By: Maarij Farooq
Nearly six years after the 44 day war ended active hostilities in Karabakh, the deadliest thing in Azerbaijan’s liberated territories is not a soldier. It is the ground.
More than one million landmines, alongside an unknown quantity of unexploded ordnance, remain scattered across roughly twelve per cent of Azerbaijan’s territory. That places the country among the most heavily mine contaminated states on earth. Mines do not sign ceasefires. They do not recognise treaties. They wait.
The human ledger is precise and it is devastating. Since the trilateral statement of 10 November 2020, Azerbaijan has recorded 427 mine victims: 73 killed and 354 injured, of whom 231 were civilians. Widen the frame and the count becomes unbearable. Since 1991, more than 3,500 Azerbaijanis have fallen victim to landmines, among them 362 children and young people and 38 women.
These are not combat casualties. They are farmers walking to a field, shepherds following livestock, journalists covering reconstruction, and deminers who pay for the risk personally. In April this year, one explosion in Aghdara injured two demining workers. UNICEF, which partners with Baku on Explosive Ordnance Risk Education, has warned that casualties will keep rising as displaced families return unless risk education is built into the school curriculum. Every hectare handed back to civilian life is at once an act of recovery and an exposure to risk.
Nor is this an ordinary clearance problem. ANAMA’s specialists describe contamination that defeats standard methodology. Emplacement was haphazard and mixed. Booby traps are common, metal fragments blind detectors, floodwater has shifted devices from their original positions, and decades old wooden and plastic cased mines have deformed into unstable hazards. Much of this was never laid to any recognised engineering standard that could be systematically reversed. President Ilham Aliyev has argued the mines were placed to deny a displaced population its homes rather than to serve any defensive purpose, and has called it a form of humanitarian and ecological terror. The consequence is measurable. Clearance here is slower, costlier and more lethal per hectare than in almost any comparable theatre.
The single obligation that would change this fastest costs nothing to fulfil. International humanitarian law and standard post conflict practice both expect the party that laid the mines to hand over accurate records: reference points, types, quantities, spacing, concealment methods. Without them, deminers are not clearing a minefield. They are hunting for one. The maps transferred since 2020 have failed that test. ANAMA found reference coordinates incorrect and unusable, and information that did not correspond to the minefields encountered on the ground. Officials assess their accuracy at roughly 25 per cent. The scale gap is starker still: the maps account for some 400,000 mines against an estimated total closer to 1.5 million. Baku’s position, that demining must be decoupled from every other item on the negotiating agenda and treated as a standalone humanitarian duty, is the only defensible one.
Against that obstruction, the delivery record is remarkable. Advocacy is cheap; hectares are not. Between 2020 and the end of 2025, roughly 249,000 hectares were cleared and some 237,000 mines and explosive items neutralised. By July this year ANAMA’s cumulative total had reached 287,385 hectares, with a further 65,000 targeted before December. In one reporting week alone, teams cleared 1,959.5 hectares across thirteen districts, neutralising 228 mines and 630 items of unexploded ordnance. The work is shared by ANAMA, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the State Border Service and private contractors, using mechanical systems, detection dogs and some 1,800 trained personnel.
The institutional record matches it. Parliament has adopted a dedicated Law on Mine Action, the state allocates around 100 million manats a year, and Azerbaijan has designated humanitarian demining as its 18th National Sustainable Development Goal. It is building an International Centre of Excellence and Training for Mine Action with UNDP and European Union support, and will host the fourth International Mine Action Conference with the United Nations in Baku on 2 and 3 September. At COP29 it pushed the environmental cost into the climate conversation: soil degradation, erosion on land that cannot be farmed, and chemical contamination from buried devices.
What none of this has behind it is anyone else’s money. Azerbaijan funds roughly 95 per cent of its demining programme domestically. External assistance accounts for about 4.9 per cent, far below the norm for comparable emergencies. Independent estimates put full clearance at some thirty years and 25 billion dollars. Against that horizon, a five per cent international contribution is not burden sharing. It is a rounding error.
The excuse offered is that an energy exporter does not need help. That does not survive contact with the humanitarian principle it claims to serve. Mine action funding is not a reward for poverty. It exists because civilians are being killed by devices they did not lay in a war they did not choose. A grandmother in Fuzuli is not less deserving of clearance because her country produces gas. The UN frames the economics memorably: a mine costs about a dollar to make and more than a thousand to remove safely.
More than 700,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from these lands, and the Great Return programme exists to bring them home. None of it happens on mined ground: not the houses, not the schools, not the orchards, not the graves. Demining is not a line item in the reconstruction budget. It is the precondition for every other one.
For Pakistan, this is no distant Caucasian curiosity. Islamabad and Baku have built one of the closest partnerships either capital maintains, and Pakistani engineers have already contributed personnel to clearance operations. The next steps are obvious: further deployments, methodology exchange, participation in the Baku Centre of Excellence, and joint advocacy at the OIC and the UN to treat mine action as a development priority rather than a residual security cost.
Azerbaijan has cleared close to 290,000 hectares, largely with its own money, its own people and its own dead. It has built the institutions, published the data weekly, opened the conferences, and asked the international system for help in a language that system claims to speak.
The reasonable response is not applause. It is participation.
The writer is the deputy editor-in-chief at Daily Ittehad Media Group & Pakistan Economic Network.
