JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
During a brutal 14-year civil war, the regime controlling Syria dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs and other munitions on its own civilians. Now Syria's new government must clear the unexploded leftovers. NPR's Emily Feng and Jawad Rizkallah spent a day with a team doing just that.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Syria is covered with unexploded bombs. Some of them are mines, buried underground, waiting for some unlucky passerby. In the village of Khirbat Nawfal, they fell from the sky.
TAMER FAISAL MHEIMID: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Local resident Tamer Faisal Mheimid heard the planes come on December 6, two days before Syria's regime fell.
MHEIMID: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: He says regime-allied forces were trying to strike military depots nearby in a last-ditch attempt to halt a rebel advance. And on the main road leading into his village, planes dropped cluster munitions - bombs that split into dozens of smaller explosive munitions when they hit the ground. By some estimates, the Assad regime dropped up to 1 million munitions over Syria, and many of them remain in the ground.
MHEIMID: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Mheimid says sometimes they blow up cows, sometimes children. The United Nations says there have been more than 400,000 incidents in Syria, often fatal, with unexploded bombs in the last nine years alone.
MHEIMID: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: But today, Mheimid says this is the first time someone has come to clear the bombs.
(SOUNDBITE OF HORN HONKING)
FENG: Clearing them up are Syrian civil defense workers, mostly from the White Helmets, a rescue organization based in Syria.
HASSAN TULFAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: The team we're following today is led by this man, Hassan Tulfah. He's a burly, bearded man who projects a supernatural calm. He's been doing this work since 2014.
TULFAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Just months after starting, he says he accidentally stepped backwards, right onto an unexploded munition. It blew off his left leg below the knee.
TULFAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Tulfah says he contemplated giving up his work. All he wanted was to be able to walk again. And he did. He wears a prosthetic now, and he went back to disposing of bombs and missiles. There's just too much need for people like him, he says.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Arabic).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: And that's why he is now here, hands on hips, the picture of concentration, surveying his men looking for cluster bombs.
So this is a wide-open field. Grape vines are planted here - olive trees. And the White Helmets are going in now with these bright yellow sensors looking for munitions.
They walk deliberately in tandem, step by step.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOMB DETECTION EQUIPMENT SQUEAKING)
FENG: They're carefully poking at the shrubbery.
The day before, Tulfah says they found 12 cluster munitions here, and they've only checked half the field.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Arabic).
(SOUNDBITE OF MOTORCYCLE ENGINE REVVING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Passersby shout encouragement as the men work. One of them is Samira Haddad, taking a stroll with her husband. She does a double take when we tell her bombs were found just steps from where she's standing.
SAMIRA HADDAD: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: She says she takes this road every day to buy bread. Then a call goes up from Tulfah's men.
They found something?
It's a type of cluster bomb. Tulfah has cleared enough munitions to know this particular bomb will need 24 sandbags filled with earth set around the bomb to safely contain a controlled explosion. The other day, his men had to fill 265 sandbags to safely clear a missile that had landed in front of a hospital. It's backbreaking work. And when the moment of detonation arrives, Tulfah's supernatural calm breaks ever so briefly.
TULFAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: He says this is the only moment when he tenses up. There is zero room for error.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Tulfah double checks that everyone has moved back and instructs me to take cover behind a cement wall before ordering the detonation.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOMB EXPLODING)
FENG: Success. By now, we've spent hours in the bright sun, all for just one cluster munition in one field outside one village. Tulfah personally has dozens of more reports of other munitions from other residents that he has yet to attend to.
TULFAH: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Tulfah says he thinks it will take more than 100 years to remove all the unexploded ordinances in Syria. They'll be back again tomorrow and the day after that. Dropping the munitions took just a few seconds, but it will mean a lifetime of work for these men. Emily Feng, NPR News, Homs, Syria. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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