The Premier Humanitarian Mine/UXO Clearance NGO in Afghanistan

 

FUNDED

 In early 1994, with intense fighting raging in Kabul and the evacuation of the bulk of Kabul’s residents to camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) around Jalalabad, ATC used its demining teams, for the first time in Afghan history, for battle area clearance in areas surrounding the camps.

 When the fighting stopped in late 1995, these teams then commenced demining in the city. As part of a Battle Area Clearance (BAC) project ATC raised a specialist team from existing demining staff and added to new teams newly employed for this purpose and trained them in battle area clearance for Kabul city itself to clear the many thousands of UXOs scattered in all areas, which were causing numerous casualties among returning refugees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New BAC techniques continue to be developed and are introduced to the program.

ATC BAC teams specifically worked in Kabul until mid 1999 but now all ATC manual demining teams have also been cross trained in BAC and are capable of dealing with BAC tasks in addition to their standard manual work, thus enabling battlefields to be cleared with teams already established and working in those areas.

Statistics show that 50% of Mines/UXOs incidents occur on civilian population rather than military personals. Therefore, existence of UXOs is major obstacles like mines and needs to be tackled in a proper and precise method.