HERAT Nov 21: With the Taliban gone, US bombs no longer fall on the
northwestern Afghan city of Herat, but they are still claiming victims.
Twelve-year-old Mohibollah was out collecting firewood in a shabby
neighbourhood on the edge of Herat on Wednesday.
Minutes later he was running down the street screaming, his face
splattered in blood and a stump of flesh, smashed bones and mangled
fingers dangling from his left arm. He had touched an unexploded bomblet
of a US cluster bomb dropped from a plane a month ago.
Their target was a nearby Taliban military base, but while many of the
bomblets hit assembled vehicles, tanks and troops, dozens were scattered
across the poor neighbourhood of Qali-e Shater about two km (1.25 miles)
away.
Nine people were killed, more than 30 wounded and 38 houses damaged.
"At first we were very happy when the Americans started dropping bombs,
we thought it would be the end of the Taliban," said local resident
Abdolahad. Eight bomblets landed on his house, peppering the walls with
shrapnel and killing his brother inside. But four of the bomblets failed
to explode, leaving a deadly legacy inside the family home and forcing
them to move in with neighbours. More than 30 people now sleep in one
house. "The Americans should do something, they have to pay for this,"
said Abdolahad.
DUSTY CRATER: De-mining teams started to detonate the small yellow
devices about the size of a drinks can after the Taliban fled the city
last week. "At first I didn't know what to do, I have never seen this
kind of bomb before," said Haji Seddiqi, regional coordinator for the
OMAR mine-clearing organisation.
"I contacted our headquarters in Islamabad and they didn't know what to
do. They said they would contact the Americans, but we have had no
answer and I decided to do something myself. The longer we leave it, the
more people will get hurt."
With an added sense of urgency after administering first aid to
Mohibollah before he was rushed to hospital, his men begin work to make
another bomblet safe.
Sandbags are piled round the bomblet, which lies in a garden of okra and
aubergines surrounded by a courtyard of mud-brick walls. A small charge
of plastic explosives is placed nearby and a wire trailed to the street
outside.
"Explosion, explosion," one of the men shouts through a loud-hailer. A
button is pressed and a loud bang heard. Inside, the sand-bags
disintegrates, leaving a small crater in the dusty vegetable patch.
Seddiqi says he is working flat-out to clear dozens of deadly yellow
packages still lying unexploded in the area.
The United States has taken criticism from human rights groups for using
cluster bombs.
Human Rights group Amnesty International has said about five percent of
the explosive bomblets fail to explode on impact, exposing civilians to
a high risk of indiscriminate attack for years to come. But US Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said the United States has every right to
use cluster bombs after the September 11 hijack attacks on New York's
World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington.
Source: Reuters
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