Afghanistan: Nine Children Killed by Mine Explosion · Global Voices

Tragedy occurred in where nine children were killed by the explosion dating back to the war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, a Ghazni province official announced today. “Nine children were killed Sunday (…) by the mine explosion, dated from the Russian invasion, with which they were playing,” Hamidullah Nisar, director of the Afghanistan Province Information and Culture Service. Gazni police clarified in a statement that the children killed in the Geru district were five girls and four boys four to ten years old. Also on Sunday another child was killed in the western province of Herat by the explosion of ammunition, from which five other people were injured, police noted in her account in X. The fatal accidents with explosive mechanisms are often in Afghanistan, a country that was at war for more than forty years. The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and retired from the country in February 1989, after nine years of highly bloody conflicts. After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 and the country’s conflict was halted, millions of Afghans managed to return to their villages and fields. But mines or other explosive devices that have not exploded still kill or maim people, mostly children.