Ali the one-legged mineclearer

Ali sits outside MAG's Kfar Zor headquarters. I have no idea who the man in the shades is

Ali Murad smiles serenely as he tells me about the day he lost his leg.

He is dressed smart, in a pristine, grey t-shirt and khaki combat trousers and speaks in broken English with measured understatement.

“I was conscious when I went to the hospital, believe me, I remember everything,” he says and shuffles awkwardly onto his prosthetic leg.

Ali was part of Lebanon’s Mine Action Group, a team of some 400 trained mine clearers who have been working to rid the country from its estimated one million cluster bombs – relics from the 2006 war with Israel that still carpet much of south Lebanon – on a fateful February morning. His squadron had been working on a plot of land, known to be “heavily contaminated” all morning and had stopped for a break. These were the last moments of Ali’s first life.

On the way back to his lane – a metre-wide column of scrub land that each worker has to scan for visible bomblets – Ali stood on an unexploded M-77 submunition. In an instant, the bomb had obliterated his right foot and badly damaged his other leg.

“I looked at my foot and said ‘It’s finished,” Ali recalls, hoisting up his right trouser leg and showing his prosthetic forelimb. As medics crowded round their wounded colleague, Ali issued a simple instruction, even as his foot was bandaged back on to his body. “Save the other one.”

Ali was taken to Hammoud Hospital in the nearby port of Sidon and pleaded with surgeons to save as much of his leg as they could. In listening to their stricken patient, however, the doctors made a terrible mistake, keeping too much of his ruined limb. In the coming days, Ali needed an additional operation – risking infection of toxic shock – to remove enough flesh for a false leg to be attached in the future.

In a way, I’m glad it was me.

Doctors feared that the injuries Ali had sustained would debar him from even walking again. They hadn’t reckoned with their patient’s willpower. Ali was back, working the fields and making Lebanese soil safe for its inhabitants, less than three months after his accident. The man, unassuming and shy, turned out to be irrepressible.

Ali has fought against a life changing ordeal, coming to terms with the loss of his leg the way you or I would grieve a departed relative, yet he and the rest of MAG’s clearance teams are currently striving against an altogether more profound problem: funding.

When I went to Nabetieh to go on my second mine clearing operation, there were some rather big cheeses who cam along: Brigadier General Fehmi – head of the Lebanese Mine Action Centre – and Marta Ruedas, Lebanon’s most senior UN official. They both stressed their hope that the mine clearance programme in Lebanon would continue to receive funding, even as international governments and philanthropists are suffering in the wake of the global financial crisis and what the latter termed as “donor fatigue.” Neither said how they hoped to achieve this.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Lebanon had 64 mine clearance teams, there are currently only 16 and this is set to diminish. Marta tells me that ridding Lebanon once and for all of landmines is an achievable goal – it is a small country, after all. But if governments continue to withhold their support then civilians here will keep being added to the list of more than 300 – mostly children – who have been killed or maimed by cluster bombs in the last three years.

Ali is – perhaps understandably given his experiences – pragmatic and selfless on the topic of mine clearing.

“I think about my bomb every minute. I stepped on it, and that was bad,” he says. “But then I think: it could have been a child. It could have been a woman harvesting za’atar, or anyone else. I survived, and I can continue to help the people here in Lebanon.

“In a way, I’m glad it was me.”