'The land is full of mines': Syria's path to recovery is littered with explosives

Huda al-Dahr appeared to be sleeping, lulled by the gentle whirr and beep of the machines at her bedside that were keeping her alive. The nine-year-old girl was lying in the Turkish-run hospital in al-Bab, northern Syria. Her tiny frame was pockmarked with shrapnel wounds.

Two days earlier, Huda was collecting saffron with her sisters near her family home in al-Buhaij, a small village in the eastern Aleppo countryside. Her father, Amr Issa al-Dahr, was working nearby in his olive grove when he heard the explosion.

“I ran over and saw her older sister, Haneen. She said, ‘Daddy, a mine exploded, and Huda is gone’,” Amr Issa said, sitting on the carpet of the hospital’s prayer room.

Though he is a schoolteacher, his face is dark and lined, weathered by the unforgiving sun. He had recently returned home with his family after years of displacement, hopeful at the prospect of new beginnings.

But on 29 May, Amr Issa sent out a brief WhatsApp message: “Truly, we belong to God, and to Him we shall return.” It was a phrase from the Quran, often used to announce a death. After 19 days in a coma, Huda succumbed to her injuries.

Similar incidents are happening every day in Syria, one of the most mine-affected countries in the world. Since the fall of the Assad regime in December, over 1.14 million people have returned to their homes, many of which are on former front lines littered with the detritus of war.

After 14 years of civil war, Syria is plagued with an epidemic of landmines, IEDs, and unexploded ordnance (UXO). It is still not clear how many mines there are in Syria, but one estimate puts the number above 300,000.

The extent of explosive contamination, combined with mass returns, has created a crisis that has resulted in over 1,000 casualties in six months - a third of them children.

But landmines have plagued Syrians for years. From March 2011, when the civil war began, to the end of 2024, there have been more than 3,500 deaths caused by landmines, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

Another 10,400 have been injured, many of whom will require years of rehabilitation and psychological support.

A race against death

Mine clearance teams face an enormous task, working against the clock to make Syria’s urban and rural areas safe again. Beyond preventing further injury and death, their work is a critical first step towards Syria’s reconstruction and agricultural renewal.

“The accident rate is absolutely horrific,” Damian O’Brien, Country Manager for the HALO Trust in Syria, told The New Arab. “People are so desperate for work, they’ll go in with basic tools and try to dig stuff [UXO] up.”

HALO Trust, an international demining charity, has mine clearance and disposal teams operating in northwest Syria, where they also provide mine awareness training to residents. Their workload has surged since Assad’s fall. More than 200km of heavily mined fields stretch along the former frontline that separated rebel forces from Assad’s army.

With funding limited, O’Brien has had to prioritise where he sends his teams. But he says HALO’s operations could be expanded easily if the money were available.

“The problem is not insurmountable,” he told The New Arab. “Once we’ve bought the machines, it’s just running costs and salaries … it doesn’t have to be megabucks.”

The safest - though painstaking - way to clear mines from the soft, arable plains of northwest Syria is with repurposed, armoured bulldozers. It is mainly a lack of these machines that is slowing progress.

At a minefield in Saraqib, about 15km southeast of Idlib, HALO clearance teams were donning flak jackets and face shields. It was a shimmering, airless day under a high sun. Zakaria Othman, the team leader on site, studied a hand-drawn map showing two minefields.

The first, which represented 300,000 square metres, was just 1% cleared since mid-February. The second, twice the size, remained untouched - except for a few accidental detonations triggered by stray sheep. Beyond it, more minefields, yet uncharted, disappeared into the horizon.

Othman is Syrian, like the rest of his team, so the job carries personal significance for him. “Children are dying … [so] we do what we can,” Othman told The New Arab. “There might be danger for us, but we’re creating a safe environment so people can return to their country … take back their land and cultivate it again.”

Almost all the mines along this front were planted by Assad’s military and manufactured by Russia, a major ally. But in other parts of the country, there are explosive remnants left by the Islamic State and Kurdish forces, especially along the Euphrates River in the east.

In Jawbas, a village just south of the minefield at Saraqib, one of HALO’s six EOD teams was rigging up explosives to destroy another piece of ordnance: the 236th item since February for this team alone. Ihab Hendi, the team leader, pointed at a silver ball on the ground.

About the size of a tennis ball, it could easily be picked up by a child, and too often, it is.

It was a submunition, one of several hundred dropped by a Russian ShOAB cluster bomb. Banned under an international convention that neither Russia, Syria, nor the United States are signatories to, cluster submunitions are peppered across Syria’s towns and villages. They linger for years, often decades, in former war zones where they maim and kill large numbers of civilians. 

Both the EOD and clearance teams are overwhelmed daily by calls from locals reporting new discoveries. In a nearby house, there was a Syrian army tank shell. The owner would have to wait before he could move back in.

But it’s not just explosive remnants that get called in. Recently, Othman’s team had to stop work to clear the way to a mass grave. Buried there were the victims of an Assad regime massacre from 2020, near Saraqib. A child’s pelvis was found in the grave, along with the remains of one of the mine clearers’ friends.

The road to recovery 

According to Joseph McCartan, Chief of the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) in Syria, a lack of funding from donor states is the main factor delaying the massive task of mine clearance, which he stresses is key to Syria’s economic recovery.

He hopes that the lifting of US sanctions in May will encourage donor countries. “If we get enough machines and EOD [bomb disposal] teams in, it could be a very different picture in three to four years,” McCartan told The New Arab.

McCartan explained that in post-Assad Syria, UNMAS has taken on more of a coordinating role, collecting reports from various mine action organisations operating in northwest and northeast Syria, something that was impossible before December.

Crucially, he has been working to “break the silos” between his organisation and other UN bodies - such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN-Habitat - to develop a joint approach for securing funding for mine clearance and recovery in Syria.

The FAO has also highlighted the importance of mine action as a “foundation for agricultural recovery.” It reports that Syria’s agriculture sector is in a “dire situation”, a critical part of the country’s economy, with almost half the population dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.

“About 14.5 million people are facing food insecurity. We should work collectively to improve the living situation of the Syrian people,” said Toni Ettel, FAO Acting Representative in Syria, in a recent report.

If the country faces a long road to recovery, so do its mine victims. At the National Hospital in Idlib, a physical rehabilitation centre helps landmine and UXO victims recover from their injuries.

But funding, as ever, is low, and 13,000 people, whose bodies have borne the brunt of 14 years of war, have come to the centre this year alone. There is a long waiting list, too.

But the centre does not only treat mine victims. Mohammed Sulaibi, the reception manager, opened the door to a cramped gym full of patients. A young boy was learning how to walk again.

He had lost both his legs and his parents in the devastating 2023 earthquake that hit Turkey and northern Syria. Another man, who had lost his leg in an airstrike, had been attending the centre for 10 years.

“The work never stops,” Sulaibi said. “The goal is for each person to be able to continue their life and their work … But there are [new] patients every day … the land is full of mines.”

Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut, covering conflict, foreign policy, and social justice issues

Follow him on X: @AlexMAstley