Ex-Taliban fighters helping charities locate landmines they planted in Afghanistan
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Former Taliban fighters are tracking down their own bombs and helping to remove them from Afghanistan’s roadsides. Ex-Taliban members are working with local police and the Scottish Dumfriesshire-based charity Halo Trust to clear the country of dangerous landmines.
![[In this photo taken on May 14, 2024, children gather around a crater after Afghan deminers from the Halo Trust detonated an anti-tank mine in Qach Qala village, Ghazni province. 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. (Photo by Wakil KOHSAR / AFP) / To go with AFP story Afghanistan-mines-clearing-accident-children, REPORTAGE by Qubad Wali and Pascale Trouillaud (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_234079594-24cd.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
The improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were routinely laid by Taliban fights during two decades of war against an international coalition and the former Afghan government, with the devices still killing around unsuspecting 60 children a month. Halo Trust staff recalled when a security guard escorting their team recognised his own landmine.
![[In this photo taken on May 13, 2024, an Afghan deminer from the Halo Trust clears anti-tank mines in Qala Khail village, Ghazni province. 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. (Photo by Wakil KOHSAR / AFP) / To go with AFP story Afghanistan-mines-clearing-accident-children, REPORTAGE by Qubad Wali and Pascale Trouillaud (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_234079503-009e.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
‘We were looking at it, sort of inspecting it, to see how we’d destroy it,’ said Callum Peebles, who was inspecting an IED underneath a main road near the town of Kandahar in November 2021. ‘While we were looking at it, the security guard from the escort said “Oh, that’s one that I laid”.
‘It was incredible. ‘He then proceeded to point at this nearby field and said “we laid them there, and over there and over there”. ‘For me that was one of these extraordinary moments where you think, wow it’s very helpful these people are here and there’s been no limitation on the information we’ve been able to gather.’.
The Halo Trust has destroyed more than 800,000 landmines in Afghanistan since 1988 and now operates in 25 of the 34 provinces in the country with the Taliban’s permission. Demining work is now taking place with increased speed and urgency as fighting has died down and 1,200,000 square meters of Afghan land is still contaminated by mines and improvised explosive devices.
