Have you ever wondered what it’s really like for a demining expert to work in a war zone such as Yemen? Our Director of Special Operations, Chris Clark, gave us an overview.
“Since Project Masam deployed in 2018, the technical experts’ role has been to train the Yemeni deminers in the equipment provided and in current procedures to deal safely with mines and ordnance with accordance to international mine action standards (IMAS).
“Once the Yemeni demining teams are trained and deployed out onto the sites, the experts then get up very early in the morning to drive long distances to be out on the sites with the Yemeni deminers. While they are out there, they are confirming that the training is being followed, helping with correcting and re-adjusting procedures depending on the terrain and of course helping to solve problems because of course each site is different so different problems come out, so to provide safe and effective solutions to those problems.
“There is a unique element of the project in Yemen: it is operating in the midst of an ongoing war. Not exclusively but normally, such mine clearance project are conducted at the end of a war when there’s some form of, at least on paper, agree stability. That’s completely different in Yemen: we are operating in the middle of a war; the lines of that war are changing on a regular basis and we need to be very careful from a security and safety point of view that we don’t send teams knowingly into areas where they are going to encounter live combatants. We have got a very good network and a very good security set up in Yemen to enable that to happen.
“Very importantly in Yemen, the vast majority of the conventional landmines that we are finding are of an improvised nature. No one is necessarily the same. Sadly in addition those landmines, there are a huge number of ‘improvised explosive devices’ – booby traps – which also have different threats. So our specialist guys are having to re-adjust, re-evaluate, re-train all the time to share suitable, safe solutions with the Yemeni deminers.
“At this point, the number and volume of landmines that we have found so far exceeds the volume of mines found in almost any other country affected by landmines in the last 20 years. It’s a phenomenal amount.
“So far with the Yemeni demining teams, we are making good progress at a very critical part of a mine clearance programme when the war is still ongoing. All of the mines that we have cleared will not need to be cleared after the war, which is when rehabilitation and reconstruction can really start, so we would have paved the way for a quicker reconstruction programme.”
