The black mushroom cloud had barely faded in Ghazni province before kids clustered around the edge of the crater created by the mine, one of the devices that kills a child every other day in Afghanistan.
Afghans have been able to return to fields, schools and roads since the Taliban authorities ended their insurgency and ousted the Western-backed government in 2021. But with new freedom of movement comes the danger of remnants left behind after 40 years of successive conflicts.
Nearly 900 people were killed or wounded by leftover munitions from January 2023 to April this year alone, most of them children, according to UN figures.
The anti-tank mine had been 100 metres from Qach Qala village, south of the provincial capital Ghazni, since the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989.
The Taliban government “is very supportive of demining in this country and wants to conduct clearance as far as it possibly can”, said Nick Pond, head of the Mine Action Section of UNAMA, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.
Eighty-two percent of those killed or wounded by the remnant weapons since January 2023 were children, with half of cases involving children playing. The village of Nokordak, nestled in a bucolic valley, lost two children in late April.
Surrounded by her small children, Shawoo told of how her 14-year-old son Javid was killed by unexploded ordnance.
