KHOST (Tajikistan): Every spring meltwater dislodges bomblets in the mountains and sends them down steep gulleys towards inhabited areas. That is how 10-year-old Salim Saimuddinov, who was born after Tajikistan’s civil war ended, became one of its victims.

A green-eyed boy wearing ripped tracksuit bottoms and an old denim jacket, he lives in a small village in the Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan, an impoverished Central Asian state bordering Afghanistan that fought a 1992-97 civil war.

Two years ago he went out with his brother Narzikul to collect firewood, a necessity in a village where the electricity rarely works. It was Narzikul who spotted the bomblet and, thinking it was a ball, picked it up and threw it.

“Suddenly something exploded. My leg and face were covered in blood,” Salim said.

Shrapnel hit his right eye while his leg was pummelled by 160 small metal balls from the unexploded Russian-made ShOAB-0.5 bomblet.

Tajikistan’s civil war, which pitched a Moscow-backed secular government against a coalition of Islamists and others, killed 150,000 people. The country has been gradually recovering ever since.

The United Nations Development Programme’s Tajikistan Mine Action Centre (TMAC) says 10,000 mines and unexploded ordnance are scattered over 25 million square metres of Tajikistan, a country that is 90 per cent mountains.

“We need more deminers, we need more detectors,” Andy Smith, chief technical adviser of TMAC, said. “We do not have enough funding. The bombs will be near the land soon.”—Reuters