ADEN, Yemen, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Sulaiman Mutahir, a demining worker, accidentally lost all his four limbs during a mission to dismantle a network of landmines laid by the Houthi rebel group near a residential neighborhood in Yemen's southwestern province of Taiz.

"The war erupted in Taiz in 2015 and Houthis began firing missiles indiscriminately against the city's residential neighborhoods when I was a third-year industrial engineering student at Taiz University," the 28-year-old told Xinhua.

"I had an initiative and formed a team with four other colleagues from my college, aiming to dismantle the unexploded missiles, bombs, and landmines that were threatening the lives of the residents," he said.

In late 2015, Mutahir began his work to clear the landmines laid in various neighborhoods of Taiz and succeeded in defusing more than 650 mines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

Then came the tragic day in September 2018. Mutahir was struck by a large landmine explosion when trying to dismantle mines near the Al Zunouj residential neighborhood in the north of Taiz.

"I was transferred to receive treatment at a nearby medical center in Taiz. I stayed there for about a month, but my health condition critically deteriorated and I was taken to receive medical care abroad in Egypt and then to India," he said.

Mutahir is now in the Indian city of Pune, but he has stopped receiving treatment and is going through extremely difficult living conditions: his right eye was perforated in the explosion and lost its vision completely while the condition of the left eye is turning for the worse dramatically for lack of adequate medical care.

The injured Yemeni deminer appealed to the government authorities and the humanitarian organizations to transfer him to a modern hospital in Germany for necessary treatment and rectification of his remaining eye's vision.

"I am now disabled after losing all my four limbs, almost completely blind, and homeless outside my country, and no one stands beside me, only because I volunteered with the initiative and chose to sacrifice for the sake of the local citizens of Taiz," Mutahir said sadly.

Mutahir is simply among dozens of explosive experts and deminers in Yemen who are suffering from serious wounds and permanent disabilities during mine clearance tasks.

Amin Aqili, director of the national demining program in Yemen, said landmines killed nearly 61 of the program's members and have left a large number of injured workers since the beginning of the war.

The mines also claimed "the lives of five international explosives experts working with the Saudi-funded project tasked with dismantling landmines in Yemen," Aqili added.

The demining teams in Yemen are ill-equipped and inadequately protected in face of the massive number of dangerous explosives spreading across the war-ravaged country, according to Ahmed Azazi, an official from the government mine clearance task team.

Azazi told Xinhua that all the on-ground demining teams lack safety equipment as well as modern devices to deal with new types of mines.

"The numerous booby-traps and the Houthi militia's usage of sophisticated mines and advanced technology made it difficult for disposal teams to deal with," he said.

Moreover, the demining workers, who are already underpaid, also witness constant delays in salaries and allowances, which deals a heavy blow to the morale of the task teams.

"We all have family obligations. Stopping or delaying distributing our salaries can cause stress, low morale and distractions, which increases casualties among the workers," said Azazi.

The mines and explosives planted by the Houthi militia have killed more than 8,000 people, including children and women, since the beginning of the war in September 2014, according to the government.

Previous reports of humanitarian organizations suggested that Yemen has become one of the largest landmine battlefields in the world since World War II.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthi militia seized control of several northern Yemeni provinces and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to support Hadi's government. Enditem

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