The day after Bashar Al Assad's regime fell in December, Mohammed Al Sghir went back to check on his family home in the Syrian desert city of Palmyra, alongside his uncle, a family friend and four children.
As the 43-year-old father-of-three entered the building, it exploded. He and the two other men were killed as mines detonated under their feet.
“The house was planted with all kinds of death. It was an enormous explosion, it rang out across Palmyra,” said Mohammed’s brother, Muthanna, 40, who had gone to pray at the time. The children – two of Mohammed’s own and two of his nieces and nephews – had remained in the car outside, so were spared, but were covered in dust from the explosion.
“The children were in the street, and they were the ones who got the news out. I ran to the house, it was absolutely awful,” Muthanna, whose family was displaced to Idlib province from their home city around nine years ago, told The National. “That house was the love of my father’s life, he put everything into it. And in one moment, it was all gone,” Muthanna said, beginning to cry.
Mines are a huge threat to Syrian civilians trying to return to their homes after being displaced by years of conflict. Unexploded remnants of war from conflicts in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Iraq have not been fully cleared years after the fighting ended, suggesting Syria faces a long battle against the deadly devices.
According to figures gathered by the Halo Trust, an international de-mining charity currently working in Idlib province in north-western Syria, 267 people have been killed by the devices across the country since the Assad regime fell. Scores more have been killed by improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance other than landmines, such as shells or rockets, and over 200 more injured.
The National visited the site of the Al Sghir home in Palmyra city, in Homs province, and Muthanna confirmed the location remotely. All that remains of the former house is a pile of grey rubble, a few teetering columns, and tangles of rebar. The three victims were buried in Palmyra, which resembles a ghost town, with much of its infrastructure and housing having been destroyed in years of conflict.
“We buried my brother the next day because there was nothing left of his body, just shreds,” said Muthanna. “The others remained for two days under the rubble before the specialist engineers could safely dismantle the mines." In the desert around Palmyra, mine clearance teams have raked through tonnes of explosives, stored in homes and other buildings and planted in the vast expanses of surrounding land.
military commander in the Syrian desert
According to two military officials in the city, between the fall of the Assad regime on December 8 and mid-January, the teams cleared at least 17 tonnes of mines from areas under their control, including 700 individual anti-personnel and anti-armour mines laid around the city's majestic Unesco world heritage site. While they believe they have largely cleared Palmyra city and its archaeological area, many more tonnes of mines remain in the desert.
“There are still more, four to five times more than this,” Amer Ahmed Jumaa, a military commander for Syria’s desert, known as the Badiya, told The National from an abandoned tourist resort being used as a base for security forces.
Outside, a team had just returned from a de-mining patrol with a lorry full of anti-personnel and anti-armour mines – hundreds of little green cylinders still covered in sand and mud from the desert. The National sent photographs to an expert formerly of the British military, who identified Iranian YM-1B, Soviet PMN-2 anti-personnel mines, and a Soviet TM-57 anti-tank mine among them.
“After we defuse the mines, we put them in places where we destroy them permanently,” Omar Ismail, head of the local mine disposal team, told The National. Twice in 24 hours in Palmyra, large booms rang out across the desert from what appeared to be ordnance exploding in controlled detonations.
Alongside the mines, Palmyra suffered severe destruction to infrastructure and housing, and the threat of unexploded ordnance is another reason why few of its pre-2011 population of more than 100,000 have returned. The city was occupied by ISIS on and off between 2015 and 2017, when it was retaken by pro-Assad forces, who fled when his regime collapsed in December.
whose brother was killed by a mine in Palmyra
Mr Ismail learnt de-mining tactics, including how to use mine detectors, from specialists in Idlib, in a pocket of territory that rebels retained control of before the Assad regime fell. “We got good expertise from them and we moved to work so that our role would be to protect civilians first, which means securing residential areas and humanitarian corridors, of course that’s first,” he told The National.
The military officials in Palmyra believe that pro-Assad, Iran-backed militias and regime forces that held the city until December laid mines around sites used as military bases. “They planted mines to protect themselves from any attack they anticipated, and to prevent civilians from approaching them,” Mr Ismail said. “We, as an engineering team, remove the mines properly, according to our experience and specialised work.”
The perimeter of Palmyra’s ancient ruins was mined to prevent vehicles entering the area, he believes. “As vehicles approached the heritage site, the mines would perhaps detonate,” he said. “The anti-personnel mines, meanwhile, were around the heritage site and in places where the regime and the Iranian militias had a presence.”
A significant problem in Syria’s desert is ensuring that livestock rearers are able to safely roam the expanses with their animals – a way of life that necessitates extra precautions. “For the Bedouin people, the shepherd, we have put in place [guards] around some zones so people cannot enter until the engineering team comes and dismantles the mines, and then the desert people can enter,” said Mr Jumaa.
Mr Jumaa said his team, which is part of the new Ministry of Defence, was well-equipped and trained to deal with the colossal scale of de-mining necessary, and was not receiving help from any foreign organisation. “Honestly, we have a team that is carrying out its duty.” he said. He answered with a tut, indicating “no”, when asked if his men needed extra support.
That assessment may have been premature. Two weeks after The National visited Palmyra, another local military official passed on news that Mr Ismail had been badly injured during a de-mining operation in the desert. One of his team members was killed.
For people like Mohammed Al Sghir, Syria needs more help to rid its landscapes of mines. “There are bodies responsible for mines, but the scale of the mines is huge, they are spread across huge expanses in Palmyra and the desert,” said Muthanna. "Other countries need to provide support – awareness about mines, equipment, specialists, civil defence."
Many Syrians want to return to their homes, but the risk of unexploded ordnance is still too high, Muthanna added. “Death is still planted everywhere.”
