More than 300 people were killed and over 600 wounded by cluster munitions in Ukraine last year, an international watchdog said yesterday, surpassing Syria as the country with the highest number of casualties from the controversial weapons for the first time in a decade.
Russia’s widespread use of the bombs, which open in the air and release scores of smaller bomblets or submunitions as they are called, in its invasion of Ukraine — and, to a lesser extent, their use by Ukrainian forces — helped make last year the deadliest year on record globally, said an annual report released by the Cluster Munition Coalition, a network of non-governmental organizations advocating a ban of the weapons.
The deadliest attack in Ukraine was a bombing on a railway station in the town of Kramatorsk that killed 53 people and wounded 135, the prosecutor-general’s office said.
Photo: AP
Meanwhile, in Syria and other war-battered countries in the Middle East, although active fighting has cooled down, the explosive remnants continue to kill and maim dozens of people every year.
The long-term danger posed to civilians by explosive ordnance peppered across the landscape for years — or even decades after fighting has ceased — has come under a renewed spotlight since the US in July announced that it would provide them to Ukraine to use against Russia.
In Syria, 15 people were killed and 75 wounded by cluster munition attacks or their remnants last year, the coalition’s data showed. Iraq, where there were no new cluster bomb attacks reported last year, saw 15 people killed and 25 wounded.
Photo: AP
In Yemen, which also had no new reported attacks, five people were killed and 90 were wounded by the leftover explosives.
The majority of victims globally are children. Because some types of these bomblets resemble metal balls, children often pick them up and play with them without knowing what they are.
Scattered submunitions often strike shepherds and scrap metal collectors, a common post-conflict source of livelihood, said Loren Persi, one of the editors of the Cluster Munition Coalition’s report.
They also lurk in the fields where truffle hunters forage for the lucrative delicacy, he said.
Efforts to clear the explosives have been hampered by lack of funding and by the logistics of dealing with the patchwork of actors controlling different parts of Syria, Persi said.
A total of 124 countries have joined a UN convention banning cluster munitions. The US, Russia, Ukraine and Syria are among the holdouts.
Deaths and injuries from cluster munition remnants have continued for decades after wars ended in some cases — including in Laos, where people still die yearly from Vietnam war-era US bombing that left millions of unexploded cluster bomblets.
Alex Hiniker, an independent expert with the Forum on the Arms Trade, said casualties had been dropping worldwide before the 2011 uprising turned civil war in Syria.
“Contamination was being cleared, stockpiles were being destroyed,” she said, but the progress “started reversing drastically” in 2012, when the Syrian government and allied Russian forces began using cluster bombs against the opposition in Syria.
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