When Enaya Dastor was 13 years old, she stepped on a landmine near her village of Jabal Habashy in Yemen’s Taiz governorate. The August 2023 explosion cost her left leg. Her family, unable to remain in the village after the trauma, relocated to Taiz city. Now in tenth grade, Dastor plans to finish high school and enrol in law college — a future she is determined to reach despite the violence that reshaped her childhood.
Her story is far from isolated. Since a ceasefire between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and Houthi forces took effect in April 2022, landmines and explosive remnants of war have killed at least 339 children and injured 843 more, according to Save the Children. Nearly half of all child casualties linked to the Yemen conflict stem from mines and unexploded ordnance — weapons that do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, and that outlast the battles that placed them.
In the first half of 2025 alone, 107 civilians were killed or injured by landmines, the majority of them children. Among the dead were five boys killed while playing football on a dirt field in Taiz — a moment of ordinary childhood interrupted by a buried weapon from a war that technically paused years earlier.
Taiz has consistently recorded the highest mine casualty figures of any Yemeni province. Mohammed Mustafa knows the toll intimately. In 2018, at the age of 20, he lost his left leg to a landmine in Taiz’s Maqbna district. After the explosion, he endured a five-hour ambulance journey to reach a hospital in Taiz city — a journey that underscores how remote many of the most dangerous areas remain, and how far survivors must travel for basic medical care.
The scale of the contamination reflects more than a decade of brutal conflict. Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, and ground fighting from 2015 through 2021 was relentless, accompanied by continuous airstrikes. A 2022 study by Yemeni human rights groups documented that between April 2014 and March 2022, mines killed 534 children and 177 women, while injuring 854 children, 255 women, and 147 elderly people across 17 provinces. The weapons were planted across the country with little regard for civilian movement.
"Mines in Yemen have been planted indiscriminately in different areas," said researcher Adel Dashela, highlighting the breadth of contamination that de-mining teams now face.
Efforts to address the crisis are substantial but strained. Project Masam, a de-mining initiative funded and launched by Saudi Arabia in July 2018, had removed a cumulative total of 549,452 mines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices by March 20, 2026, clearing explosives from 7,799 hectares — nearly 19,300 acres — of Yemeni land. The Danish Refugee Council has cleared more than 23,302 square metres of contaminated land as of early 2026.
Yet the challenge is compounding in ways that go beyond sheer numbers. Portions of Yemen remain under the control of various armed groups, rendering them inaccessible to de-mining teams. And in August 2025, flash floods swept through parts of the country, physically displacing explosives from known contaminated zones into new areas — effectively undoing portions of prior clearance work and seeding fresh danger in communities that believed themselves safe.
The combination of inaccessible territory, ongoing political fragmentation, and environmental disruption means that even as de-miners remove hundreds of thousands of devices, the threat continues to migrate and evolve. Children playing in fields, walking to school, or tending livestock remain at risk in provinces across the country.
For Dastor, the path forward is defined by the education she is pursuing and the legal career she envisions. Her family’s displacement from Jabal Habashy is permanent — the village that shaped her early years is now a place they cannot return to. But in Taiz city, she continues her studies, two years from completing high school, with plans that extend well beyond the conflict that marked her.
Her determination reflects a broader reality in Yemen: millions of civilians are attempting to rebuild lives in a landscape still laced with the physical remnants of war, where a ceasefire on paper has not yet translated into safety on the ground.
