Explosive remnants of Syrian civil war pose a daunting challenge

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An EOD team deals with a Russian-made 220mm Uragan thermobaric_rocket rocket found at a site in Luf village, Saraqib district of Idlib governorate in Syria. (The HALO Trust photo)
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Updated 03 February 2025
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Explosive remnants of Syrian civil war pose a daunting challenge

  • Unexploded ordnance and landmines threaten civilians, with children most at risk of death or injury
  • As displaced Syrians return, accidents are expected to rise due to inadequate clearance, experts warn

LONDON: The sudden fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in early December prompted around 200,000 Syrians to return to their war-ravaged homeland, despite the widespread devastation. But the land they have come to reclaim harbors a deadly threat.

Almost 14 years of civil war contaminated swathes of the Syrian Arab Republic with roughly 324,600 unexploded rockets and bombs and thousands of landmines, according to a 2023 estimate by the US-based Carter Center.

In the last four years alone, the Syrian Arab Republic has recorded more casualties resulting from unexploded ordnance than any other country, yet no nationwide survey of minefields or former battlefields has been conducted, according to The HALO Trust.

Those explosives have maimed or killed at least 350 civilians across the Syrian Arab Republic since the Assad regime fell on Dec. 8, Paul McCann, a spokesperson for the Scotland-based landmine awareness and clearance charity, told Arab News.

The actual toll, however, is likely much higher. “We think that’s an undercount because large areas of the country have no access or monitoring, particularly in the east,” he added.

Children bear the brunt of these hidden killers.

Ted Chaiban, deputy executive director for humanitarian action and supply operations at the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, warned that explosive debris is the leading cause of child casualties in Syria, killing or injuring at least 116 in December alone.

According to McCann, the bulk of the documented incidents involving landmines and unexploded ordnance took place in Idlib province, north of Aleppo, and Deir Ezzor, where intense battles between regime forces and opposition groups had occurred.

“There is a long frontline — maybe several hundred kilometers — running through parts of Latakia, Idlib, and up to north of Aleppo, where the government was on one side, and they built large earthen barriers,” he said.

“They used bulldozers to push up big walls and dig trenches, and in front of their military positions they put a lot of minefields.”

McCann said the exact number of landmines, across the Syrian Arab Republic and in the northwest specifically, remains unknown. “We don’t know exactly how many, because there hasn’t been a national survey,” he said.

After the regime’s forces withdrew from these areas, locals discovered maps detailing the location of dozens of minefields. Although it will take time and resources to clear these explosives, such maps make containment far easier.

“There was a battalion command post, and when the troops left, local residents went in and found some maps of local minefields,” McCann said. “So, for that one area, we’ve discovered there were 40 minefields, but this could be repeated up and down this line for all the different military positions.”

Landmines planted systemically by warring parties are not the only threat. HALO reported “huge amounts of explosive contamination anywhere that there might have been a battle or been any kind of fighting.”

One such area is Saraqib, east of Idlib. The northwestern city endured a major battle in 2013, fell to rebel forces, was recaptured by the Syrian Army in 2020, and was then seized during the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham-led offensive on Nov. 30.

“The city was fought over by the government and multiple different opposition groups, who sometimes fought each other,” McCann said. “And in a big spread south of there, there are dozens of villages that we’ve been through which are contaminated with explosives.”

The Carter Center warned in a report published in February 2024 that the “scale of the problem is so large that there is no way any single actor can address it.”

Since Assad’s ouster, HALO has seen a 10-fold surge in calls to its emergency hotline in areas near the Turkish border where it operates.

“Every time our teams dispose of a piece of ordnance… people hear the explosion and they come running to say, ‘I found something in my house’ or ‘I found something on my land, can you come and have a look? Can you come and take care of that?” McCann said.

“We are hoping to be able to increase the size of the program as quickly as possible to deal with the demand.”

As the only mine clearance operator in northwest Syria, HALO is struggling to keep up with surging demand. With funding for only 40 deminers, the organization is desperately understaffed, HALO’s Syrian Arab Republic program manager Damian O’Brien said in a statement. 

HALO urgently needs emergency funding “to help bring the Syrian people home to safety,” he said. “Clearing the debris of war is fundamental to getting the country back on its feet,” he added.

The urgency of clearing unexploded ordnance in Syria has grown as displaced communities, often unaware of those hidden dangers, rush to return home and rebuild their lives.

