(Zaman Al Wasl)- After the dust and smoke settle with every bombing on Jericho, the children of village in northern Idlib province set out to collect from the rubble and the empty shells and bullets or cluster bombs left behind to sell, indifferent to the death that has occurred and lurks around at every moment.
Many of the townspeople have paid with their lives for this dangerous line of work, which has turned into a source of income fraught with unhappy endings.
According to the United Nations Mine Action Service, mines, explosive remnants of war and improvised explosive devices, all of which are difficult to detect, continue to pose a threat to the lives of millions of people in northern Syria.
Inside his shop in Kurin , Ramez Suleiman Ageni, a young blacksmith, busied himself with dismantling a bomb that he had just bought from one of the townspeople for metal parts when it suddenly exploded, killing another man, who was inside the shop at the time, and causing Ageni to lose his hand in the process.
Jericho was subjected to intense shelling by regime forces while they had control over Al-Mastumah and the surrounding checkpoints, which left behind a large number of explosive remnants on agricultural lands, says an activist to Zaman al-Wasl.
Many people of the area fell victim to unexploded remnants while plowing these lands and harvesting crops. What did not explode, the people sold as scrap, and instead detonated while it was dismantled and tinkered with.
According to our source, regime forces have consistently dropped some cluster bombs in the form of children toys for children, which led to the death of children from the village more than once.
Because of the poverty and lack of job opportunities in these areas, many of the townspeople found themselves working a very deadly profession, encouraged by the presence of scrap merchants, who, according to the activist, are not satisfied with buying these materials for the metal by also for the gunpowder remaining inside. Some of the collected ammunition and weapons are sold by the kilo as scrap and remnants of iron. As for those containing gunpowder or the like, they are sold by piece, in order to be dismantled and the explosive materials extracted, which often results in disasters for both who sell and buy them, for lack of knowledge on how to deal or dismantle the shells.
According to statistics published by Al Modon newspaper, the Syrian Institute for Justice, which documents violations and war crimes in Syria, stated that 1,552 civilians across the country fell victim to mines and remnants of war since 2016, the largest percentage of whom died in 2016, with 522 recorded deaths. The number of injured people who lost a limb due to the explosion of this type of weapon are not yet available, as it is difficult for similar institutions and human rights bodies operating in Syria to track them accurately.
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