| Danger
Looms in Collecting a War's Explosive Residue: U.S. Bombings Add to
Task of Clearing Mines, Ordnance HERAT, Afghanistan, 3 feb 02 (Washington Post)-- By Doug Struck The steel carnage of war lay before Sean Moorhouse, the twisted metal and moonscape craters left by a U.S. bombing run. Littering the scene were explosives of every lethal form -- bombs, grenades, artillery shells, rockets -- that were scattered when the Americans hit a Taliban munitions camp. "Don't kick anything," he advised. For Moorhouse, 34, a bomb disposal expert working for the U.N. World Food Program, the work has just begun. As the war in Afghanistan subsides, the job of cleaning up its explosive residue looms huge. Afghanistan is littered with an estimated 10 million land mines, the product of 23 years of war. And that was before U.S. planes dropped thousands of pounds of explosives in four months of bombardment after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The explosives included cluster bombs, each of which scatters 202 smaller bombs. When they hit, they are designed to rain incendiary fire and armor-piercing shrapnel over a wide area. "Our problem is not the ones that worked," said Moorhouse. "It's the ones that didn't." The bombs that failed to explode on impact are now lying in wait, a daily danger to curious children, wandering shepherds and refugees who stumble across them. Moorhouse said the problem is greater than the Pentagon acknowledges. The Pentagon contends the "failure" rate of cluster bombs -- those that do not explode -- is 5 percent to 7 percent. Moorhouse calculates the failure rate is 14 percent to 19 percent, leaving as many as 38 live "bomblets" on the ground from each dropped cluster bomb. He also says some bombs missed their targets. Comparing the target coordinates provided by the U.S. military with where the bombs fell shows "the accuracy of the U.S. figures is pretty doubtful," differing by as much as four miles, he said. Bashir Ahmad, 25, lives in a crowded warren of mud-brick homes about a mile from a military camp on the outskirts of Herat, and almost as close to a second camp. He was on his roof, feeding his pet pigeons and chatting with his father and a neighbor, when a U.S. plane passed overhead. The sky blossomed with mustard-colored canisters floating from tiny parachutes, he said. Suddenly, his neighborhood was an inferno of shrapnel and fire. Pieces of the cluster bombs ripped through his back, arms, legs and side. As he stumbled from the high-walled homes, he saw the remains of the other two men. "I know the Americans were aiming at the army camps," said Ahmad, whose home was destroyed and who lost partial use of an arm. "What is the use of being angry?" When the smoke cleared, the area was littered with dozens of the canisters. Nabi Bullah, 60, was eager to clear the debris. "I didn't know what they were," he said. He picked up a dozen canisters and threw them into the muddy canal that runs through the neighborhood. He now knows he is lucky to be alive. "They are usually pretty sensitive," Moorhouse said of the cluster bomb canisters, which are designed to send fragments through seven inches of steel. "They can go off if they are in the rubble and you just move a brick, or if you use a radio in the area." The cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance have set back the painstaking efforts to remove the land mines that have been planted in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979. "I used to be able to send my teams" to outlying provinces to remove mines, said Haji Siddiqui, manager of the regional mine action committee, which has more than 200 disposal experts on the job. "Now we are too busy here in Herat. We can't even get to the other areas." Mine removal started in 1989, but in western Afghanistan, only about one-fourth of the mined areas have been cleared. "At this rate, it will take us 30 to 35 years," said Mulajan, an official of Afghanistan's Mine Control Planning Agency. The dangers are compounded by people moving around because of the war. "There are lots of refugees who are starting to come back," said Mohammad Farhad, who is part of a program to educate Afghans about the dangers. "They don't know where the dangerous areas are." And there are new risks, Moorhouse said. His experts spent 14 days digging out an unexploded 2,000-pound bomb -- one of the larger U.S. weapons -- that was buried near a residential area. "If it had blown up, a lot of people would have been killed," he said. They defused it and loaded it onto Moorhouse's truck to take it to a remote area for detonation. "Strangely, there weren't many volunteers to ride with me." Moorhouse used to work as a broker at the New York Stock Exchange, which he said "was not very rewarding to me. It is all about money." A British national who served as an intelligence officer in Rwanda, he signed up with a relief agency working on mine removal, and has worked in Mozambique and Kosovo for the Swiss Federation for Mine Action. He has been in Afghanistan for two months, under contract with the U.N. program. Moorhouse is passionate about his job, and has been fascinated with explosives since boyhood. As he walked carefully through the debris of the U.S. airstrike on a Taliban munitions dump, he rattled off the names of the armaments on the ground, a catalogue of contributors to Afghanistan's misery. "That's an 82-millimeter Russian artillery shell. There's a Pakistani-made mortar. That one's a Chinese copy of a Russian grenade. That's from Serbia. Those rocket-propelled grenades -- very unstable. "Oh, look," he said, picking his way carefully into a crater. "It's an Iranian copy of an American Claymore mine." He looked it over carefully, disappointed that he could not add it to his collection. "The detonators are still armed," he said. U.N. agencies are involved in this work because the explosives must be removed before the relief workers can do their jobs. Even pinpoint strikes such as the demolition of a Taliban munitions dump near Herat become a civilian problem, because the bombardment tossed the munitions into surrounding residential areas. The disposal experts usually disarm mines and larger bombs, but the cluster bombs are too sensitive, so they pack sandbags around them and detonate them. There have been no casualties among the teams working on disposal since the U.S.-led war began, Moorhouse said. But "there's a certain inevitability about casualties," he said. "People get blase. They say, 'I've done this a million times,' and get careless." But the work carries rewards, said Moorhouse. "We've found munitions on roofs, in gardens, all over," he said. "I've taken things off of houses, and then sat with the family to have tea while they moved their belongings back in. There's an immediate sense of satisfaction." © 2002 The Washington Post Company |
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