More than 300 people killed by cluster munitions in Ukraine last year

More than 300 people were killed and over 600 wounded by cluster munitions in Ukraine in 2022, according to an international watchdog, surpassing Syria as the country with the highest number of casualties from the controversial weapons for the first time in a decade.

Russia's widespread use of the bombs, which open in the air and release scores of smaller bomblets, or submunitions as they are called, in its invasion of Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, their use by Ukrainian forces helped make 2022 the deadliest year on record globally, according to the annual report released Tuesday by the Cluster Munition Coalition, a network of non-governmental organizations advocating for a ban of the weapons.

The deadliest attack in Ukraine, according to the country's prosecutor general's office, was a bombing on a railway station in the town of Kramatorsk that killed 53 people and wounded 135.

Meanwhile, in Syria and other war-battered countries in the Middle East, the explosive remnants continue to kill and maim dozens of people every year, even though active fighting has cooled down.

The long-term danger posed to civilians by explosive ordnance peppered across the landscape for years or even decades after fighting has ceased has come under a renewed spotlight since the United States announced in July that it would provide them to Ukraine foruse against Russia.

WATCH l Zelenskyy says controversial munitions to only be used on 'military targets':

Cluster munitions would aid Ukraine's defence, Zelenskyy says

1 year ago

Duration 1:52

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he knows there is division around cluster munitions but he maintains his country needs them in its fight against invading forces, saying Russia constantly uses the controversial explosive weapons on Ukraines territory.

Canada has considered itself a leader in the international movement to limit the damageweapons like landmines and cluster munitions can cause to war-torn communities. The federal government helped spearhead a movement that led more than 100 countries to sign the Ottawa Treaty in December 1997, and dozens more joined in the years after.

In July, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would "continue to stand very strongly" on the position that cluster munitions "should not be used," though it's not clear if he's lobbied his Ukrainianand American counterparts to reverse their decision.

Syrian children at risk

In Syria, 15 people were killed and 75 wounded by cluster munition attacks or their remnants in 2022, according to the coalition's data. Iraq, where there were no new cluster-bomb attacks reported last year, saw 15 people killed and 25 wounded. In Yemen, which also had no new reported attacks, five people were killed and 90 were wounded by the leftover explosives.

The majority of victims globally are children. Because some types of these bomblets resemble metal balls, children often pick them up and play with them without knowing what they are.

Among the casualties are 12-year old Rawaa al-Hassan and her 10-year-old sister, Doaa, whose family has lived at a camp near the village of Ain Sheeb in northern Syria's opposition-held Idlib province since being displaced from their hometown in Hama province six years earlier.

The area where they lived in Idlib had frequently come under airstrikes, but the family had escaped from those unharmed.

During the holy Islamic month of Ramadan last year, as the girls were coming home from school, their mother Wafaa said, when they picked up an unexploded bomblet, thinking it was a piece of scrap metal they could sell.

Rawaa lost an eye, and Doaa, a hand. In a cruel irony, the girls' father had died eight months earlier after he stepped on a cluster munition remnant while gathering firewood.

The girls "are in a bad state, psychologically" since the two tragic accidents, said their uncle,Hatem al-Hassan, who now looks after them and their mother.

"Of course, we're afraid, and now we don't let them play outside at all anymore," he said.

Advocacy group 'baffled' by U.S. decision in Ukraine

Scattered submunitions often strike shepherds and scrap metal collectors, a common post-conflict source of livelihood, said Loren Persi, one of the editors of the Cluster Munition Coalition's annual report.

Efforts to clear the explosives have been hampered by lack of funding and by the logistics of dealing with the patchwork of actors controlling different parts of Syria, Persi said.

Some 124 countries have joined a United Nations convention banning cluster munitions. The U.S., Russia, Ukraine and Syria are among the holdouts.

Deaths and injuries from cluster-munition remnants have continued for decades after wars ended in some cases including in Laos, where people still die yearly from Vietnam War-era U.S. bombing that left millions of unexploded cluster bomblets.

The numbers had dropped off as the war in Syria turned into a stalemate, although at least one new cluster bomb attack was reported in Syria in November 2022. But they quickly spiked again with the conflict in Ukraine.

Read the report from the Cluster Munition Coalition:

U.S. officials have defended the decision to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine as necessary to level the playing field in the face of a stronger opponent and have insisted that they will take measures to mitigate harm to civilians. This would include sending a version of the munition with a reduced "dud rate," meaning fewer unexploded rounds left behind after the conflict.

Alex Hiniker, an independent expert with the Forum on the Arms Trade,said she and others who track the impacts of cluster munitions are "baffled by the fact that the U.S. is sending totally outdated weapons that the majority of the world has banned because they disproportionately kill civilians."