.
The government announced a ceasefire on Wednesday.
It followed Monday’s killing of major militia chief Abdulghani Kikli, widely known as Ghaniwa, and the sudden defeat of his Stabilization Support Apparatus group by factions aligned with Dbeibah.
SSA is under the Presidential Council that came to power in 2021 with the Government of National Unity of Dbeibah through a United Nations-backed process.
SSA was based in the densely populated Abu Salim neighborhood.
GNU’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that nine decomposed corpses were found in a morgue refrigerator in Abu Salim-based Al-Khadra hospital. It said SSA never reported them to authorities. The PM’s media office posted a video of Dbeibah greeting the security force protecting the Prime Ministry Building. It said he later received delegations from elders to discuss Tripoli’s situation and what he called “successful security operation in Abu Salim.”
“The Prime Minister stressed that this operation falls within the state’s fixed vision to eliminate armed formations outside the police and army institutions,” the media office said.
On Friday, at least three ministers resigned in sympathy with hundreds of protesters who took to the streets calling for Dbeibah’s ouster.
Dbeibah did not comment on their resignations. “The protests are annoying, but I’ve put up with them. I know some of them are real, but a lot of them are paid,” he said.
The United Nations Support Mission in Libya expressed concern on Friday about the escalation of violence in Tripoli, calling on parties to protect civilians and public property.
Libya has had little stability since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising ousted longtime autocrat Muammar Qaddafi. The country split in 2014 between rival eastern and western factions, though an outbreak of major warfare paused with a truce in 2020.
While eastern Libya has been dominated for a decade by commander Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army, control in Tripoli and western Libya has been splintered among numerous armed factions.
A major energy exporter, Libya is also an important way station for migrants heading to Europe, while its conflict has drawn in foreign powers including Turkiye, Russia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
State-oil firm NOC said on Friday that its operations at oil facilities are proceeding as normal, with oil and gas exports operating regularly.
Israel says it intercepted missile from Yemen
CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Sunday that it intercepted a missile that was launched from Yemen toward Israel.
Sirens sounded in several areas in Israel, the military added.
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have continued to fire missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, although they have agreed to halt attacks on US ships.
Israel has carried out strikes in response, including one on May 6 that damaged Yemen’s main airport in Sanaa and killed several people.
Syria announces commissions for missing persons, transitional justice
- A decree signed by interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa and released by the presidency announced the formation of an independent “national commission for missing persons”
DAMASCUS: Syria on Saturday announced the formation of a national commission for missing persons and another for transitional justice, more than five months after the ouster of longtime ruler Bashar Assad.
Syria’s new authorities have pledged justice for victims of atrocities committed under Assad’s rule, and a five-year transitional constitution signed in March provided for the formation of a transitional justice commission.
The fate of tens of thousands of detainees and others who went missing remains one of the most harrowing legacies of Syria’s conflict, which erupted in 2011 when Assad’s forces brutally repressed anti-government protests, triggering more than a decade of war.
A decree signed by interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa and released by the presidency announced the formation of an independent “national commission for missing persons.”
The body is tasked with “researching and uncovering the fate of the missing and forcibly disappeared, documenting cases, establishing a national database and providing legal and humanitarian support to their families.”
A separate decree announced the formation of a national commission for transitional justice to “uncover the truth about the grave violations caused by the former regime.”
That commission should hold those responsible to account “in coordination with the relevant authorities, remedy the harm to victims, and firmly establish the principles of non-recurrence and national reconciliation,” according to the announcement.
The decree noted “the need to achieve transitional justice as a fundamental pillar for building a state of law, guaranteeing victims’ rights and achieving comprehensive national reconciliation.”
Both bodies will have “financial and administrative independence” and act over all of Syrian territory, according to the decrees signed by Sharaa.
In December, an Islamist-led coalition toppled Assad after five decades of his family’s iron-fisted rule and nearly 14 years of brutal war that killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more.
Tens of thousands of people were detained and tortured in the country’s jails, while Assad has been accused of using chemical weapons against his own people.
Rights groups, activists and the international community have repeatedly emphasized the importance of transitional justice in the war-torn country.
In March, Sharaa signed into force a constitutional declaration for a five-year transitional period.
It stipulated that during that period, a “transitional justice commission” would be formed to “determine the means for accountability, establish the facts, and provide justice to victims and survivors” of the former government’s misdeeds.
This week, prominent Syrian human rights lawyer Mazen Darwish told AFP that lasting peace in Syria depended on the country building a strong judicial system giving justice to the victims of all crimes committed during the Assad era.
Three killed in strike near displacement camp in Gaza, charity says
- Strike hit just 100 meters from main entrance of Hope Camp 4, a site Action for Humanity operates for displaced civilians
GAZA: A strike near a displacement camp in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, has killed three people, according to the humanitarian organization Action For Humanity.
In a statement released on Saturday, the charity said the bombing occurred at approximately 3:30 p.m. local time, striking just 100 meters from the main entrance of Hope Camp 4, a site it operates for displaced civilians.
The organization said the victims included a displaced resident, a relative of a woman living in the camp, and a member of the family that made the land available for use as a displacement site.
“This was not just an attack on civilians, it was an attack on humanitarian infrastructure,” Action For Humanity said.
“Striking areas where displaced families are seeking safety is a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
No further casualties or damage were reported among the camp’s other residents, but the group warned of the “deep and lasting” psychological toll on the community.
Action For Humanity said it continues to provide support to those affected and called for the protection of humanitarian sites and safe, unhindered access for aid delivery.
“Our operations in Gaza remain active,” the statement added. “We urgently call for the protection of all humanitarian sites and for immediate, unhindered access to deliver life-saving aid to those in desperate need.”