“One of the problems we’re finding is the people are coming back now,” McCann said. “They want to plant the land for spring. They want to start getting the land ready because they’re going to need the income to rebuild.

“Millions of homes have been either destroyed by fighting, or they’ve been destroyed by the regime that stripped out the windows and the doors and the roofs and the copper pipes and the wiring to sell for scrap.”

The war in the Syrian Arab Republic created one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with more than 13 million forcibly displaced, according to UN figures. With Assad’s fall, hundreds of thousands returned from internal displacement and neighboring countries.

And as host countries, including Turkiye, Lebanon and Jordan, push to repatriate Syrian refugees, UNICEF’s Chaiban warned in January that “safe return cannot be achieved without intensified humanitarian demining efforts.”

HALO’s O’Brien warned in December that “returning Syrians simply don’t know where the landmines are lying in wait. They are scattered across fields, villages and towns, so people are horribly vulnerable.”

He added: “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Tens of thousands of people are passing through heavily mined areas on a daily basis, causing unnecessary fatal accidents.”

Unless addressed, these hidden killers will impact multiple generations of Syrians, causing the loss of countless lives and limbs long after the conflict has ended, the Carter Center warned.

Economic development will also be disrupted, particularly in urban reconstruction and agriculture. Environmental degradation is another concern. As munitions break down, they leach chemicals into the soil and groundwater.

But safely demining an area is costly and securing adequate funding has been a challenge. Mouiad Alnofaly, HALO’s senior operations officer in the Syrian Arab Republic, said disposal operations could cost $40 million per year.




Remnants from a ShOAB-0.5 submunition that struck Jisr al-Shughour in Saraqib, Idlib, Syria, on July 22, 2016, killing 12 and injuring dozens. (HRW photo)

Faced with these limitations, locals eager to cultivate their farmland are turning to unofficial solutions, hiring amateurs who are not trained to international standards, resulting in more casualties, McCann warned.

“People are returning and trying to plant, and so we’re hearing reports that they’re hiring ex-military personnel with metal detectors to do some sort of clearance of their land, but it’s not systematic or professional,” he said.

“I met a man a few days ago who said his neighbor had hired an ex-soldier with a metal detector to find the mines on his land. The man (ex-soldier) was killed straight away, and the neighbor was injured.”

McCann emphasized that a field cannot be considered safe until every piece of explosive debris and every landmine has been removed.




Unexploded munitions dug up by farmers at a field in Syria. (The HALO Trust photo)

“If there are 50 mines in a field, and somebody finds 49 of them, the field still cannot be used,” he said. “You can only hand back land when you are 100 percent confident that every single mine is gone.

“So, even in places where some people are removing mines, we don’t know if all of them have been cleared, and we’ll have to do clearance again in the future.”

Although the northwest of the Syrian Arab Republic is riddled with unexploded ordnance, locals remain resolute in their determination to stay and rebuild their lives — a decision that is likely to lead to an increase in accidents.

“We think the number of accidents will increase because a lot of people don’t want to leave their displaced communities in Idlib in the winter,” McCann said. “They’re waiting for the weather to improve.”




Unexploded 220mm Uragan rocket found in the village of Lof near Saraqib, Idlib governorate. (The HALO Trust photo)

In the village of Lof near Saraqib, one resident HALO encountered returned to work on his land just hours after the charity’s team had neutralized an unexploded 220mm Uragan rocket. Had it detonated, it would have devastated the village.

“We took the rocket, dug a big hole, and evacuated the whole village,” McCann said. “We used an armored front loader to take it to this demolition site in the countryside.

“By the time we came back to the village, the landowner had started to rebuild his house where the rocket had been. He couldn’t touch it (before), and the rocket had been there probably since 2021.

“But within three or four hours of us removing the rocket, he had started to rebuild.”




Remnants from a ShOAB-0.5 submunition that struck Jisr al-Shughour, killing 12 and injuring dozens. (HRW photo)

Among the most common unexploded ordnance found in the northwest Syrian Arab Republic are TM-62 Russian anti-tank mines and ShOAB-0.5 cluster bombs.

Despite HALO’s 35 years of work in safely clearing explosive remnants of war, the scale of the problem, compounded by a lack of adequate resources, remains a significant challenge.

“To cover the whole country, there will have to be thousands of Syrians trained and employed by HALO over many years,” said program manager O’Brien.

And until international and local efforts are effectively coordinated to neutralize this deadly threat, the lives of countless civilians, particularly children, will continue to be at risk.
 

