Where War’s Legacy Is Just a Step Away

Everywhere, the city is booby-trapped.

A woman returns to her home after five years in a refugee camp, opens a door and loses her life. A bus crammed with wedding day revelers runs over a mine and 45 die. A farmer wades into his field, walks around, loses a leg.

Six years after the shooting stopped in this city, the mines are still claiming victims. So are old grenades, unexploded shells and even bombs that look like toy butterflies. Children play among the mines, women step around them. A few times a week, another one explodes.

Rohibullah Amidullah, 16, was swimming in the creek that runs through town when his foot came down on something hard. An old land mine exploded, and Rohibullah’s left leg blew apart below the knee. His buddies, still soaking from their swim, carried him to the hospital.

“I thought I had stepped on a stone,” said Rohibullah, his stump wrapped in a bandage.

A quarter-century of modern war has turned Afghanistan into the most heavily mined country in the world, a junkyard of unexploded ordnance. In the years of fighting that engulfed the nation, each army laid its mines and fired its shells--and each retreated without cleaning them up. First the Soviet army, then the holy warriors who fought it, then the holy warriors again when they started fighting among themselves.

There are thousands of booby-traps, set to explode whenever a person does any number of ordinary things, like picking up a book or stepping into a room.

No one knows how many mines and other explosives still litter Afghanistan--maybe millions, certainly thousands. And no one knows how many people have been killed or maimed by mines and shells, but one can guess: In the capital, Kabul, alone, an average of 50 people a day died or were injured by mines and shells in 1995.

The thousands of de-miners working in Afghanistan--de-mining is one of the country’s largest industries--speak of an archeology of land mines: layers of mines, each dated by its depth in the soil. Buried deepest is usually a Soviet mine, then a layer of rubble, then a mine laid by the moujahedeen, or holy warriors. Sometimes there’s another layer of rubble, then another mine. So far, de-miners have discovered 51 different types of mines, including one that leaps from the ground before it explodes.

“There are mines buried underneath mines, mines in collapsed buildings, mines in the streets,” said K. M. Sharif, a U.N. official supervising de-mining operations. “We don’t know where the mines are.”

In the 10 years since they started working, experts have defused 1.2 million mines and shells, each dug up at a painstaking pace. So far, de-mining teams have scoured less than a third of the area that they believe is dangerous. More than 68,000 square miles of land remain to be searched. Some areas once clear of mines have been mined again by warring groups.

The calculations don’t include areas where combat between the ruling Taliban militia and the rebel groups continues. Those areas, as much as 20% of the country, are laden with mines. More mines are being laid every day.

“If they continue to work at the same pace, it will take 400 years to dig up all the mines,” said Habibullah, a 37-year-old man who lost his left leg to a mine buried in a Kandahar street. Habibullah, who gave only one name, works in a clinic where he helps build artificial legs for other mine victims.

City Was a Center of Fighting in the ‘80s

Kandahar is one of the most heavily mined areas. It was a central battleground in the 1980s, when the moujahedeen fought against invading Soviet troops. First, the Soviets wrapped the southern rim of Kandahar with three belts of mines, each belt 50 miles long, to stop the moujahedeen from coming in from the desert. When that didn’t work, the Soviets evacuated entire city blocks and mined the houses and streets.

Meanwhile, the moujahedeen laid hundreds of giant antitank mines all around the city. Each side loosed thousands of shells and bombs, many of which have never exploded. When the Soviets left, the moujahedeen began fighting among themselves. A relative calm did not come to the city until 1994, when the Taliban, a fierce group espousing a draconian form of Islam, conquered its rivals.

Unexploded ordnance is ubiquitous in Kandahar. In the neighborhood of Sarpoza, so many cattle and sheep have stepped on land mines that Juma Khan Golalai, 38, has set up a butcher shop there. He sits with his knives and apron on the edge of the minefield, waits for the cows to explode, then rushes into the field and gathers the meat.

