Kabul: As the US military withdraws from Afghanistan, it is leaving behind a deadly legacy, about 800 square miles of land littered with undetonated grenades, rockets and mortar shells, the Washington Post reported. The military has vacated scores of firing ranges packed with the explosives. Dozens of children have been killed or wounded as they have stumbled upon the ordnance at the sites, which are often poorly marked.
Casualties are likely to increase sharply; the US military has removed the munitions from only 3 percent of the territory covered by its sprawling ranges, officials said. Clearing the rest of the contaminated land, which in total is twice as big as New York City, could take two to five years, the report said. US military officials say they intend to clean up the ranges. But because of a lack of planning, officials say, funding has not yet been approved for the monumental effort, which is expected to cost $250 million, the Post said.
“Unfortunately, the thinking was ‘We’re at war and we don’t have time for this,’ ” Major Michael Fuller, the head of the US Army’s Mine Action Centre at Bagram Airfield, was quoted as saying making a referrence to the planning. There are a growing number of tragedies at these high-explosives ranges. Mohammad Yusef, 13, and Sayed Jawad, 14, grew up 100 yards from a firing range used by US and Polish troops in Ghazni province.
The boys’ families were accustomed to the thundering explosions from military training exercises, which sometimes shattered windows in their village, the Post said. But as those blasts became less common, a function of the US and NATO withdrawal, the boys started wandering onto the range to collect scrap metal to sell.
They did not know that some US explosives do not detonate on impact but can still blow up when someone touches them.
