Making Syria safer, one mine at a time MARK MACKINNON Globe and Mail (Canada)

[Robin Collins]

Making Syria safer, one mine at a timeMARK MAC KIN NON SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT ALEPPO, SYRIA

The Globe and Mail (Ottawa/Quebec Edition)
Mar 15, 2025
Read more at:
https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/281702620491187


This email was sent to you by a user of Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail service contains copyrighted material, trade marks, and other proprietary information. Receipt of this email should not be interpreted as grant of any licenses express or implied, to the intellectual property of PressReader, PressReader Inc. or Globe and Mail presented.
©2014-2025 Globe and Mail, All rights reserved. Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy

The White Helmets are carefully removing explosives after the fall of the Assad regime The three men and two women moved slowly through the olive grove, their famed white construction hard hats glinting in the sun but their eyes firmly on the ground. The White Helmets stayed in a line, clutching yellow metal detectors as they advanced through the spindly trees. Finally, one member, Ramadan Mohammed, thrust his arm into the air and the group halted. A red flag was placed on the ground beside the tip of a mortar shell that he had spotted. The team inched forward again, even more cautiously, their eyes darting back and forth over the scrabbly soil in the village of Kafr Hamra, on the northern edge of Aleppo. Later, a Russian-made cluster bomblet was discovered in another part of the field, and a controlled explosion was carried out. 

 Two pieces of unexploded ordnance, or UXOS, cleared – and, across Syria, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 more to go. “If we keep going at this pace, it will take a minimum of 20 years,” the 30-year-old Mr. Mohammed said on Sunday, wiping sweat from his brow after two hours doing a job the team knows can rapidly turn to fatal from mundane. “There is no part of the country that is unaffected by UXOS.” The fall of Bashar al-assad’s regime on Dec. 8 brought at least a temporary end to Syria’s long and devastating civil war. But the relative peace has put the spotlight on the amount of damage done over more than 13 years of fighting – as well as the exorbitant number of unexploded bombs, rockets, artillery shells, mines and other dangerous detritus left behind. 

For the White Helmets – a rescue organization that emerged as one of the few heroes of the war as they raced to dig out people trapped in the rubble of regime bombings, recording their work with cameras attached to their headgear – the end of the fighting brought only fleeting relief. In the aftermath, the group faces a staggering workload. While some teams focus on UXOS, other squads work to clear away the buildings – and sometimes entire city blocks – that have been reduced to rubble so that this battered country can start to rebuild. All the while, the White Helmets are careful to preserve any evidence they find of mass graves, chemical weapons attacks and other apparent war crimes. If that wasn’t enough, the volunteer organization has also taken over as de facto first responders for the entire country, as the interim government of President Ahmed al-sharaa has pushed out suspected Assad sympathizers from the civil service, leaving the White Helmets operating the main fire station in the Syrian capital of Damascus. 

“We’re struggling with so many competing priorities,” Farouq Habib, deputy general manager of the White Helmets, said in an interview in the group’s office in Damascus. But, he added, it was a victory for the group to finally be able to operate across Syria again, after many years when it felt as if the revolution against Mr. al-assad was on the verge of defeat. 

Mr. Habib, who was already outside Syria at the time, played a co-ordination role in the 2018 rescue operation that saw 98 White Helmets members and their families, 422 people in all, evacuated to Jordan from southern Syria, with the majority eventually being resettled to Canada. At the time, the White Helmets – who played a key role in revealing potential war crimes committed by the regime and its allies to the world – were being specifically targeted by Mr. al-assad’s forces. After that evacuation, the group’s work was largely limited to the northwestern province of Idlib, which was under the control of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-sham militia headed by Mr. alSharaa. That earned the White Helmets the trust of what is now the national government, which asked them to perform the same tasks across the whole of Syria after the sudden fall of the regime in December. That co-operation has the White Helmets – who are funded by foreign governments, including Canada – awkwardly straddling the line between being a civil society organization and part of a government seen as playing a role in the new sectarian violence that has erupted. 