“So many people have died before us, we don’t give a damn,” Golalai said.

Despite the dangers, many of Sarpoza’s villagers use the minefield as a shortcut to a nearby trail. The U.N. de-miners, working in the same field, warn the villagers, but they keep crossing anyway. Six months ago, a 15-year-old boy named Sarwar Jahn stepped on a mine and died on the spot. His father, Mira, mourns his son, but he continues to take the shortcut.

“We are used to this,” he said with a shrug.

Life does go on in Kandahar. More and more Afghans are returning from refugee camps, and they are eager to resume their normal lives.

Abdul Aziz, a 35-year-old father of two, returned from a camp in Pakistan three years ago and moved the 20 members of his family into the ruins of his old home. While he was away, his neighborhood became one of Kandahar’s most dangerous urban minefields. De-mining teams have removed 15 mines and 132 unexploded shells from Aziz’s neighborhood, and they’re still working.

Each night, the members of Aziz’s family gather under the clutter of plastic sheeting and mud bricks that passes for their home. Standing with his 7-year-old son, Abdul, Aziz explained that a home in a minefield is the best he can do.

“I tell my children not to play in the ruins,” he said.

Few Maps of the Minefields Available

For the de-mining teams, the biggest problem is that no one knows where the mines are buried. The Soviet army left behind a few maps of its minefields when it retreated from Afghanistan in 1989. The U.N. is still negotiating with the Russian government to get the others. The moujahedeen never had any.

The result is that practically every inch of Afghanistan is going to be searched--by hand, by machine, by dogs. Teams of canines are being used to sniff out land mines, particularly the Italian-made plastic mines that can’t be found by a metal detector.

On a lonely stretch of highway between Kandahar, in the south, and Herat, in the west, two German shepherds, females named Misha and Alma, recently used their noses to mark off a field believed to be awash in antitank mines.

During the war, the highway became too dangerous for the Soviet army, and the troops often drove their vehicles off to the side of the road. The moujahedeen covered the area with antitank mines. Even today, tracks from old Soviet tanks still mark the desert sands.

Misha and Alma, gifts from the U.S. government, have together found 16 mines. They work about six hours a day, desert heat permitting. Occasionally, one of the dogs will sit for a few minutes beneath a parasol held aloft by its trainer.

“They have dedicated their lives to the Afghan people,” said Samiullah Satari, their proud boss.

But dogs don’t work well in densely mined urban areas such as Kandahar, and mine-detecting machines are effective only up to a point. In some places, there are so many booby traps and old bullet casings that a mine detector is overwhelmed by the amount of metal.

“In Kandahar, wherever you put a mine detector, it starts beeping,” said de-miner Mohammad Hashim.

Most of the de-mining work is done by people--house by house, inch by inch. The work requires extraordinary patience. Clearing an area the size of a bedroom, usually with a knife and a metal detector, might take two weeks. And the work is often lethal: 30 mine experts have been killed in Afghanistan since 1990, and 534 have been injured.

Gul Ahmed, a 38-year-old father of two boys, has unearthed dozens of mines and hundreds of unexploded shells in his six years on the job. In Kabul, in the mid-1990s, fighting often raged a block away while he did his work. Five years ago, his partner and friend, Mohammad Salim, died when a mine exploded in his face.

“We all try to follow the safety procedures,” he said, “but sometimes that’s not enough.”

Standing amid the mine-strewn ruins of a collapsed building, Ahmed said he doesn’t often think of the dangers he faces while on the job. But a nightmare often haunts him.

“In my dreams, I have been blown up and my friends are carrying me to the hospital,” he said.

Ahmed grew up intending to be a farmer, but the $150 a month he earns as a de-miner makes him one of the best-paid people in Kandahar. With a rueful smile, Ahmed said he figures that Afghanistan will be providing him with a steady income for years to come.

“If I am lucky,” he said, “I will be a very old man.”