 


UN urges more support to speed up Syria refugee returns

Updated 4 sec ago
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UN urges more support to speed up Syria refugee returns

DAMASCUS: UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi has urged more international support for Syria to speed up reconstruction and enable further refugee returns after some 14 years of civil war.
“I am here also to really make an appeal to the international community to provide more help, more assistance to the Syrian government in this big challenge of recovery of the country,” Grandi told reporters on Friday on the sidelines of a visit to Damascus.
Syrians who had been displaced internally or fled abroad have begun gradually returning home since the December overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar Assad, whose brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 triggered war.
But the wide-scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns.
Grandi said over two million people had returned to their areas of origin, including around 1.5 million internally displaced people, while some 600,000 others have come back from neighboring countries including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkiye.
“Two million of course is only a fraction of the very big number of Syrian refugees and displaced, but it is a very big figure,” he said.
According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad.
Syria’s conflict displaced around half the pre-war population, with many internally displaced people seeking refuge in camps in the northwest.
Grandi said that after Assad’s toppling, the main obstacle to returns was “a lack of services, lack of housing, lack of work,” adding that his agency was working with Syrian authorities and governments in the region “to help people go back.”
He said he discussed the importance of the sustainability of returns with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani, including ensuring “that people don’t move again because they don’t have a house or they don’t have a job or they don’t have electricity” or other services such as health.
Sustainable returns “can only happen if there is recovery, reconstruction in Syria, not just for the returnees, for all Syrians,” he said.
He added that he also discussed with Shaibani how to “encourage donors to give more resources for this sustainability.”
With the recent lifting of Western sanctions, the new Syrian authorities hope for international support to launch reconstruction, which the UN estimates could cost more than $400 billion.

Water levels plummet at drought-hit Iraqi reservoir

Updated 21 June 2025
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Water levels plummet at drought-hit Iraqi reservoir

  • Visible cracks have emerged in the retreating shoreline of the artificial lake, which lies in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region and was created in the 1950s

DUKAN: Water levels at Iraq’s vast Dukan Dam reservoir have plummeted as a result of dwindling rains and further damming upstream, hitting millions of inhabitants already impacted by drought with stricter water rationing.
Amid these conditions, visible cracks have emerged in the retreating shoreline of the artificial lake, which lies in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region and was created in the 1950s.
Dukan Lake has been left three quarters empty, with its director Kochar Jamal Tawfeeq explaining its reserves currently stand at around 1.6 billion cubic meters of water out of a possible seven billion.
That is “about 24 percent” of its capacity, the official said, adding that the level of water in the lake had not been so low in roughly 20 years.
Satellite imagery analyzed by AFP shows the lake’s surface area shrank by 56 percent between the end of May 2019, the last year it was completely full, and the beginning of June 2025.
Tawfeeq blamed climate change and a “shortage of rainfall” explaining that the timing of the rains had also become irregular.
Over the winter season, Tawfeeq said the Dukan region received 220 millimeters (8.7 inches) of rain, compared to a typical 600 millimeters.


Upstream damming of the Little Zab River, which flows through Iran and feeds Dukan, was a secondary cause of the falling water levels, Tawfeeq explained.
Also buffeted by drought, Iran has built dozens of structures on the river to increase its own water reserves.
Baghdad has criticized these kinds of dams, built both by Iran and neighboring Turkiye, accusing them of significantly restricting water flow into Iraq via the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Iraq, and its 46 million inhabitants, have been intensely impacted by the effects of climate change, experiencing rising temperatures, year-on-year droughts and rampant desertification.
At the end of May, the country’s total water reserves were at their lowest level in 80 years.
On the slopes above Dukan lies the village of Sarsian, where Hussein Khader Sheikhah, 57, was planting a summer crop on a hectare of land.
The farmer said he hoped a short-term summer crop of the kind typically planted in the area for an autumn harvest — cucumbers, melons, chickpeas, sunflower seeds and beans — would help him offset some of the losses over the winter caused by drought.
In winter, in another area near the village, he planted 13 hectares mainly of wheat.
“The harvest failed because of the lack of rain,” he explained, adding that he lost an equivalent of almost $5,700 to the poor yield.
“I can’t make up for the loss of 13 hectares with just one hectare near the river,” he added.


