Syrian Volunteers Pick Up Land Mines Planted by Their Army

By ROBERT MACKEY

Human Rights Watch called on Syrian government forces to stop planting land mines along the country’s borders with Turkey and Lebanon this week, citing the danger posed to refugees fleeing the violent crackdown on dissent in the country.

As my colleague Kareem Fahim reported last week, refugees “who head to Turkey have been forced to cross farther and farther north, as Syrian soldiers occupy hamlets near the south of the shared border. Smugglers and activists say they have seen the military laying mines.”

In a video report posted online by the rights group, a former member of the Syrian military who was trained to remove mines showed one of the explosive devices he said he had removed this month from a route to Turkey used by refugees. The 28-year-old engineer from Jisr al-Shughour in Syria’s northern Idlib province, whose identity was concealed for his safety, said that the explosive device was one of approximately 300 antipersonnel mines he had removed this month with help from a cousin and three volunteers.

Human Rights Watch identified the mine as a “Russian-made PMN-2 antipersonnel blast mine,” which was so common during the Soviet era that it still litters former conflict zones from Afghanistan to Yemen. In the video report, the engineer explained that he tackled this dangerous work even though was never trained to neutralize this sort of mine, which was apparently added to the Syrian military’s arsenal recently. “I can’t dismantle this because I don’t know how it operates,” he said. “Just by doing some trials we learned how they should be removed, so we removed them.”



http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/syrian-volunteers-pick-up-land-mines-planted-by-their-army/