It is a Sunday morning in March and the team of Maamoun al Omar, head of the War Remnants Disposal Center of the Syrian Civil Defense (White Helmets) in Ariha (north of the country), has just received a call from a man reporting of the presence of a strange object in a residential area of Al Nayrab. The team heads to the location and cordons off the area to prevent civilians from entering. With extreme caution, they approach and photograph the object. The Civil Defense Center confirms that it is an explosive. Two women surround him with bags of earth and spray him with a substance to cause a controlled detonation. Al Omar suspects that the explosive was a cluster bomb, although a report must still confirm this. “Not a month goes by without us destroying between six and ten bombs of this type,” says Al Omar.
The Government of Syria and its Russian ally have launched Since 2011, missiles loaded with cluster bombs have been targeting the northern regions of the country, according to various international organizations. These weapons contain dozens of explosive metal balls and rectangles that spread when they reach their target. However, approximately a third of them do not explode at the moment, although they remain active and represent an enormous risk to the population, since they can explode if someone touches them. A total of 124 countries have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which “prohibits all use, production, transfer and storage” of this type of explosives. Among the non-signatory countries are the United States, which used these weapons in Iraqand Russia, which has dropped them on Ukraine and Syria.
One of these bombs was the one that injured Abdul Rahman al Safar. “I thought it was a ball. But when I threw it to the ground, it exploded in my leg and I felt the pain,” says this Syrian boy, who was four years old when a cluster bomb destroyed his right foot, in a low voice and with a sad look. The accident occurred when he returned to his home in 2020. A year earlier, the attacks by the Bashar al-Assad regime in the north of the country had forced the eight members of the Al Safar family to leave his home. When they returned, they found the house full of weeds and war debris. One day, Abdul Rahman was playing in the grass and found a red ribbon tied to an artifact and picked it up. “I heard an explosion and I started running,” remembers Maryam Matr, 42, the little boy's mother. “We took him immediately to the hospital,” Matr continues, in an interview from her home with this newspaper. The woman says that her grandmother Hassana al Satouf also died in a similar incident from a cluster bomb explosion in 2019. “We had never seen these explosives before in our life and we didn't know what they look like. “My husband has found several in different places,” says the woman.
“This type of bomb is a piercing weapon that causes very serious injuries,” explains Al Omar. In addition, some, like the M77, have a white or red ribbon that “catches the attention especially of the little ones, who think it is a toy, but when they touch it or move it the explosion occurs,” the man warns.
Mustafa Muhanna Sukhouri, 14, and his brother Abdullah, 16, neighbors of Abdul Rahman al Safar, were also injured by shrapnel all over their bodies as a result of the explosion of a cluster bomb they found on the land next to them. from their house, where they were working. “We thought it was a game and started to dismantle it. My brother threw it against the rock and it exploded on impact. Our neighbor was near us and took us to the hospital,” says Mustafa.
Since the war broke out in 2011, the Syrian regime, supported by Russia, has used more than a dozen models of cluster bombs, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. This organization has documented between 2011 and April 2023 the deaths of 2,971 civilians, including 765 children and 304 women, as a result of landmine explosions. Additionally, 382 civilians, including 124 children and 31 women, lost their lives as a result of exploding cluster munition debris — more than 600,000 people have died in the Syrian war since the conflict began, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. —. As of 2021, Syria was the country with the highest number of cluster munition casualties in the world, a position now led by Ukraine, according to the report of the International Alliance to Eliminate Cluster Munitions and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The types of cluster munitions that Al Omar says they frequently encounter are ShOAB-0.5 and AO-2.5RT/RTM. They are the same weapons mentioned in a report by Human Rights Watch in which it is stated that Syria and Russia have used them on a large scale in their attacks. “We are intensifying awareness sessions on war remains in schools,” says the person in charge of weapons deactivation. The Syrian Network for Human Rights also points directly to the Assad regime and Moscow in a report in which it states that most of the explosives were placed in border areas, especially between Syria and Turkey. “We must continue working on their elimination because they are a real danger,” says the director of the organization, Fadl Abdul Ghani, in an interview with this newspaper.
The artillery and aerial bombardments that continue from time to time to target the northwestern region of Syria may hamper operations to search for and eliminate these munitions. “The solution is to stop the bombings against civilians completely and for specialist teams to begin removing these remains in a comfortable and large-scale manner. These bombings prevent us from visiting many areas and towns to work comfortably on eliminating these remains,” concludes Al Omar. “The situation is dangerous because we, in the Syrian network, are still registering injuries and deaths,” explains Ghani.
Reem Rahmoun, 26, knows the risk, but she is still one of the volunteers working to defuse explosives. “We underwent a high-precision course to learn about the types of remnants of war and unexploded ordnance and deal with them without harming ourselves or our colleagues,” says Rahmoun from Al Nayrab, the place where in this Sunday of March, Al Omar's team has managed to remove a possible explosive. Despite the danger, she compensates him, because she makes him happy to “save lives.” There are no precise statistics available on victims of remnants of war and cluster munitions in Syria, but according to UN data, around 28% of the Syrian population over the age of two suffers from some form of disability as a result of the war.
Without proper treatment, the consequences of amputations and injuries worsen. Abdul Rahman is still suffering from the consequences of the explosion four years later. No organization funded his treatment and the costs have become a burden on his family as he needs medications and moisturizers to repair his skin. Without resources, his mother can only cure him with olive oil. And the little boy, who before the explosion was a restless child who enjoyed playing, is now afraid of everything around him.
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