Shah Agha is one of more than 100,000 Afghans living with injuries caused by land mines. He lost his leg to a mine during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s in his native Kunduz Province in northern Afghanistan. In 2015, another unexploded weapon injured him again.
“My life is miserable,” he told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. “I am always in need of help.”
Noor, who goes by only one name, lost both his legs to a mine blast. The Kabul resident says disabled Afghans cannot access education, jobs, or even move freely.
“Both our society and the government do little to give us our rights,” he said.
Agha and Noor are among the hundreds of Afghans killed and maimed every year by land mines left behind during more than four decades of war.
Mine-clearing agencies in Afghanistan, one of the most mine-infested countries globally, now fear an even larger number of Afghans will soon become victims of land mines.
Calls To End Aid
They say the clearing of killer munitions that still litter large swaths of Afghanistan could soon stop amid calls to end aid to the country ruled by the extremist Taliban group.
Ahead of his inauguration this month, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly criticized Washington’s assistance to Afghanistan.
The United States is the leading donor for humanitarian operations in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in the country after the final U.S. military withdrawal from the country in August 2021.
“Deaths and injuries, especially among children and women, will increase,” Shahabuddin Hakimi, head of the Mine Detection Center (MDC), an Afghan demining NGO, told Radio Azadi.
Since 1989, over 45,000 Afghans have been killed by land mines, according to the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS). Deminers have so far cleared over 3,000 square kilometers of some 14 million pieces of unexploded ordnance, including 764,000 antipersonnel mines and more than 33,460 anti-vehicle mines.
Casualties ‘Set To Increase’
UNMAS estimates land mines still threaten more than 1,700 communities spread across Afghanistan, where over 1,200 square kilometers of territory still needs to be cleared of unexploded munitions.
Hakimi said that a decline in funding has forced the MDC to cease nearly 80 percent of its operations during the past year.
He says the lack of demining has already increased the number casualties from land mines to 60 per month. In previous years, Afghans suffered an average of 50 mine-related casualties per month — one of the highest rates in the world.
“These casualties are set to increase this year as refugees return from Iran and Pakistan and internally displaced populations return to their homes,” Hakimi said.
An estimated 2 million Afghans have been forced to return from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, which have been hosting millions of Afghans since the decadelong Soviet invasion of their country that began in December 1979.
The end of fighting after the Taliban’s return to power has prompted hundreds of thousands more displaced Afghans to return to their homes across the country.
Last year, 455 Afghan civilians were killed or injured by 234 land mine blasts, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. These include 359 children, indicating they constitute nearly 80 percent of the victims of explosive hazards.
“Currently, mine action is among the most underfunded sectors in Afghanistan, said a spokesperson of the HALO Trust, a British charity and one of the leading demining groups in Afghanistan.”[The country] no longer has the resources needed to stem the problem.”
Blinding Blast Can’t Stop Former Afghan Policeman From Defusing Bombs
The spokesperson said that, over the past two years, funding for mine action has halved, forcing demining groups to dramatically reduce their workforce.
Today, only 3,000 of the 15,000 Afghan deminers working before the Taliban returned to power are still clearing dangerous explosives. According to the HALO Trust, more than 40 percent of Afghan deminers lost their jobs over the past two years.
“The country is facing a paradox of reduced donor support and increase in humanitarian need and rising poverty,” the spokesperson said.
Humanitarian Crisis
According to the UN, Afghanistan has one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, with more than half of its 40 million population in need of assistance.
Yet the Taliban’s restrictions on women and new humanitarian crises elsewhere have prompted Western donors to cut aid to the country.
Kabul lost all its development assistance, which funded most of its government expenses after the Taliban toppled the pro-Western Afghan Republic.
The country is now in danger of losing more humanitarian aid. On January 7, Trump accused President Joe Biden of paying “billions of dollars to essentially the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
In a letter to the U.S. president-elect on January 2, Republican Congressman Tim Burchett urged him to stop cash aid to Afghanistan, some of which he alleged was going to the Taliban.
source : rferl