Landmines in Syria kill hundreds of civilians returning home after fall of Assad

More than 200 people, including women and children, have been killed in Syria in incidents involving war remnants in the three months since the fall of the Assad regime, as bomb disposal experts warn that “no area in Syria is safe”.

The number of casualties has risen as approximately 1.2 million people return to their former homes and lands after being displaced by the country’s brutal civil war.

Volunteer landmines clearer Fahd al-Ghajar (right) with a friend in a landmine storage facility in Damascus, Syria. Photograph: Fahd al-Ghajar/Facebook

Thousands of landmines and unexploded shells and munitions are scattered across the country in major cities and rural areas that witnessed military operations and bombings over 14 years.

As families return to their homes, accidental contact is killing hundreds. Children are particularly vulnerable to cluster munitions, sometimes mistaking them for toys. By last week, 640 people had been killed or injured, according to the world’s largest land mine charity, the Halo Trust. An earlier UN report had found that a third of the victims were children.

“We cannot say that any area in Syria is safe from war remnants,” said Mohammed Sami Al Mohammed, mine action programme coordinator for the Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, an NGO funded by governments and development organisations.

Mohammed said it would take decades to remove the mines and make Syria safe. “There are countries where wars ended 40 years ago, yet they are still unable to completely eliminate this danger. The matter is not that simple and what happened in Syria is far more devastating than what occurred in other places.”

Volunteers have been helping to try to clear people’s land to make it safe for them to return, but tragically have also been losing their own lives as a consequence.

Since the fall of the Assad regime in December last year, Fahd al-Ghajar, 35, had been regularly posting pictures on Facebook showcasing his dangerous work clearing mines in various locations across Syria.

In one of his posts, he expressed pride in removing mines from farmland used for grazing livestock, captioning it: “The most beautiful thing is the end.” In February, Ghajar wrote about the death of one of his colleagues, saying: “Syria is free, but we, the engineering team, lose someone every day. In the end, we are all dead; what matters is to clean the country.”

On 21 February, Ghajar was killed by a landmine explosion while demining a farm in northern Syria. He had successfully cleared the house, but a mine detonated while he was inspecting the field, killing him instantly, said his brother Abduljabbar Alghajar.

Fahd al-Ghajar, in the last photograph he published before his death in February 2022. He was searching for landmines in Idlib, northern Syria. Photograph: Fahd al-Ghajar/Facebook

Ghajar, who was married with four children, had learned how to plant and remove mines while working for the Syrian army prior to the start of the civil war in 2011, after which he left and joined the opposition movement seeking to bring an end to the Assad regime.

“He sacrificed himself so that others could live,” said Alghajar, who remembered him often saying: “The country has been liberated, and we, the engineering specialists, must stand by these people and remove the mines to help them return to their homes.”