Afghan women clear out village's bombs by hand. Basically, when a couple of children in the village were killed while playing with the bombs, the women, who were tired of stepping around the US cluster bombs to do daily chores and whatnot, collected them carefully and set them off in a safe place.
The women, Khairulnisah, 50, and Nasreen, 40, started to gather the dangerously volatile yellow canisters after the bombing in 2001 and after they had witnessed the explosion that killed the two boys and badly injured another child as they played with the 2-pound bombs that littered the village.
Think about that. They knew exactly what the bombs could do, they witnessed it first-hand in the deaths of two children, but they started to clean them up anyway.
The cluster bombs were dropped during the U.S. operation against Taliban forces occupying the village in October 2001. They are armor-piercing missiles that scatter in the air from a larger bomb and can shred both humans and tanks. Up to a third of the bombs do not explode on impact, but lie on or just below the surface of the ground, and detonate with the slightest vibration or increase in heat, mine removers at the Halo Trust said.
How are these bombs different than land mines? Why are we dropping this kind of bomb on villages? Yeah, it says that Taliban forces were occupying the village, but that means we can leave explosives lying around to kill innocent children? It's a horror that Khairulnisah and Nasreen felt they had to remove the bombs themselves. Can you imagine having a dozen unexploded bombs sitting in your front yard, endangering your family and children? I only hope that if/when the day comes that I'm tested as these women were, that I can live up to the challenge.
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