Kabul: In a tragic incident, at least nine children were killed after they found an old land mine near their village in the eastern Ghazni province and started playing with it, a Taliban spokesperson said on Monday. The mine was located near their village in Ghazni’s Gero district and was from decades ago, said Hamidullah Nisar, director of the Taliban’s information and culture department in Ghazni.

Nisar said the explosion on Sunday killed five boys and four girls who were 5 to 10 years old. Afghanistan has suffered from decades of war and remains highly dangerous for children who collect scrap metal to sell to support their families. Many are killed or maimed when they come across unexploded ordinance.

The United Nations in Kabul on Monday said that tens and thousands of civilians, including women and children, have been killed or injured in Afghanistan by landmines and explosive remnants of war, reported Voice of America. It said “more work” was needed to protect Afghans who have already been reeling from decades of conflict.

Afghanistan experienced several years of civil war in the 1990s after the Russian troops withdrew from the country, with the hardline fundamentalist Taliban emerging winner in the power struggle and taking control of most of the country in 1996 until they were removed by the United States and its allies in 2001 for sheltering the Al-Qaeda planners of the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban quickly regrouped and launched a deadly insurgency against foreign forces and their Afghan allies in the years that followed and reclaimed power in August 2021, when all foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Since then, there has been a significant reduction of violence in the country, even though many have been killed by war remnants.

In a report published last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, highlighted the urgent need to boost efforts to “address the issue of weapon contamination” in the conflict-torn, impoverished country. The ICRC recorded that 640 children were killed or injured in 541 incidents involving landline explosions and explosive remnants between January 2022 and June 2023. 

(with AP inputs)

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