Yemen Sees 107 Civilian Landmine Casualties in Early 2025, Amid De-Mining Progress and Post-Ceasefire Challenges

Enaya Dastor, then 13 years old, stepped on a landmine in August 2023 while following her goats near Jabal Habashy in central Yemen’s Taiz governorate. She had been reading a school textbook while keeping an eye on the animals when the explosion occurred. “People gathered around me after the blast, and I was taken to the hospital immediately.

It was a horrible moment,” Dastor told Al Jazeera. Surgeons amputated Dastor’s left leg following the blast. Two months earlier, a boy in a nearby village had one of his legs amputated after stepping on a landmine.

After the incident, Dastor’s family and others fled Jabal Habashy, a former front-line village, and they now live in the city of Taiz. “Landmines are sleeping killers, waiting for the innocents to step on them or move them without caution. That is how they wake up to shed blood and take human souls,” Dastor said.

She added, “I used to go with other girls to the pasture. We grazed the cattle and play for hours. Dastor expressed her aversion to returning: “I do not want to see another child harmed or hear another landmine explosion.

Now in tenth grade, she plans to finish high school in two years, enroll in law college, and become a lawyer to defend those facing injustice. “The injury has changed how I move or walk, and separated my family from our home,” she said. Mohammed Mustafa lost his left leg in a landmine explosion in Taiz’s Maqbna district in 2018, when he was 20 years old.

He stepped on the device while walking in a mountainous area at sunset. After the blast, I looked towards my feet, and I found my left leg was gone,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera.

Mustafa traveled five hours by ambulance to the city of Taiz after the explosion. The next day, doctors amputated his left leg up to the knee. With support from family and friends, he recovered and now serves as a member of the Yemeni Amputee Football Federation, while also being a father and small business owner.

“My family and friends stood by me, lifted my morale, and accompanied me on outings in the city to help me forget my pain and worry. I realised I was not alone,” Mustafa said. His experience underscores the long-term impact of such incidents, which began amid Yemen’s civil war that started in 2014.

From 2015 through 2021, ground fighting was brutal, and warplanes continuously bombed across Yemen, killing and injuring thousands of civilians. A 2022 study by Yemeni human rights groups found that mines killed 534 children and 177 women between April 2014 and March 2022.

The same study reported 854 children, 255 women, and 147 elderly people injured by mines during that period in 17 Yemeni provinces.

Taiz recorded the highest number of mine injuries between April 2014 and March 2022, according to the Yemeni human rights groups. The ceasefire in April 2022 largely stopped the fighting, but the legacy of explosives continues to pose risks, with no final peace deal yet in place to fully address de-mining across all territories.