A four-legged guest made an unusual appearance at a Capitol Hill briefing on Thursday: Yankee, a mine-detecting canine.
Yankee, an ambassador for the Marshall Legacy Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting with the recovery of victims of war-torn countries, has sniffed out an estimated 1 million square meters for landmines planted in the Middle East and worldwide. Mines killed more than 7,000 people around the world in 2017.
“The use of landmines in any conflict, in any country, by any party, is wrong,” said Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak, ambassador of Yemen to the U.S. and one of the people who spoke at the briefing on behalf of the Global Landmine Crisis. “Every casualty is unnecessary. We should all stand opposed.”
The Houthi rebel forces have planted them in six Yemeni governorates, including residential areas such as schools, homes, roads, hospitals, farmlands, and wells.
Mubarak said that the majority of targets are young, innocent civilians who die or lose limbs as a result.
President of the Marshall Legacy Institute Perry Baltimore said that it is not enough for the institute to give the children their limbs back; they want to give the children their lives back.
“There’s a big, big job for all of us right now to take care of [landmines],” said Baltimore. “Long after people stop dying from war, long after the bullets stop flying from war, people will keep dying because of landmines — decades and decades and decades after the battle.”
Ken Rutherford, the director of the mine-focused public policy organization the Center for International Stabilization Recovery at James Madison University, lost both of his legs when a car he was riding in hit a landmine in Somalia 26 years ago.
“I got really lucky,” said Rutherford, who was working for a humanitarian organization at the time. “God’s been more than good to me. I feel like his holy will, in a sense, was for me to live this experience, to share the stories of the voiceless and for those who don’t have the opportunity to speak.”
The concentration of the landmines in Yemen is believed to be as high as any other country since World War II, and 2,000 individuals are killed or injured every month by landmines around the world.
The U.S. has donated over $3.4 billion to 100 countries around the world to “at-risk, illicitly proliferated, and indiscriminately used conventional weapons of war,” alongside a $37.5 million investment in conventional weapons destruction activities in Yemen.
