Khaled Abdulgader noticed children using an unusual object as a football and tried to stop them. He grabbed it, and it exploded in his hand. He lost two fingers and shrapnel sliced into his chest. In a hospital for a checkup after last year's blast, he tried to stay positive. “I feel like, Thank God it was just my hands,” Abdulgader said.
He is among hundreds of people who have been injured or killed by unexploded ordnance in Sudan's three years of war. That includes mines as well as weapons like bombs, shells, grenades or rockets that failed to detonate, tens of thousands of items in all.
The government and aid groups say it’s a problem particularly in and around Khartoum, where residents, many unfamiliar with the threat, have started to return after the Sudanese military recaptured the capital last year.
Nearly 60 people were injured or killed in Khartoum state last year, over half of them children, and 23 were injured or killed in the first three months of this year, 21 of them children, according to the United Nations. Decades of conflict in Sudan have left unexploded ordnance scattered across the country with a combined area of about 7,700 football fields contaminated.
More than half of that is the result of the war that erupted in 2023 between Sudan's army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group with new areas like Khartoum state affected. Both the Sudanese army and the RSF have been accused of laying mines, according to aid groups, during the war as they fought for control of the capital.
“The presence of land mines and other explosive ordnance is of great concern to everybody," said Juma Abuanja, the team leader for Jasmar, a Sudanese demining group. He said it will take years to clear. Demining is a slow, careful process with staff covering 10 to 15 square metres a day.
Khartoum city is still a ghost town, strewn with remnants of fighting. Charred, abandoned buildings are pocked with bullet holes.
The UN says deminers over nearly the past year have cleared some 7.8 million square metres of land in Khartoum state. They found more than 36,000 items, including hundreds of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Those that are safe to move are destroyed away from population areas. Those that can't be moved are destroyed on the spot. There is still much to clear as people try to rebuild their lives.
In Khartoum, Jasmar's demining team has spent eight months clearing a popular park from land mines, one of at least seven identified mine fields in Khartoum state. Some locations are on the outskirts. Others are downtown. Some are near important bridges.
Also read: 42 killed in Chad in dispute over water
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