Aziz El Yaakoubi -
Nasser Yassin was driving along a road on Yemen’s rugged Red Sea coast when a blast sent his Toyota Hilux flying into the air.
When he regained consciousness, the 30-year-old merchant realised he couldn’t move his right leg or see with his right eye.
Yassin’s car had hit an anti-tank mine, one of thousands left by fighters three months earlier when they conceded the Al Khoukha port area to southern Yemeni forces, their civil war adversaries in that part of Yemen.
His recovery has been far from straightforward, despite help from the Gulf Arab coalition.
“They (coalition) took me to Aden where they fixed my leg, but there was an issue with the metal prosthesis and my leg got infected,” Yassin, leaning on his crutches, said while visiting Al Mokha hospital for a follow-up after the blast in February.
The United Nations says the war has created the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis and inflicted indiscriminate violence, through the use of banned anti-personnel mines. Both sides in the conflict deny accusations by human rights groups.
The results of land mine use can be seen in the hallways of the hospital in Al Mokha town, located not far north of the strategic Bab al Mandab strait, which were crowded with victims and visitors.
Doctors and medical staff made their way between armed men to provide first aid to patients wounded by land mines, as well as by shrapnel and mortars.
“I was walking with my brother, I stepped on a mine and it went off,” said Rashida, a 13-year-old girl fitted with a rudimentary prosthetic leg.
Her father said she had never attended school because the closest one to their village in Taiz province was 30 km away and had closed down after heavy fighting.
Residents and medics from Al Mokha and nearby villages said land mines had caused more casualties than the fighting in the area. The explosives were buried randomly across the region, including in residential areas, playgrounds and under trees where many Yemenis traditionally sit and chat, they added.
It is not clear how many people have been killed by these weapons, but two doctors and a government official said dozens had died just in the coastal areas of Al Mokha, Al Khoukha and Al Heiss since 2017.
The coalition and Yemeni troops said they harvest between 250 and 300 land mines every week in the western region.
More than 40,000 devices have been neutralised since coalition-allied forces took control of the Red Sea coast in a series of battles starting in 2016.
Around 90 per cent of the land mines were locally made and most of the victims are civilians, they said.
“They also have Russian-made land mines which they took from government warehouses when they invaded the capital Sanaa,” said an expert in explosives.
The war is entering its fourth year this month and, despite Ansar Allah’s losses in parts of western Yemen, they still control Yemen’s most populated areas.
Famine, cholera and diphtheria affect about eight million people, including two million severely malnourished children.
Last year, Human Right Watch called on the Ansar Allah to cease using land mines and observe the 1997 Ottawa Convention ban on anti-personnel mines, which took effect in 1999. Yemen signed the treaty in 1998.
“Most of the victims who survived lost one or two of their legs, and many are crippled and cannot do any physical work,” said Ghassan Massoudi, director of Al Mokha hospital. Massoudi said the military wing of the hospital was treating also civilian land mine victims.
That side of the facility gets most of the attention from the internationally recognised government and the coalition, as it treats fighters from the frontlines in Al Jarahi district — 90 km away — where the Southern Resistance and allies from fellow coalition member Sudan face mortar bombs and heavy shelling.
Yassin said the coalition would not pay for his trip to India — where many Yemenis seek medical treatment — when he needed new surgery on his leg and eye, as he was not a fighter. So he paid his own way. “I sold the remains of the car, my mother and wife’s gold and went to India where I spent $8,500. I still lost my eye,” he said.
— Reuters
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