Mines, Unexploded Ordnance a Daily Menace for Afghanistan's Children

Children gather around a crater after Afghan deminers from the Halo Trust detonated an anti-tank mine in Ghazni province. Wakil KOHSAR / AFP
Children gather around a crater after Afghan deminers from the Halo Trust detonated an anti-tank mine in Ghazni province. Wakil KOHSAR / AFP
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Mines, Unexploded Ordnance a Daily Menace for Afghanistan's Children

Children gather around a crater after Afghan deminers from the Halo Trust detonated an anti-tank mine in Ghazni province. Wakil KOHSAR / AFP
Children gather around a crater after Afghan deminers from the Halo Trust detonated an anti-tank mine in Ghazni province. Wakil KOHSAR / AFP

The black mushroom cloud had barely faded in Ghazni province before kids clustered around the edge of the crater created by the mine, one of the devices that kills a child every other day in Afghanistan.
Afghans have been able to return to fields, schools and roads since the Taliban authorities ended their insurgency and ousted the Western-backed government in 2021, said AFP.
But with new freedom of movement comes the danger of remnants left behind after 40 years of successive conflicts.
Nearly 900 people were killed or wounded by leftover munitions from January 2023 to April this year alone, most of them children, according to UN figures.
The anti-tank mine had been 100 meters from Qach Qala village, south of the provincial capital Ghazni, since the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989.
Deminers from the British organization Halo Trust cautiously unearthed then detonated it, the explosion echoing three kilometers (nearly two miles) around.
But before it was set off, a Taliban member roared up to the deminers on his motorcycle.
“Give me that mine!" he demanded. "I'll keep it safe at home. We can use it later when Afghanistan is occupied again."
The mine couldn't be "so dangerous since it hadn't exploded all these years", he insisted, before being pushed back by the deminers.
The Taliban government "is very supportive of demining in this country and wants to conduct clearance as far as it possibly can", said Nick Pond, head of the Mine Action Section of UNAMA, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.
Demining began in Afghanistan as early as 1988 but, over decades of wars, the country has been re-infested with mines and ordnance.
"It is almost impossible at the moment to predict what the scale of current contamination is," Pond told AFP.
Eighty-two percent of those killed or wounded by the remnant weapons since January 2023 were children, with half of cases involving children playing.
The village of Nokordak, nestled in a bucolic valley, lost two children in late April.
Surrounded by her small children, Shawoo told of how her 14-year-old son Javid was killed by unexploded ordnance.
"He threw a stone at it. He hit it once, then a second time. The third time, the device exploded."
The boy died almost instantly.
The same explosion killed Javid's friend Sakhi Dad, also 14.
"People said there were explosive ordnances around, but nothing like this had ever happened in the village before," said Sakhi Dad's 18-year-old brother, Mohammad Zakir, a lost look in his eyes.
"No one had come to the village to warn the children of the danger."
'Lack of funds'
In Patanaye village, 50 kilometers away, 13-year-old Sayed showed his wounded hand and foot, still in bandages after the explosion in late April that killed his brother Taha, 11, as they were tending their sheep.
"Three, four times I pulled it from his hands. I was shouting at him but he kicked me and hit it on a rock," Sayed told AFP.
These kinds of accidents are all too common, said their father Siraj Ahmad.
Tomorrow, "someone else's son could be killed or handicapped for the rest of their life", he said.
Zabto Mayar, Halo's explosive ordnance disposal officer, said "lack of funds" was a major challenge their work.
So deminers work painstakingly plot by plot, depending on donations.
"The mine action workforce was once 15,500 people around 2011. It is currently 3,000," said Pond.
Other global conflicts have pulled funding away, while Afghanistan has also seen donors pull back after the Taliban takeover, their government unrecognized by any other country.
Mistaken for gold
But Mohammad Hassan, headmaster of a small school in the Deh Qazi hamlet, is still counting on the deminers.
"Even the schoolyard is dangerous for the children because it is not cleared of mines," he said.
"We can't even plant trees here. If we dig, if we bring a tractor or machines to work here, it is really dangerous," he said.
Children in a classroom listened to a lesson aimed at preventing such accidents, the wall plastered with charts of mines or ordnance of all shapes and colors.
"Six months ago on a walk with my friends, we saw a rocket and we immediately told the village elders and they informed the deminers," said 12-year-old Jamil Hasan.
Mines and ordnance can look like playthings to children, said Pond.
The Soviet-era butterfly mine (PFM-1), for example, with its winged shape, "is very attractive to pick up", he said.
Children are also drawn to the "beautiful and modern colors" used in munitions, said Halo unit commander Sayed Hassan Mayar.
Some colors are also deceiving, such as golden-topped ammunition that can look like precious metal to people hunting for scrap to sell in the impoverished country.
"The children usually think it might be gold, and they hit it with a stone or a hammer to take the top part," Pond said.
Danger from remnants of war is also omnipresent for deminers. Halo lost two of their number in early May.
"Sometimes when I go defusing mines, I call my family and tell them I love them, just in case anything happens," said Zabto Mayar.



