Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria – A three-year-old girl was killed, and three others were injured on Monday, March 24, in two separate landmine explosions in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor province, reported by to local sources to +963.
In the town of Al-Quriyah, east of Deir ez-Zor, a group of children discovered an unexploded ordnance left behind from the war. While handling it, the device detonated, killing three-year-old Rana Ahmed Al-Atallah and severely injuring her two siblings. The injured children were transported to hospitals in Damascus for urgent medical treatment.
In a separate incident in the town of Khasham, also in eastern Deir ez-Zor, a young man named Tamer Al-Samhan was wounded when a landmine exploded while he was riding his motorcycle through an abandoned area.
The ongoing threat of unexploded ordnance in Syria remains a deadly hazard, particularly for children. According to Save the Children, an international non-governmental organization based in the UK, 188 children were killed or injured in Syria in the past three months alone due to landmines and other remnants of war. The total number of casualties from such incidents across the country reached 628 during this period.
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The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, has been actively working to mitigate these dangers. On March 11, the organization announced that its teams had identified 141 minefields and hazardous areas contaminated with unexploded ordnance across Syria. Some of these locations contain anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, posing a significant risk to civilians.
Between November 26, 2024, and March 2, 2025, the White Helmets conducted 1,229 clearance operations, successfully destroying 1,813 unexploded munitions—one-third of which were cluster bombs.
