2023-09-23 13:20:33
How can we drink and irrigate our land when hydraulic infrastructures are destroyed, when waterways become rarer and, above all, contaminated by explosive remnants of war? The populations of northeast Syria face this challenge on a daily basis.
After twelve years of war, the threat is threefold: the fighting still ongoing in these areas beyond the control of the regime; the drought which is hitting the region with increasing intensity and force; and the environment, terrestrial and aquatic, which is still riddled with bombs, rockets or mines.
It is to stop this increasingly deadly dynamic that Handicap International has set up, alongside more “traditional” mine clearance operations, an underwater mine clearance project. “The threat is diffuse, in rivers, lakes and streams. Sometimes these are remnants of war that have not exploded or munitions that people pick up from rubble or in fields, which they throw into the water in the hope of getting rid of them. But this actually creates a second contamination”explains Timothy Roberts, head of mine clearance operations in Syria, present in Paris on the occasion of the 29th Shoe Pyramid, organized by HI this Saturday September 23 in Paris.
Around thirty Syrian underwater minesweepers
In January, the French NGO collected 700 munitions (projectiles, unexploded munitions, mortars, detonators, etc.) in nine days on the sole site of the Tabqa wastewater treatment plant, near Rakka. The operations carried out around this heavily damaged and contaminated factory, controlled by Daesh until 2016, directly benefited 20,000 people in the surrounding area and 67,000 indirectly by allowing them to regain access to drinking water.
” Water is life. We must regain control of water infrastructure, in these poor regions where many agricultural communities live”adds Timothy Roberts, mine clearance specialist for twenty years. The falling water levels of the artificial Lake Assad and the Euphrates River are particularly worrying. “With the drought, there is already not much water, so people sometimes drink this contaminated water. It’s devastating. All you have to do is look at the level of pathologies, particularly renal, and cancers…”
On the ground, Handicap International has 32 deminers, divided into three teams. “Apart from three foreigners, including me, they are only Syrians. We train them, train them to dive, to breathe underwater for three months and up to eight meters deep, explains this trained naval diver, very enthusiastic about the idea of passing on his experience. When you dive, you really have to pay attention to your life. Once trained and equipped, Syrian personnel are responsible for operations, which first consist of locating, identifying and then eliminating explosive weapons to clear the seabed. »
“Syria is abandoned”
Around Timothy Roberts, Place de la République in Paris, schoolchildren discover a stand in which different types of explosives, vests used by deminers and mine clearance techniques are displayed. “It is important that people see what these populations are going through, understand the fear they feel on a daily basis, living in often contaminated rubble. Even children collect metals to recover and resell them… says the deminer, of South African nationality. Syria is abandoned. Interest has dissipated, there is war in Ukraine, Sudan, etc., and people tend to forget how much the Syrian population, especially women and children, are suffering. They didn’t ask to be there. »
Beyond Syria, this 29th edition of the Shoe Pyramid, organized simultaneously in Paris, Lyon and Nice as a sign of indignation against the bombing of civilians, occurs in a context of a record increase in the number of victims: between 2021 and 2022, it increased by 83% (or 20,793 civilians), according to the Explosive Weapons Observatory, in particular due to the wars in Ukraine, Syria, but also in Ethiopia, Somalia and Burma.
This edition is also in line with a diplomatic victory in November 2022: the adoption in Dublin by 83 States of a political declaration for better protection of civilians against the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. On this occasion, Handicap International and the 19 NGOs involved call on States, and in particular France, to implement their commitments made in this framework.
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