Water Crisis Batters War-Torn Sudan as Temperatures Soar

People refill donkey-drawn water tanks during a water crisis in Port Sudan in the Red Sea State of war-torn Sudan on April 9, 2024. (AFP)
People refill donkey-drawn water tanks during a water crisis in Port Sudan in the Red Sea State of war-torn Sudan on April 9, 2024. (AFP)
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Water Crisis Batters War-Torn Sudan as Temperatures Soar

People refill donkey-drawn water tanks during a water crisis in Port Sudan in the Red Sea State of war-torn Sudan on April 9, 2024. (AFP)
People refill donkey-drawn water tanks during a water crisis in Port Sudan in the Red Sea State of war-torn Sudan on April 9, 2024. (AFP)

War, climate change and man-made shortages have brought Sudan -- a nation already facing a litany of horrors -- to the shores of a water crisis.

"Since the war began, two of my children have walked 14 kilometers (nine miles) every day to get water for the family," Issa, a father of seven, told AFP from North Darfur state.

In the blistering sun, as temperatures climb past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Issa's family -- along with 65,000 other residents of the Sortoni displacement camp -- suffer the weight of the war between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

When the first shots rang out more than a year ago, most foreign aid groups -- including the one operating Sortoni's local water station -- could no longer operate. Residents were left to fend for themselves.

The country at large, despite its many water sources including the mighty Nile River, is no stranger to water scarcity.

Even before the war, a quarter of the population had to walk more than 50 minutes to fetch water, according to the United Nations.

Now, from the western deserts of Darfur, through the fertile Nile Valley and all the way to the Red Sea coast, a water crisis has hit 48 million war-weary Sudanese who the US ambassador to the United Nations on Friday said are already facing "the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet."

- No fuel, no water -

Around 110 kilometers east of Sortoni, deadly clashes in North Darfur's capital of El-Fasher, besieged by RSF, threaten water access for more than 800,000 civilians.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Friday said fighting in El-Fasher had killed at least 226.

Just outside the city, fighting over the Golo water reservoir "risks cutting off safe and adequate water for about 270,000 people", the UN children's agency UNICEF has warned.

Access to water and other scarce resources has long been a source of conflict in Sudan.

The UN Security Council on Thursday demanded that the siege of El-Fasher end.

If it goes on, hundreds of thousands more people who rely on the area's groundwater will go without.

"The water is there, but it's more than 60 meters (66 yards) deep, deeper than a hand-pump can go," according to a European diplomat with years of experience in Sudan's water sector.

"If the RSF doesn't allow fuel to go in, the water stations will stop working," he told AFP, requesting anonymity because the diplomat was not authorized to speak to media.

"For a large part of the population, there will simply be no water."

Already in the nearby village of Shaqra, where 40,000 people have sought shelter, "people stand in lines 300 meters long to get drinking water," said Adam Rijal, spokesperson for the civilian-led General Coordination for Displaced Persons and Refugees in Darfur.

In photos he sent to AFP, some women and children can be seen huddled under the shade of lonely acacia trees, while most swelter in the blazing sun, waiting their turn.

- Dirty water -

Sudan is hard-hit by climate change, and "you see it most clearly in the increase in temperature and rainfall intensity," the diplomat said.

This summer, the mercury is expected to continue rising until the rainy season hits in August, bringing with it torrential floods that kill dozens every year.

The capital Khartoum sits at the legendary meeting point of the Blue Nile and White Nile rivers -- yet its people are parched.

The Soba water station, which supplies water to much of the capital, "has been out of service since the war began," said a volunteer from the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of grassroots groups coordinating wartime aid.

People have since been buying untreated "water off of animal-drawn carts, which they can hardly afford and exposes them to diseases," he told AFP, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Entire neighborhoods of Khartoum North "have gone without drinking water for a year," another local volunteer told AFP, requesting to be identified only by his first name, Salah.

"People wanted to stay in their homes, even through the fighting, but they couldn't last without water," Salah said.

- Parched and displaced -

Hundreds of thousands have fled the fighting eastward, many to the de facto capital of Port Sudan on the Red Sea -- itself facing a "huge water issue" that will only get "worse in the summer months," resident al-Sadek Hussein worries.

The city depends on only one inadequate reservoir for its water supply.

Here, too, citizens rely on horse- and donkey-drawn carts to deliver water, using "tools that need to be monitored and controlled to prevent contamination," public health expert Taha Taher told AFP.

"But with all the displacement, of course this doesn't happen," he said.

Between April 2023 and March 2024, the health ministry recorded nearly 11,000 cases of cholera -- a disease endemic to Sudan, "but not like this" when it has become "year-round," the European diplomat said.

The outbreak comes with the majority of Sudan's hospitals shut down and the United States warning on Friday that a famine of historic global proportions could unfold without urgent action.

"Health care has collapsed, people are drinking dirty water, they are hungry and will get hungrier, which will kill many, many more," the diplomat said.