ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A landmine exploded in the northern Aleppo countryside, injuring three children who had been displaced from Afrin, a UK-based conflict monitor reported on Sunday. The children, who are eight, nine, and 11 years old, were injured after the landmine exploded in Tal Qarah village in Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). The children had varying degrees of injury, the observatory added. Kurdish and pro-Damascus forces control the area in northwestern Syria, according to SOHR. Pro-Kurdish Hawar News (ANHA) also reported on the details of the incident in Shahba canton, adding that the injured children - Sardar, Alaa, and Salah - received treatment at Afrin hospital. The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) has raised awareness of mines and other explosive contaminations for "both rural and urban areas" throughout Syria. "While the full scale of contamination is not precisely known, based on preliminary findings for the 2024 Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO), approximately one in three communities in Syria is potentially contaminated with explosive ordnance," UNMAS stated in April. Since Turkey began an operation in 2018 to occupy the predominantly Kurdish district of Afrin in Aleppo, much of the area has been forcibly resettled by Turkish-backed proxy groups and other outside groups supported by Ankara. Afrin largely had not been involved in the Syrian civil war prior to the Turkish operation which displaced its people into the Aleppo countryside and other parts of the country. Turkey's operation also has sought to push the pro-Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) out of Afrin and away from Turkey's southern border. Ankara believes the YPG is a Syrian offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The YPG form the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the partnered ground forces of the US-led international coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS). Many of Afrin's natives are effectively trapped between the Turkish occupation in the north and pro-regime forces to the south. Syrians rose against the Assad regime in March 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, left millions more in dire need of humanitarian assistance, and left much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins. More than 13 million Syrians, half the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced since the start of the civil war, more than 6 million of whom are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to United Nations figures. Millions of Syrians are living in Turkey.
