The American newspaper "The Washington Post" said that the Russian "Wagner" mercenaries, when they fled the Libyan capital Tripoli last summer, left behind booby-trapped houses and gardens, and also put - according to Libyan demining experts - explosives designed to explode upon touch in every area. A place, inside toilets, with baby dolls, on doors, even in empty soda cans.

The newspaper stated - in a report by the director of its office in Cairo, Sudarsan Raghavan - that the Libyan demining teams are now roaming various parts of the war-ravaged capital to rid it of this "deadly legacy", and sometimes find unexploded ordnance left behind - intentionally or unintentionally - by the mercenaries. The Russians supporting the retired Libyan Major General Khalifa Haftar and the fighters who preceded them during the past waves of conflict.

Rabih al-Jawashi, head of the Free Fields Foundation, a Libyan agency specialized in demining, says that many Libyan youths like to run over soda cans out of fun, so the Russians designed them to explode when pressured.

"They studied the details of our lives, they even studied how our children play... They know very well how we think," he added.

Some of the discovered munitions dated back to the Arab Spring a decade ago, which led to the overthrow and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and left the huge stores of weapons in his possession in the hands of a number of militias.

deadliest

In the war-ravaged southern neighborhoods of the capital, such as Ain Zara, demining experts have discovered unexploded ordnance and mortar shells, some of them US-made from the Gaddafi era.

Libyan experts confirm that the most dangerous and most deadly of these weapons are Russian-made mines, which they say they have not seen before Khalifa Haftar's failed campaign in 2019 to control the capital.

"Of all the conflicts that Libya has witnessed since 2011, this last conflict was the worst for us... Because of it, we discovered many new weapons, all of which were brought from abroad," said Maad Al-Araby, director of operations at the Free Fields Foundation.

Also, according to the newspaper, hundreds and perhaps thousands of Libyan families are still unable to return to their homes because of mines and other types of explosive objects. Almost every week, social media circulate reports of new casualties among defenseless civilians.

“It is sad to see all the waste of the world dumped in Libya,” said Mohamed Zlatni, a demining team leader in Tripoli. “The ones responsible for this situation are those who supported one of the two sides of the conflict.. If there was no external support, all this would not have happened. We The Libyans are now paying the price."

The newspaper reports that during the past summer, members of the Free Fields Foundation were among the first demining experts who entered the areas that were under the control of Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, and were able to discover 107 explosive devices in only one street in Salah al-Din neighborhood, south of Tripoli.

high cost

Over the course of several weeks, two members of the team were able to remove more than 400 mines and other explosive devices from more than 200 homes, but this success came at a high cost, as the two men were killed early last July when an explosive device that was tightly hidden inside one of the houses exploded.

The Libyan experts were also able to discover bodybuilding equipment, imported water bottles and milk cartons inside houses with phrases written on the walls in Russian and Serbian. They also found instructions on how to open the doors or go to the bathroom without causing the booby traps set by the mercenaries.

Maad al-Arabi says, "The problems we faced were not finding the explosive devices, but rather the way to place them. All of them were designed in a new way that we did not know before."

The Libyan experts also reported that they had found a range of innovative mines, including the “Russian Diffuse Mine,” which is a mine that spreads automatically and self-destructs within 100 hours, and an anti-personnel mine with laser beams as detonating wires, and other lethal groups of mines such as the double mine, whose first fissure is Taste while his second apartment explodes.

After detecting all these explosive objects, Libyan demining experts sent pictures of them to advisers in the United States and Europe, and a Ukrainian expert confirmed that they are similar to those used in the conflict in Crimea, where Russian Wagner mercenaries also fought.