The Saudi Project for Landmines Clearance in Yemen (MASAM) announced Friday that it has successfully removed 360,573 landmines, improvised explosive devices and various unexploded ordnance in eight liberated provinces in Yemen.
It said a number of Arab studies and research centers in Cairo have recently honored this project by MASAM for its humanitarian role in saving the lives of millions of Yemenis.
MASAM’s Assistant Director General Professor Khaled al-Otaibi received the awards on the behalf of the project’s Managing Director, Ousama al-Gosaibi.
During its four-year operation period, the project lost 33 deminers, including five foreign experts and 28 Yemeni nationals, while more than 42 were injured during the demining operations.
Gosaibi said that the Iranian-backed Houthi militias plant and re-plant mines on daily basis, with little consideration for the lives of civilians, including children, women and the elderly who make up the majority of landmine victims in Yemen.
He affirmed that the project seeks to develop its capabilities and methods in the field of demining despite the militias’ insistence to develop their methods to target the largest possible number of civilians.
He further pointed out that the militias have introduced new technology into the manufacture of these explosives and mines, including new methods and mechanisms to remotely detonate these booby-traps.
Highlighting long technical assessment of the makeup of these new types of landmines, Gosaibi stressed that this act amounts to war crimes committed indiscriminately against civilians.
The technical evaluations show that the explosives and booby-traps are manufactured and installed inside Yemen, but the materials used in their manufacture are imported and cannot be locally manufactured.
He also revealed that Houthis have adopted a brutal approach by professionally planting explosives and booby-traps in schools, health centers and water tanks, in large quantities.
Clearing Yemen of mines will take years, Gosaibi lamented, underlining the density of landmines and the lack of minefield maps.
MASAM estimates that the militias planted more than one million landmines and explosive devices in the areas they ran.
In May, Saudi Arabia extended MASAM’s operations for a fifth year at an estimated cost of $33.3 million to carry out its mission in Yemen – clearing residential areas (homes, water sources and places of worship), schools, and roads of Houthi planted landmines.
Landmines have claimed the lives of thousands of Yemenis, and injured tens of thousands of people – often with disabling injuries and amputations.
On April 4, the United Nations Development Program office in Yemen revealed that landmines and unexploded ordnance had killed or injured 1,800 civilians, including 689 women and children, in a number of Yemeni governorates over the last four years.
Reports from international and local organizations confirm that Yemen has witnessed one of the largest mine-laying operations on its territory since the end of World War II.
