When rebels toppled the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad four months ago, they ended – at least for now – 14 years of war. But as front lines quieted and borders opened, refugees and displaced Syrians heading home have discovered new dangers: Shells, bombs, mines, and other explosive remnants of the conflict are littered across the country, and deminers say it will take significant time and money to make all of Syria safe again.
In the months following al-Assad’s 8 December fall, reports of deaths and injuries from explosive remnants of war have come with disturbing regularity: five children injured in rural Aleppo on 2 January; 2 people killed and a child injured in rural Homs on 13 January; 2 people killed and 10 injured in Deraa on 28 January.
These are just a few of the dozens of headlines – there are many more, and most incidents likely don’t make the news. According to records kept by The HALO Trust, a humanitarian demining NGO that has been working in Syria since 2017, 324 people were killed and 311 injured by mines and other explosives in the three months between the regime’s ouster and early March.
This is likely an undercount. While there are no comprehensive statistics from across the country before the regime’s fall, deminers say casualties are rising as more people head home, sometimes to villages that haven’t been entered in years.
The scale of the problem isn’t captured by numbers yet, either. One estimate says there are more than 300,000 mines across Syria, but there is not yet one map or figure that takes into account all the explosives left over from the war.
To better capture the explosive legacy of Syria’s war, The New Humanitarian’s Zeina Shahla spent the past few months traversing parts of the country that were formerly held by both rebels and the government – from once-besieged neighbourhoods of Damascus to Homs to Idlib. She tagged along with deminers and educators, and spoke with farmers who are itching to get back to their fields. She met people who are tackling explosives with their well-trained hands, and others who are still trying to get their heads around what it means to try to rebuild their lives in the face of destruction and lingering danger.
Behind every headline and statistic is a person and a story, so weaved throughout this piece are profiles and images of Syrians living with mines in one way or another. Click on the boxes to read their stories.
Returning to danger
As al-Assad fled Damascus in December, many Syrians headed in the opposite direction, returning from neighbouring countries or to parts of the country that were previously off limits because of the war’s front line and divisions.
Between December and early April, an estimated 372,000 people have returned to Syria from outside the country, and more than one million have gone home after internal displacement, according to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR. While it’s not clear how many of these people have returned for good, it’s still only a small proportion of the 14 million people who were forced to flee over the course of the war, and these numbers could rise now that we are through the colder winter months.
There are myriad challenges for those who have gone back, or that prevent people from even trying: Destroyed homes, a ravaged economy, a severe lack of basic infrastructure in many parts of the country, and continued fears of instability are just a few of the obstacles for returnees.
A cautious return
One resident of the Damascus neighbourhood of Jobar – home to some of the fiercest fighting in the Syrian civil war – goes home for the first time in 12 years to find hidden dangers lurking amongst the rubble.
Mouhammad Sami al-Mohammed, manager of the mine action programme at the Syria Civil Defence – better known as the White Helmets – said deaths and injuries clearly shot up after al-Assad’s fall.
He said his organisation cleared the same amount of unexploded ordnance (known as UXO) in December – the month after the regime’s ouster – than it had over the previous 11 months.
While this in part demonstrates that the White Helmets are now able to enter territory that was previously held by the government – they had been restricted to the rebel-held northwest – al-Mohammed said it also “shows the high level of contamination, especially in areas where Syrians are trying to go and re-settle”.
Speaking from his Damascus office, al-Mohammed explained that his team of around 110 people was “surprised” by the number and variety of remnants of war they had already found. He was particularly concerned about parts of rural Idlib, Aleppo, and Hama that had seen heavy conflict, were under government control until December, and had never been demined.
“This is one of the main challenges facing returnees,” al-Mohammed said, “in addition to the lack of basic services, the level of destruction and the high cost of reconstruction.”
In the field with Syria’s deminers
Even though Syria does not have a centralised list of the victims of landmines and UXOs, it still regularly tops international lists of people killed by landmines and other unexploded remnants of war.