The water shortage at Dukan has affected around four million people downstream in the neighboring Sulaimaniyah and Kirkuk governorates, including their access to drinking water.
For more than a month, water treatment plants in Kirkuk have been trying to mitigate a sudden, 40 percent drop in the supplies reaching them, according to local water resource official Zaki Karim.
In a country ravaged by decades of conflict, with crumbling infrastructure and floundering public policies, residents already receive water intermittently.
The latest shortages are forcing even “stricter rationing” and more infrequent water distributions, Karim said.
In addition to going door-to-door to raise awareness about water waste, the authorities were also cracking down on illegal access to the water network.
In the province of roughly two million inhabitants, the aim is to minimize the impact on the provincial capital of Kirkuk.
“If some treatment plants experience supply difficulties, we will ensure that there are no total interruptions, so everyone can receive their share,” Karim said.


Israel military says hit Hezbollah site in south Lebanon

Updated 21 June 2025
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Israel military says hit Hezbollah site in south Lebanon

  • The military said the site was used by Hezbollah “to advance terror attacks against Israeli civilians”

JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Saturday its navy hit a Hezbollah “infrastructure site” near the southern Lebanese city of Naqoura, a day after Israel’s foreign minister warned the Lebanese armed group against entering the Iran-Israel war.
“Overnight, an Israeli Navy vessel struck a Hezbollah ‘Radwan Force’ terrorist infrastructure site in the area of Naqoura in southern Lebanon,” the military said in a statement.
The military said the site was used by Hezbollah “to advance terror attacks against Israeli civilians.”
In a separate statement on Saturday, the military said it had “struck and eliminated” a Hezbollah militant in south Lebanon the previous day, despite an ongoing ceasefire between both sides.
In a statement carried by the official National News Agency, Lebanon’s health ministry said late on Friday that one person was killed in a “strike carried out by an Israeli enemy drone on a motorcycle” in the same south Lebanon village.
The November ceasefire aimed to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which sparked months of deadly hostilities by launching cross-border attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Palestinian ally Hamas following its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Lebanon’s army, which has been dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure as part of the truce, said earlier in June that the Israeli military’s ongoing violations and “refusal to cooperate” with the ceasefire monitoring mechanism “could prompt the (Lebanese) military to freeze cooperation” on site inspections.


Israeli military kill head of Palestine corps in IRGC’s overseas arm – defense minister

Updated 21 June 2025
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Israeli military kill head of Palestine corps in IRGC’s overseas arm – defense minister

  • Veteran commander, Saeed Izadi, led the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force
  • The Quds Force built up a network of Arab allies known as the Axis of Resistance

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday that the military had killed a veteran commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ overseas arm, in a strike in an apartment in Iran’s Qom.

The veteran commander, Saeed Izadi, led the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, Katz said in a statement.

There was no confirmation from the IRGC.

The Quds Force built up a network of Arab allies known as the Axis of Resistance, establishing Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 and supporting the Palestinian militant Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But Iran-aligned network has suffered major blows over the last two years, as Israeli offensives since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel have weakened both the Palestinian group and Hezbollah.

Katz said Izadi financed and armed Hamas during the initial attacks, describing the commander’s killing as a “major achievement for Israeli intelligence and the Air Force.”

Izadi was sanctioned by the US and Britain over what they said were his ties to Hamas and Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad, which also took part in the October 7 attacks.


Iran’s FM arrives in Istanbul for Arab League meeting

Updated 21 June 2025
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Iran’s FM arrives in Istanbul for Arab League meeting

  • Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

ISTANBUL: Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, Tasnim news agency reported, for a meeting with Arab League diplomats to discuss Tehran’s escalating conflict with Israel.

Around 40 diplomats are slated to join the weekend gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), as Israel and Iran continue to exchange missile strikes.

“The Foreign Minister arrived in Istanbul this morning to participate in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Foreign Ministers’ meeting,” Tasnim reported.

It comes after Araghchi met with his counterparts from Britain, France and Germany in Geneva on Friday.

“At this meeting, at the suggestion of Iran, the issue of the Zionist regime’s attack on our country will be specifically addressed,” said Iranian foreign Abbas Araghchi, according to the news agency.

Israel began its assault in the early hours of June 13, saying Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, triggering an immediate retaliation from Tehran in the worst-ever confrontation between the two arch-rivals.

Earlier on Friday, Araghchi said Tehran was ready to “consider diplomacy” again only if Israel’s “aggression is stopped.”

The Arab League ministers are expected to release a statement following their meeting, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu said.