Navigating A Minefield
Coming Soon…
Afer the Myanmar military takes a village, often accompanied by widespread looting and arson, it routinely seeds the ground with landmines near people’s houses, places of worship, and transit routes. As displaced villagers return to their homes, they face a stark choice, according to Free Burma Rangers (FBR) volunteer Jonathan Moss: face the danger now by conducting ad hoc demining or live with constant danger in the course of their lives and livelihoods.
After a career as a teacher in the United States, Moss joined the U.S. military in 2014, where he served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer with training including diving, airborne operations, demolitions, IEDs, and chemical and radiological hazards. After leaving the military in 2022, he began volunteering with FBR, the well-known humanitarian aid and advocacy organization that has been active in Myanmar for the past 32 years.
The patterns of landmine use by the Myanmar military have been consistent throughout FBR’s engagement with the country, Moss told Insight Myanmar in the latest episode of the Navigating a Minefield series. Mines are laid in rings around military encampments, along roads, trails and crossings, and in villages that the military has taken, pillaged, and burned. The scale has increased since the 2021 coup, and especially ahead of the military’s staged elections beginning at the end of 2025, with rapidly shifting lines of conflict making mapping of contamination and clearance efforts more complicated.
“Mines are being laid, not only for defense, but to target civilians. IDP routes that IDPs would travel on, food paths, water access points – they’re increasingly contaminated,” Moss says. “These mines are being laid in areas where civilians are going to go back to… after the villages are burned and looted and the Burma Army leaves, they will actually boobytrap the front doors to the homes.” Mines have been found at the entrance and walkways of churches and other places of worship, again, deliberately targeting civilians in violation of international humanitarian law.
FBR data indicate that typical resupply drops to Myanmar army units, which occur about every three months, included 200 to 500 landmines. One military camp was found to have 5,000 mines deployed. These anti-personnel mines are causing more casualties than unexploded ordnance (UXO), such as dud artillery and munitions, Moss says, because people know how to deal with remnants of war, while the landmines are buried and hard to detect.
The M14 mine, known colloquially as a “toe-popper”, has been used by the military for about 20 years, according to FBR founder Dave Eubank. Designed to be triggered by a footfall and injure rather than kill, the M14s are made largely of plastic and smaller than six centimeters in diameter. In a recent mission in Karenni State, Moss notes, the detector they brought failed to register an M14 because of the low metal content.
More than 1,600 mine and UXO casualties were recorded by the Landmine Monitor in Myanmar in 2024 – the worst in the world for the second year in a row – in statistics that assuredly undercount the scale of the suffering. In addition to the deaths and injuries, landmine contamination creates a climate of fear for people living their daily lives and earning livelihoods, maiming and killing precious livestock and worsening already hardship economic conditions. For people returning to their homes, clearing contaminated areas is a matter of utmost urgency.
“Demining, it’s already happening, and it’s happening with or without international support from people and the communities,” Moss says. “They just really can’t wait for anyone to come and help them. So people are taking this on themselves, and they’re clearing paths to these farms, to these water sources, to these medical clinics and to their schools and churches, just out of necessity.”
Those efforts are typically being carried out by one to two community members, who are sometimes former soldiers, or with the assistance of resistance forces, Moss adds. In the absence of formal training or almost any funding support, people are resorting to ad hoc methods such as shooting at mines, dropping weights on them, driving over them with a vehicle or, at great personal danger, trying to defuse them by hand. All these methods are extremely hazardous, with the ubiquitous M14 making detection and defusal even more difficult.
In March 2025, Moss and his family moved to Thailand, where his wife Rachel, a licensed mental health therapist, began working with landmine survivors. Moss continued FBR efforts to establish an Explosive Hazard Mitigation Center in support of existing demining efforts, seeking to enact International Mine Action Standards (IMAS) as much as possible. “We are working alongside our partners within Burma, and we are trying to partner with them and really let them lead and tell us how we can be of most service to them,” he said. “And we want this to be something sustainable and scalable and repeatable across all of Burma.”
The proposed model features two levels of staffing, which includes a professional, full-time demining team attached to local organizations, such as the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, or the Karenni Interim Executive Council, which would clear mines and support communities. The second level would be community demining training so villagers can mark, identify, and in some cases, conduct demining safely. There already have been systematic, locally led initiatives such as mapping territory into “red zones,” where the Myanmar armed forces are or have been in control; “yellow zones,” where conflict has occurred; and “green zones,” with less hazards but possible contamination with UXO.
“International funding and policy are lagging behind the reality of the situation on the ground,” Moss says. “We’re working with local groups to develop practical and field-driven solutions.”
The challenges include a dire shortfall of funding for expensive demining efforts, leading to a lack of detectors, personal protective equipment (PPE), mechanical equipment, fuel and repair capacity.
In Moss’ estimation, any successful international landmine clearance will depend on the leadership, knowledge and expertise of the communities on the ground, supporting the local demining efforts that are already underway. The questions that persist are when international organizations will demonstrate the flexibility to support those efforts and make the major investments needed to save lives in an uncertain and ongoing conflict.