In January, UNICEF said at least 422,000 incidents involving UXOs had been reported across Syria over the past nine years, estimating that half “ended in tragic child casualties”. The Syrian Network of Human Rights has documented “the deaths of at least 3,521 civilians as a result of landmine explosions between March 2011 and the end of 2024”.
But until recently, Syria was a country divided, at war, and extremely difficult for deminers to work in (the exception being northeast Syria, where clearance work has been ongoing for some time, although some of this activity has been hit by the recent USAID cuts).
As his organisation looks to expand from the formerly rebel-held northwest across Syria, HALO Trust Syria country director Damian O’Brien told The New Humanitarian that one priority is getting a handle on where their work needs to be done most.
A team of HALO Trust deminers clear a cluster bomb from a field in rural Aleppo province, a process that takes about four hours. (Hasan Belal/TNH)
“It’s a big job to do an assessment of the whole country to find out where all the contamination is,” he explained. “But the maps that we and other organisations have produced clearly show where the most dense contamination is. And we can say that there are probably explosive hazards in every community in Syria.”
Ridding Syria of these hazards, O’Brien said, is part of a bigger picture obstructing return and reconstruction. His organisation receives daily calls from Syrians across the country, including farmers and shepherds, asking for help dealing with explosive items they have found.
One of these calls resulted in HALO deminers heading earlier this year to the village of Abbad, in southwest Aleppo province.
Everything looked normal to the untrained eye. The field had been ploughed, and in the middle sat a ball. It looked like it could be a toy.
But the HALO team knew what it was looking at. The ball was a cluster munition, discovered by the land’s owner, who had spotted something unusual and called for help.
“I am a source of safety for my family”
Syrian deminer Lama Haj Kaddour explains why she hopes more women will get into a field she has found empowering, and how the dangers of her job keep her on top of her game.
For the next four hours, a team of five trained deminers carefully surrounded the munition with sandbags. They remotely detonated it from a safe distance they had calculated by assessing the size of the weapon and the explosive charge.
Moayad al-Nofali, operations manager of the HALO team, explained that civilians are first evacuated from the area as a precautionary measure. Cluster munitions, he said, are dangerous for several reasons. The weapons send out multiple tiny bomblets, which often don’t look dangerous but can be deadly. Many are also designed not to explode immediately, which means they can lie dormant in fields and between houses for years.
The Syrian government and its Russian allies were regularly documented using cluster munitions – which are banned by international treaties as they often kill civilians indiscriminately – in their campaigns against rebel forces.
About half an hour’s drive from Abbad, another HALO Trust team was dealing with a less common hazard. In Lof, a village in Idlib province, returning residents found a three-metre-long rocket lodged between two homes.
Feras Kleifat, who believed the rocket to be Russian, said the deminers planned to explode the rocket in a hole they dug in an open field, after evacuating people beyond a one-kilometre radius.
Kleifat, a Jordanian expert deminer, said ridding the village of the rocket would allow the community to start coming back to life. “The place was like a busy beehive before the war. Now everyone is afraid. We can give them a sense of security back,” he said.
Further south in Homs province, White Helmets teams were also busy. They had received a call from a man who had recently returned to his land to find a “disaster”. The deminers headed to the town of al-Jabrieh to find a worrying scene: Eight cluster munitions were spread across a field, extremely close to a main road.
On the lookout in rural Homs
While mine clearance requires special skills, calling for help is becoming a community responsibility.
Team leader Hasan Tolfah calmly explained how the clearance was going to work, with a priority on keeping civilians away. “We first surround the area with ribbons and warning signs to make sure no one approaches,” he said. Only after a secure zone had been established, would they examine the munitions and figure out the best plan to destroy them.
It would take several days to clear the field, Tolfah said, given how many munitions there were.
Tolfah himself lost a leg several years ago while working in mine clearance. After learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, he got back to work.
Having come from rural Hama and seen so many years of war, the chance to rebuild Syria makes his job feel more important than ever.
“We will need decades to clean the country [of mines and UXOs],” Tolfah said. “But at least we’ve started.”
Spreading awareness, saving lives
As Syria looks forward and hopes to rebuild, clearance is a crucial task. But it takes time, and money, which is always a challenge.
