Afghan Land Mine Danger Remains

K A B U L, Afghanistan, Dec. 2 -- It is one of the saddest places in the city.

Babies go through painful therapy. Children who have lost their legs learn to walk on new ones.

One of them here, Obaidullah, was just eight years old and gathering firewood when an old Russian mine blew off his leg.

After more than 20 years of war, there are not many places where Afghans can go with a guarantee of safety. There are millions of land mines and unexploded bombs.

Because Obaidullah is still growing, every few months the Italian director here builds him a new leg. It is shaped and sculpted by Afghan men and women.

Some 80,000 Afghans have been disabled by mines. A British mine-clearing organization now employs 1,200 people in Afghanistan.

Sometimes, they find layers of mines. They take them all to the mountains along with tank shells and mortar rounds, lay themcarefully in a hole and pack in explosives.

To give you an idea of how littered this country is, these guys have been blowing this stuff up on the side of this mountain every other day for 20years.

And now, a new problem. More than 10 percent of the American bombs dropped on this country did not explode, and the de-mining teams don't have the training to defuse them — they can only blow them up. It's very dangerous.

"Already we found four strike areas in which one person has been killed, one has been injured and one child threw one over a wall and it went off," said Bob Gannon of Halo Trust De-mining.

There are so many new mine victims in Afghanistan, the Red Cross runs one of the busiest factories in the country.

They can't make wooden wheelchairs fast enough.