“At the moment, we’re an NGO delivering a wide range of services, including some which should be delivered by the government. But currently the government does not have a structure or the forces to do that,” Mr. Habib said. “We will split at some point. One will form a ministry in the new government, and one will stay an NGO.” The Uxo-clearing work is funded almost entirely by Canada, which donated $7.2-million to the White Helmets over a 15month period that ended Jan. 31. That money funded six teams, including the one sweeping the olive grove near Aleppo on Sunday. But the funding was meant only to help the White Helmets clear UXOS from the 6,000 square kilometres of Idlib governorate. 

Suddenly, the same six teams are working to clear all 185,000 square kilometres of Syria. Mr. Habib, whose family has settled in Montreal as refugees, said he was optimistic Canada would provide an injection of additional funding that would allow the organization to at least double the number of UXO teams in the field. On Wednesday, the Canadian government announced that it was temporarily lifting some sanctions imposed on Syria since 2011, specifically for transactions “aimed at the democratization and stabilization of Syria or the delivery of humanitarian assistance.” Ottawa also announced that it was providing $84-million in new humanitarian aid to Syria, while nominating Canada’s ambassador to Lebanon, Stefanie Mccollum, to concurrently serve as the country’s first ambassador to Syria since 2012. That’s all high politics to the thinly stretched White Helmets members working on the ground. Their dangerous tasks are further complicated these days as many members are fasting for Ramadan. 

Tariq Ibrahim, a 35-year-old who heads the Uxo-clearing effort around Aleppo, said he gives his team extra breaks during the Muslim holy month to help them maintain their focus. “Because your first mistake is your last mistake,” he said. Mara Hajj Ahmed, 25, one of the two women on the squad working in Kafr Hamra, said she had joined the White Helmets in 2023 out of a desire to do something to help her country. “My family was completely against it because of how dangerous it was.” But, she insisted, her job is only risky if she doesn’t follow her training. (Mr. Ibrahim said the six UXO teams haven’t suffered any casualties so far.) Locals told The Globe and Mail that both the mortar and the cluster bomblet found in the olive orchard were likely fired by forces loyal to Mr. al-assad during the devastating 2012 to 2016 siege of Aleppo, when Kafr Hamra was under the control of the rebel Free Syrian Army and other anti-assad factions. 

The surprise was that only one bomblet was found in the field. Usually when there’s one cluster munition, there are hundreds. As the White Helmets were filling sandbags to carry out the controlled detonation on Sunday, the owner of the olive grove, 40year-old Khalid Khattab, sheepishly acknowledged that there had originally been more than 20 of the tiny silver balls. He said he and his brother had been detonating the munitions themselves by shooting them with a Kalashnikov rifle – until his brother was hit in the stomach by flying shrapnel and taken to hospital. After that, he decided to call in the White Helmets. Mr. Ibrahim said a lack of education about the danger of UXOS is one of the biggest dangers Syria now faces, recounting a story about how a 10-year-old boy had taken a mortar shell home, killing his whole family when he accidentally set it off. “Some people collect the UXOS hoping to sell them for metal,” he said. “They do it out of poverty.” Mr. Habib said more than 120 people had been killed by UXOS in the three months since the fall of the regime. 

After the olive grove was cleared, the White Helmets drove a few kilometres to another town on the shattered northern edges of Aleppo. The second part of their mission was to check on an abandoned cache of artillery shells they had discovered in January, but which they hadn’t yet had time to properly dispose of. They arrived at the two-room house in Haiyan to discover someone had removed the red warning tape and the “Danger: Mines” signs they had placed in front of the building. Fortunately, the dozens of Russian-made shells – which have had their firing pins removed – were still inside. “Nothing ever stays in these places,” 27-year-old Yahia Hamoud muttered as he replaced the red tape and planted new warning signs. Mr. Hamoud and his family fled Aleppo at the start of the war. He hadn’t seen his hometown – where entire neighbourhoods have been all but flattened, and even the historic 4,000-year-old citadel is badly damaged – since 2011. He said it was bittersweet being back and helping to remove the dangers left behind by the war. “It’s a miracle to be standing here. We had given up on ever returning,” he said. “But seeing all the destruction, it aches my heart.”

