A child was killed in the village of Buraydij, in the countryside of Hama province, after being struck by fragments from an explosive remnant of war that detonated while he was herding sheep. The death fits a pattern that has become routine across rural Syria, where munitions that failed to explode on impact remain in fields, pastures and pathways that people use every day.
According to the most recent documented count, 235 people have been killed in Syria since the start of 2026 by the detonation of explosive remnants of war. They include 142 men, 85 children and 8 women. Others were wounded.
A hazard that outlasts the fighting
Syria’s countryside carries the residue of more than a decade of armed conflict. Shells, rockets, submunitions and mines that did not function as designed do not become safe with time; they remain capable of detonating for years, and in some cases decades, after the forces that fired them have gone. Contamination is heaviest in areas that saw sustained military operations in past years, which are also the areas where engineering teams are now working to clear the ground.
That clearance work is itself lethal. Soldiers and members of demining and engineering units are among those killed and injured while locating and dismantling ordnance.
Why children make up so much of the toll
The breakdown of the casualty figures places children second only to men. That distribution says something about how the deaths occur: they are not confined to specialists handling munitions or to people straying near former military positions. They happen to people carrying out ordinary work — grazing livestock, moving between villages, using land that has never been surveyed.
Children are especially exposed. A rusted piece of ordnance in a field does not look like a weapon to a child, and curiosity rather than caution governs the encounter. The terrain compounds the problem: pastures, open fields and the approaches to villages cannot realistically be fenced off or watched, and families returning to land they left years ago have little way of knowing what lies in it.
Until surveying and clearance reach that land, the risk stays where it is — in the soil of places people have already come back to.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
