Last September, five-year-old Hala's dream of attending the school near her displacement camp in rural Idlib ended abruptly. Hala stumbled on a buried landmine. She lost one leg, and the other was badly fractured, kept intact with metal pins that have put her in a wheelchair.
Originally from Jabal Al-Akrad in the Latakia countryside , Hala was born and raised in displacement camps. After the fall of Syria's Assad regime in December 2024, her family went back to visit their village, oblivious of the existence of a buried landmine that would change their little girl's life forever.
"The camp is miserable, but we can't return to our village," says her father, Hussein, who is a farmer. "We own nothing there, and my daughter's accident has only deepened our tragedy."
The family doesn't know when the mine-clearance teams will reach their village, or whether they will ever be able to move their worn-out tent back home to live among the relatives and neighbours who risked returning.
But while Hala's tragedy was an accident, a viral video , circulated on 25 March, shot in Ain Issa in the Raqqa countryside, sparked outrage in Syria as it showed a group of young boys dismantling the unexploded ordnance with their bare hands, rushing playfully from one to the next.
"What you see is the tragic result of a harsh reality forced upon those children," Maysara Hijazi, a senior military official and landmine expert, tells The New Arab . "Playing with landmines happens because they grew up in an environment where these objects were part of their daily landscape after years of war; they don't understand the danger," Maysara, who began working in mine clearance in 2013, adds.
He explained how extreme poverty led them to search for scrap metal they could sell to survive.
"These children have never received proper mine risk education," he says. In areas recently vacated by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the remains of weapons have become a familiar sight.
Clearance efforts in these areas were spearheaded by several organisations, including the Nour Foundation for Relief and Development . Bakr Fayez Al-Sakran, coordinator of the Jaramana mobile team in southern Syria, explains that their work across rural Damascus focuses on teaching children and mothers how to avoid harm using interactive workshops and posters.
"Residents and local communities were cooperative," Bakr tells The New Arab . "After the liberation of Syria, it became very important to raise awareness because of the abandoned weapons and tanks. We relied on the firsthand experiences of people who suffered from landmine explosions."
Other local NGOs focus on people who were harmed by landmine explosions, offering services that go beyond immediate medical care. Suhaib Ajam, Protection Program Manager at Shafaq , explains that their approach includes mapping contaminated areas and referring them to specialized agencies like the HALO Trust a UK-based charity that clears and manages explosives around the world, while simultaneously running direct and indirect awareness campaigns through plays and social media.
"If people need medical assistance, we refer them, and if they need assistive devices, we provide them," Suhaib told The New Arab , noting that their strategy has now shifted to economic empowerment.
"For instance, for people with disabilities caused by mines, we provide assistive devices and funding to open a small business, or to refer them to cash-for-work programmes." A land of mines During the 13-year civil war , which began in 2011 when President Bashar al-Assad's Baath regime met peaceful Arab Spring protests with military force, vast areas of Syria were heavily mined to restrict enemy movement and suffocate civilian life. Fadi Al-Saleh, Director of the National Mine Action Centre at the Ministry of Emergencies and Disaster Management, explains that Syria is one of the most contaminated countries by landmines and unexploded ordnance globally . "The contamination is concentrated in former conflict zones and frontlines across the countrysides of Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, Latakia, Damascus, Daraa, Homs, Deir ez-Zor, and Raqqa, and open areas like the Syrian Badia,” Fadi told The New Arab , emphasising how the danger is "fluid" as war remnants were carried to entirely new locations by floods tracked by his organisation. Fadi believes the placement of mines was retaliatory, noting the random deployment of mines among residential buildings, vital facilities, schools, and agricultural land, planted without any standard military mapping.
Maysara confirms the risk is exceptionally high in Raqqa and parts of northern and eastern Syria. “These areas were primarily mined by the Islamic State (IS) group during its control of the city from 2014 to 2017, a mission later continued by the SDF and the PKK from 2018 to 2026," he explains. Heavy bombardment by the US-led international Coalition against IS and ground battles also left behind countless unexploded munitions.
Regarding the types of explosives, Maysara lists Russian and Iranian anti-personnel mines, Russian anti-vehicle mines, locally manufactured improvised explosive devices (IEDs), unexploded ordnance, cluster munitions, and booby traps hidden within civilian environments. These hidden explosives have paralysed daily life and halted agriculture, causing mass casualties, according to Abdul Razzaq Qantar, Director of the Victim Support Department at the National Mine Action Centre . Abdul Razzaq told The New Arab that between 8 December 2024 and 16 January 2026, the centre recorded 1,685 casualties: 607 deaths (391 men, 39 women, 177 children) and 1,078 injuries (578 men, 36 women, 443 children).
Deir ez-Zor governorate recorded the highest number of incidents. Of the 189 incidents, 135 people were killed (95 men, 7 women, 33 children) and 208 were injured (103 men, 7 women, 98 children). Aleppo followed with 151 incidents, resulting in 104 deaths and 175 injuries. Idlib saw 136 incidents, causing 84 deaths and 172 injuries.
While men, particularly farmers, herders, and day labourers, make up two-thirds of the victims, Fadi points out that children and women remain highly vulnerable. "Children are naturally drawn to unfamiliar objects, while women in rural communities often lack mine risk education and are exposed while tending to livestock or farming," Fadi said. To compound the crisis, the progress on demining is slow, he adds. The National Mine Action Centre is still building its capacity under the transitional government and operates with limited resources and nascent managerial structures. International funding for mine action has long fallen short of needs, receiving only a fraction of the tens of millions required annually, leaving local and partner teams struggling to scale up despite growing demand.
International partners, including organisations like the HALO Trust , Mines Advisory Group , and UNMAS , are working alongside Syrian teams to survey contaminated land, remove explosive items, and reach communities with risk education. But experts emphasise that without a significant increase in sustainable funding, technical support, and coordinated national planning, many villages will remain unreachable for months or years to come.
In the meantime, the burden of keeping civilians alive often falls on local volunteers. Nermin Hani Al-Hassan, a young woman from the village of Talmenes in rural Idlib, has taken it upon herself to lead mine risk education and survey efforts. Her motivation was born of personal tragedy. After a brief displacement due to shelling, her family returned home during a period of calm, only for her relative and her relative's daughter to be killed by a landmine.
That incident pushed Nermin into humanitarian work, where she joined the Civil Defence . She started in a field hospital assisting the wounded before shifting to UXO awareness and survey teams.
"I joined so that a word from me might save lives," Nermin tells The New Arab . "I hope someone listens to my advice and takes it seriously, and that it becomes the reason they survive."
For Fadi, the core awareness message is simple: "Do not approach, do not touch, and report." Nada Al Ali is a writer from Syria using a pseudonym for security reasons This piece is published in collaboration with Egab