[Andy Smith]

RiP Christopher Garret, AKA "Swampy", former tree surgeon on the Isle of Man.

I first met Chris in 2014 when Luke Atkinson asked me to help clear the land around a school in Myanmar - on the border with Thailand.

The international team comprised Luke, Pele (Mr Potato Head from Kosovo), Chris Garret and me. I was 60 and close to past it. Pele was younger but I knew him from NPA Sri Lanka where he lived up to his name. Chris was 29 and a novice, but keen to learn, energetic and up for anything. The local deminers varied according to local defence needs.

The work required border hopping illegally daily by canoe, building and then transporting a uniquely cheap ground preparation machine across the river and then searching/clearing the land around a recently constructed schoolhouse. The only detector was my F3 so most of it was done with rakes. Fact is, a lot of it was done by Luke and Chris. 

Incidentally, there was a lot of metal so Luke was actually faster with his rakes than I was with a detector. Two old men pretending to be young and competing - but my machine did make the whole thing achievable.

This was a volunteer effort so when the money ran out, Chris carried on alone and the job got done. He had caught the demining bug. I gave him some armour, tools and my F3 -  and he went to Ukraine where he became a soldier and EOD tech before going on to get EOD3 training in Kosovo where Ben accepted him because I had sponsored him.

Chris was from a different generation, addicted to social media and adrenaline, and in Ukraine he was working in a very active war zone. Always a maverick, he went on to establish a charity and did a great deal of good work with very little money (no traditional funding because he could not handle the bureaucracy). He never argued with my safety advice but he seldom heeded it. I have never known a better EOD tech but he took risks I would not have sanctioned (my risk tolerance being based on peacetime work). He died near the front line in Ukraine on Tuesday. Details are sketchy but it was a bounding fragmentation mine - probably an OZM-72. Another man died, and another was injured. Yes, I do know. But that's peacetime, and hindsight.

I am proud to have known Chris. He was a recent father so I fear for his wife and infant child. There will be no payout because the system does not value men like him appropriately. 

Sigh.

Funny old world.

Andy

[William Lawrence]

Thank you for sharing this moving tribute, Andy. 

Though I didn’t know Chris Garrett personally, his story speaks volumes—of courage, conviction, and a willingness to go where few would. From makeshift demining efforts in Myanmar to frontline EOD work in Ukraine, it’s clear he lived with intensity and purpose, even if it came with risk. 

It’s heartbreaking that such dedication often goes unrecognised by the systems meant to support those who sacrifice the most. 

May he rest in peace, and may his family find strength in the legacy he leaves behind.

Willie Lawrence

William Lawrence

UK +44 7986 043 732

Skopje +389 7094 80 62

"All hardships are but the petty inconveniences of a traveller, which sink into insignificance when compared with the pleasure of seeing new people and countries, strange manners and customs, and being able to temper the prejudices of one’s own country by observing those of others." Alexander Burnes [1805-1841].

---

From: demi...@googlegroups.com <demi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Andy Smith <a...@ddasonline.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 12:10:43 AM
To: demi...@googlegroups.com <demi...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [HD] and another one bites the dust

 

--
--
You have received this message because you are subscribed to the Humanitarian Demining forum - which is a forum for the discussion of all Mine Action topics - ranging from EOD and technical aspects of mines and ERW to field demining, survey, MRE, Advocacy, Campaigning and Victim's Assistance.
 
To post to this group, send an email to demi...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
demining-u...@googlegroups.com

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Humanitarian Demining" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to demining+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/demining/55ff3c19-f1d5-4e3d-ac85-2666e25b00e5%40ddasonline.com.