Land mines are not the only type of explosive devices that families returning home after conflicts risk stumbling across, representatives from the UN’s Mine Action Service (UNMAS) told journalists here Monday.

“There is a lot of stigma about using mines now – the real issue is just the explosive detritus of conflict,” said Paul Heslop, UNMAS chief of program planning on the International Day for Mine Awareness. This detritus, said Heslop, includes unexploded hand grenades, rockets, bombs, shells, cluster munitions, and improvised explosive devices.

This is why UNMAS does not discriminate when removing unexploded ordinances in conflict and post-conflict zones, said Agnes Marcaillou, director of the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS). For UNMAS, it doesn’t matter if the explosive device is a land mine or an improvised explosive device inside a soda can, she said.

Marcaillou described how in Iraq people are returning home to find their homes deliberately booby-trapped. “In Iraq if you decide to return to your home after Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL) has left your village you are likely to find your doors, your windows, everything will be booby trapped,” she said.

Syrian families who return home are faced with “a land littered with unexploded bombs and cluster munitions that might kill (them) or (their) children today, or perhaps tomorrow,” she said.

While some of these devices are sometimes described as improvised or homemade, they are actually sophisticated systems designed to make sure that people are not safe to return home even after the fighting has ended, said Marcaillou.

Marcaillou told journalists that it is essential that mine action is incorporated into the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit to be held in Istanbul in May. If not, it will be impossible to meet the cost of clearing mines and other unexploded devices from Iraq and Syria, which, she said, could exceed 100 million dollars. However Marcaillou said that the cost of removing the unexploded weapons was small in comparison to the amount spent on purchasing bombs and fighter jets. “There is money to clean up what money paid to do,” she said.

And while progress has been made on mine clearance, including in some of the worst affected countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia, the international community should not yet see the problem as solved, said Heslop.

For example, in Afghanistan, he said, the number of deaths from mines has dropped from hundreds per month down to five or six, yet other types of unexploded ordinances still cause about 70 deaths per month.

And despite decades of clearing land mines from Cambodia, Heslop said that making Cambodia mine free could still take another decade, with cluster munitions posing a new challenge as people move to areas which haven’t yet been cleared.

In a statement issued to mark the International Day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that he was “particularly concerned about the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.”

However Ban also noted that even in extremely challenging contexts such as Syria progress is being made on removing mines. Since August 2015, some 14 tonnes of unexploded ordnance have been destroyed in Syria, he said.

Almost 90 percent of recent deaths or serious injuries to United Nations peacekeepers in Mali have been attributed to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a U.N. panel has heard.

Ahead of International Day of Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action on April 4, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) is this week hosting a series of events and discussions in New York.

The theme of the 2015 awareness campaign is ‘More Than Mines,’ encompassing a range of other explosive hazards besides traditional landmines, according to UNMAS Director Agnès Marcaillou.

“This issue, thought to be an issue of the past, has come back in full force. ‘More Than Mines’ includes IEDs, cluster bombs, unexploded ordnance,” Marcaillou told a panel on IEDs on Monday.

Representatives from Afghanistan, Chad, Japan, Colombia, France and the Netherlands told how the dangers of explosive ordnance are shifting; mine threats becoming more manageable, with enforcement of international agreements and reduction of stockpiles, while the occurrence of IEDs is on the rise.

“In Afghanistan, victims of landmines are declining, but they are being replaced with victims of IEDs,” Marcaillou said.

Gombo Tchouli, Political Coordinator of the Permanent Mission of Chad to the United Nations, said UNMAS had recorded 409 casualties from IEDs in Mali since January 2013, with 135 deaths and 274 injuries. Of those 409 casualties, 142 were peacekeepers deployed to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), 89 percent of the mission’s 158 total peacekeeper casualties.

“IEDs undermine operational effectiveness and freedom of movement, stop peacekeepers moving outward from camp, and prevent implementation of critical mission mandated tasks,” he said.

Eric Schilling, a counter-IED advisor with UNMAS, said U.N. peacekeepers were now more frequently targeted by IEDs and other explosives than in the past.

“The devices can be relatively low-cost, victim-operated pressure plates, up to more sophisticated technology using cell phones. They are limited only by the imagination of the bomb-maker and their ability to gather the materials needed,” he said.

In a session earlier in the day, titled ‘Visions From The Field,’ UNMAS explored how mine-clearing action was being taken in Colombia. Marcaillou called Colombia “one of the most mine-affected countries in the world,” second in impacts only to Afghanistan. Mines are said to have killed 11,000 Colombians since 1990.

Initiatives to engage locals, especially women, in helping to clear mines were hailed as a “best practice” example. Bringing locals in to work, and by extension, assuring them that areas are safe and that they can return to work and school, is seen as the most effective way to restore communities.

“De-mining can’t be imposed from the outside. It is important to connect with people locally, to be working with local communities, and generating benefits for the local population,” said Ambassador Karel van Oosterom, Permanent Representative of the Netherlands.

Activities for International Day of Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action continue all week.

Follow Josh Butler on Twitter at @JoshButler

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin