Taliban officials in southeastern Afghanistan said Monday that an overnight landmine explosion had killed at least nine children.
The “unexploded mine” was a remnant of past conflicts that went off on Sunday as a group of young boys and girls were playing with it in the district of Geru, in Ghazni province, said a provincial government spokesman.
Hamidullah Nisar claimed that the ordnance was left over from the time of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The United Nations in Kabul said Monday that tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, in Afghanistan had been killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war.
It posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that U.N. “#MinAction partners have cleared 3,011 km2 (1,162 mi2) of land,” stressing that “more work” was needed to protect Afghans, reeling from decades of conflicts.
Afghanistan experienced several years of civil war in the 1990s after the Russian troops withdrew from the country, ending their decade-long military intervention.
The fundamentalist Taliban emerged winner in the ensuing power struggle among various Afghan factions, taking control of most of the country in 1996 and governing it through their strict interpretation of Islamic law.
The hardline rulers were removed from power five years later when the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan to punish them for sheltering al-Qaida planners of the September 2001 terrorist strikes on U.S. cities.
The Taliban quickly regrouped and launched a deadly insurgency against foreign forces and their Afghan allies in the years that followed and reclaimed power in August 2021, when all foreign forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
In a report published last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, highlighted the urgent need to boost efforts to "address the issue of weapon contamination” in the conflict-torn, impoverished country.
The ICRC recorded that 640 children were killed or injured in 541 incidents involving landline explosions and explosive remnants between January 2022 and June 2023. “This is nearly 60 percent of the total number of civilian casualties (1,092 people) because of UXO-related incidents,” the report said.
