Cluster bombs new peril for civilians

A village located near a military camp was struck by cluster bombs during air strikes on Tuesday night over Herat, western Afghanistan. A UN official said an unknown number of casualties had been taken to the main city hospital, while the village of Shaker Qala was littered with unexploded cluster bomblets, restricting the movement of local people for fear of injury.

Villagers came to the Mine Action Centre in Herat on Wednesday morning to report that their village was littered with bomblets. Dan Kelly, manager of the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, that the bomblets - bright yellow, weighing one and a half kilogrammes and the size of a soft drinks can - were extremely dangerous.

"Villagers do have a lot to be afraid of, as these bomblets, if they did not explode on impact, can explode if touched," he said. Kelly said there were normally 200 bomblets in a cluster bomb, and on average 10 percent failed to explode.

Kelly explained that the bomblets were designed with anti-vehicle capabilities, enabling them to pierce through 125 millimetres of armoured steel. Designed to fragment into hundreds of pieces of shrapnel at high velocity and able to ignite combustible materials, each bomblet is also a lethal antipersonnel device.

"The Mine Action Centre's quick-reaction team in Herat are presently clearing paths for villagers, and sandbagging the devices so that villagers can move outside their houses again," Kelly said. As the de-miners were not trained on or familiar with these devices, Kelly said they urgently required information on how to destroy the cluster devices and prevent further loss of human life.

Meanwhile, sources in Herat reported that 70 percent of the population of Herat city had fled to surrounding villages to avoid the ongoing bombing.