In the meantime, deminers emphasise that it is crucial to teach civilians how to best keep themselves safe.
For example, as other deminers responded to calls, a group of children were sitting on the ground in the Idlib village of al-Nayrab listening to three women who work with the HALO Trust. The women showed them images of various explosives and remnants of war, leading games and interactive exercises that demonstrate what to do if they come across these items.
An Idlib village springs back to life
In northwest Syria, farmers in a village famous for its olive trees are working the groves without fear.
Kawthar Abu Deen, leader of this awareness team, said there were four teams like hers, working inside displacement camps and parts of the country that have become newly accessible to civilians. The hope, she said, “is to mitigate the risk [posed by remnants of war] by spreading awareness across all groups in society”.
Different sessions are tailored to target children and adults, and they can be conducted in schools, homes, or public spaces – anywhere people gather. While the methods of instruction vary, the messages are the same: Do not go near damaged or destroyed buildings, stay away from unpopulated areas, and report suspicious objects.
“We are glad to see how happy people are to return to their villages, but we are worried too,” said Abu Deen. “We have seen many incidents in the past weeks where people have been injured or killed.”
Abu Deen explained how her team coordinates with the mine clearance teams, passing on any information they get about potential danger spots. More and more villages are calling her, asking for the awareness team to visit.
“The need is huge, and we wish we could have more teams and sessions all around Syria,” she added. “We see how people are rushing to go back to places that they have missed so much… this is a Herculean task.”
A HALO Trust awareness team shows residents of al-Nayrab village what different types of UXOs look like, and what to do if they come across them. (Hasan Belal/TNH)
Working with the new Syrian government
The tasks of mine risk education and demining are particularly challenging given that the aid response to Syria was already chronically underfunded even before the recent USAID cuts.
“For years, mine action in Syria has been underfunded by donors in comparison to the needs, frustrating efforts to begin new programming or continue basic work, such as mine risk education,” Human Rights Watch said in an 8 April report. “Because of these limitations, clearance is often undertaken by local and private groups or individuals with little or no formal training or coordination with national or international mine clearance operators.”
All deminers The New Humanitarian spoke with said the new government and aid bodies will have to work together if they want to get anything done.
Al-Mohammed of the White Helmets said he wanted to see aid groups and government bodies implement a national plan for the entire country – first to map out what needs to be done, then to coordinate clearance.
He said the White Helmets would like to scale up both their clearance and awareness teams right away, but “there is a huge gap between the needs and the actual funding”. He cited one estimate that it would take $110 million to demine all of Syria, and called for technical support, equipment, and advanced training.
One deminer’s determination
Ammar Zamzam has seen the horrors of Syria’s war firsthand. Now he wants to clean them up.
“The good news,” said O’Brien of The HALO Trust, “is that Syria is not a very big country. The work is slow, and we need to examine a vast amount of land and previous front lines that changed a lot… but we can access most of them easily.”
There is a need, he said, for people and equipment, which could mean more job opportunities for Syrians. HALO has already started to hire more people, more than doubling its mine clearance staff since the start of the year.
Funding is an issue, but so far none of the major demining organisations have yet been hit by the USAID cuts (with the exception of some of the groups working in the northeast). However, this could change in the future.
Despite the hard work ahead and the tough funding environment, Joseph McCartan, chief of the mine action programme at UNMAS Syria, was – to some extent at least – hopeful about the future.
The role of UNMAS is to help build national demining capacity, make sure international demining standards are met, coordinate between demining organisations, and “plug any gaps”, he explained, adding that the ultimate goal is to hand overall demining work to Syrians.
UNMAS is also lobbying for more money for demining, and McCartan said he was “optimistic that donors will come forward with substantial funding”.
“Mine action is a priority now on many levels,” McCartan said from his Damascus office. “Syria can’t be rebuilt, and people cannot return home while there is all of this explosive contamination… But if we can solve the problem, then a lot of other things naturally fall into place. People can return home. Cities, infrastructure, and industries can be rebuilt. The agricultural sector can recover. Even tourism can be restored.”
Edited by Annie Slemrod.
