Afghan mine clearers reap a sinister harvest

ALI KHUJA, Afghanistan -- Even in the December chill, a thin film of sweat glistened on Mohammed Naseem's forehead. At the foot of a crumbling mud wall, in what was once a pretty village where clusters of grapes hung heavy on the vine, his metal detector had just uttered a small, telltale shriek.

Naseem, an Afghan mine clearer with five years' experience, knew it might be a false alarm. Already that morning he had uncovered several buried shell casings from Kalashnikov rifles, a bit of scrap metal, and what looked to be the digging edge of a rusty spade.

Now Ali Khuja, a village on the mountain-ringed Shomali plain north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, is yielding up a more sinister harvest -- dozens, perhaps hundreds of land mines laid by northern alliance troops for whom this was a front-line position during the struggle against the Taliban.

In dozens of towns and villages, mine-clearers like Naseem are racing to find and destroy mines before refugees begin streaming home.

Tock-tock-tock

Kneeling now, Naseem slid a thin metal rod into the dirt -- and heard the telltale tock-tock-tock as his probe lightly tapped the side of a disc-shaped anti-personnel mine.

It was planted at just the spot a person intending to clamber over the wall would have used as a foothold.

Scarcely breathing, Naseem used a small scraper to expose an inch or two of the mine's curving, dull-black side, studded with small spikes. He could see at a glance that it was an Iranian-made YM-1, and had he triggered it, his leg would have been blown off to the knee.

Afghanistan has a small army of mine-clearers -- about 4,500 of them, most employed by half a dozen U.N.-affiliated agencies whose funding is supplemented by private groups and foreign governments.

Most make about $105 a month -- a princely sum in a country where the average monthly wage is $4. Most admit the high salary is the main attraction, but all say they also take satisfaction in rendering their war-wrecked country a bit more habitable, day by day.

Has a rough map

In Ali Khuja, the mine-clearers are lucky -- the local northern alliance commander left a map, though an imprecise one, of the mines his men had laid throughout the abandoned village to fortify their defenses.

It will probably take 18 months to make the village safe, said Nasir Ahmad of the Halo Trust, the agency contracted to clear it.

A short while after finding his Iranian-made mine, Naseem stood a hundred yards away, mopping his forehead with his tattered headscarf as he waited for fellow workers to attach a long fuse and blow up the mine in a controlled explosion.

When he heard the percussive blast and saw the dust plume rise, Naseem, a 31-year-old father of 10 children, closed his eyes for a moment.

"Once again, God has protected me," he murmured.