Hidden Costs of Conflict: Mines, Submarine Cables, and Cultural Heritage

The same wars that leave cities and monuments in ruins also reverberate through the world’s invisible networks — from ancient colonnades laced with unexploded ordnance to the undersea fiber arteries that carry cloud services — exposing how fragile both culture and commerce have become in the age of modern conflict.

Background: two kinds of hidden damage — mines beneath feet, cuts beneath seas​

Across the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of Africa, landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) continue to maim civilians, block resettlement and put priceless cultural heritage at risk. International monitoring groups recorded thousands of casualties from mines in 2023, and humanitarian demining teams face a long, painstaking job to render sites safe for reconstruction and tourism. These figures and trends are documented in the latest Landmine Monitor reporting and corroborated by mine-action NGOs, which warn that increases in improvised and indiscriminate explosive use have driven casualty numbers higher. (apopo.org, maginternational.org)
At the same time, the global internet — the backbone of commerce, government and community services — depends on a handful of submarine fiber corridors. When those physical links are damaged, either accidentally or during times of maritime insecurity, cloud services can experience measurable disruption: increased latency, congested alternate routes and degraded performance for latency-sensitive workloads. Microsoft’s Azure issued an operational advisory in September 2025 warning customers about higher-than-normal latency after a cluster of undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea forced traffic onto longer detours. This is a reminder that digital resilience ultimately rests on physical infrastructure. (reuters.com)

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Overview: what’s at stake — lives, livelihoods, heritage and digital continuity​

• Human cost: Landmines are not a historical curiosity. They kill and maim civilians long after active combat has ended, causing life-changing injuries and driving humanitarian need.
• Cultural cost: Heritage sites — Palmyra, the Musallah Minarets at Herat, the Herat Citadel, and many others — are not just tourist attractions; they are anchors of identity, scholarship and community recovery. Explosive contamination can prevent archaeological work and safe public access for decades.
• Economic cost: Mines block agriculture, trade routes and reconstruction, while subsea cable damage raises operational costs for cloud-dependent businesses and can disrupt critical services.
• Strategic cost: Both types of damage complicate post-conflict recovery and can entrench instability by slowing humanitarian aid and economic normalization.

This feature assesses how explosive hazards and infrastructure attacks intersect with heritage conservation and digital resilience, examines the operational realities of demining and cable repair, and offers practical guidance for policymakers, IT leaders and humanitarian actors.

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How war’s hidden weapons endanger culture and communities​

The modern mine problem — trends and human toll​

The 2024 Landmine Monitor and related NGO analyses show a worrying trajectory: more recorded casualties in recent years, driven largely by expanding armed conflicts and increased use of improvised mines. In 2023, monitor aggregations recorded roughly 5,700 casualties from mines and ERW — with about 2,400 deaths and 3,300 injuries — and civilians accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims. Children remain particularly vulnerable, representing a large share of casualties where age data is available. These numbers underscore that antipersonnel devices continue to be used and cause humanitarian harm despite international norms. (apopo.org, hrw.org)
The human impact is immediate and long-lasting. Survivors often require lifelong prosthetic, rehabilitation and social support. Entire communities can be blocked from farmland, schools and markets. The socio-economic ripple effects — lost income, interrupted education, and increased medical costs — compound the humanitarian catastrophe of conflict.

Cultural treasures caught in the blast radius​

Historic and archaeological sites are uniquely vulnerable. They are often located in contested areas or have been used strategically during conflicts, turning them into de-facto military zones. When mines are laid near monuments — whether intentionally to deny access, to shield military positions, or unintentionally by chaotic wartime deployments — demolition and demining become intertwined with conservation.
Case studies illustrate the difficulty:

• Musallah Minarets, Herat (Afghanistan): Soviet-era military use left mine contamination that prevented restoration work until careful manual and mechanical clearance allowed conservators to start preservation. HALO Trust worked in partnership with cultural organizations to clear areas around minarets, enabling safe conservation activity. (halotrust.org)
• Palmyra (Syria): The site suffered deliberate destruction and the presence of explosive devices left remaining areas hazardous for years. Clearing and secure access are prerequisites for any meaningful conservation or archaeological program. HALO personnel and other demining teams have repeatedly highlighted the complexity of operations in such environments. (vaticannews.va)

Removing explosive hazards from heritage sites must balance two sometimes competing imperatives: the speed needed to reopen spaces for displaced communities, and the precision required to avoid further damaging fragile structures during clearance.

Demining is not just removal — it’s survey, conservation and livelihoods​

Modern mine action goes well beyond physically removing devices. Best practice follows a sequenced approach:

• Survey and mapping to understand contamination patterns and prioritize areas for clearance.
• Explosive ordnance disposal and controlled removal using manual and mechanical methods tailored to the site’s fragility.
• Risk education for local communities so accidental casualties drop while work proceeds.
• Coordination with conservation teams so archaeological material is preserved and catalogued during clearance.
• Reintegration efforts that restore farmland, schools, and tourism livelihoods once areas are declared safe.

The HALO Trust and similar organizations emphasize that this integrated, community-centered model reduces casualties and restores economic activity. When handled correctly, clearance can re-open heritage sites for both cultural regeneration and tourism-led recovery. (halotrust.org)

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Project Masam and the scale of clearance in Yemen: progress and uncertainties​

Saudi Arabia’s Project Masam (KSrelief) has reported large clearance totals since its 2018 start, with publicly claimed figures in the hundreds of thousands of devices cleared in liberated Yemeni areas. Project releases show numbers routinely updated — reflecting the pace of operations and changing priorities — with several public tallies in 2024–2025 reporting between roughly 430,000 and nearly 492,000 explosive items deactivated, depending on the date of the statement. These figures include anti-personnel mines, anti-vehicle mines, UXO and IEDs, and represent substantial humanitarian effort in a region heavily affected by contamination. Project reports and KSrelief bulletins provide the operational totals and periodic summaries. (projectmasam.com)
Caveat: official project counts can vary by reporting date and methodology. Different agencies may categorize devices differently (e.g., distinguishing UXO from engineered antipersonnel mines), and independent verification can be constrained by access and security. Where totals are material to policy or funding decisions, donors and governments should seek transparent methodologies and third-party verification. (projectmasam.com, ksrelief.org)

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The operational reality of demining heritage sites — manual, slow and delicate​

Clearing mines from monuments and historic complexes is one of the most technically demanding mine-action tasks. Mechanical clearance (armored flails or tillers) is faster but can generate vibrations and shocks that damage masonry or destabilize foundations. Manual clearance is slower but allows deminers to work close to fragile structures with controlled procedures.

• Manual probing and excavation often proceed centimeter-by-centimeter near archaeological remains.
• Clearance depth can reach a meter or more in sites where explosive emplacement was deep or where later deposits have buried devices.
• Finds of archaeological material (mosaic fragments, artifacts) are common during clearance; those items require immediate cataloguing and cooperation with museums and conservationists.

HALO’s work at Herat and other sites demonstrates the necessity of multidisciplinary teams: deminers, conservators, archaeologists and local authorities must coordinate to avoid collateral destruction and to ensure that recovered heritage is preserved. Such operations are resource-intensive and require sustained funding. (halotrust.org)

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The Red Sea and the fragility of digital arteries​

Why a cable cut is a cloud incident​

Submarine fiber cables carry the majority of intercontinental internet traffic. A concentrated corridor such as the Red Sea links Europe to Asia via the Mediterranean and Suez, making it a strategic choke point. When multiple cables in that corridor are cut or impaired, Internet routing systems (BGP and backbone peering) must send traffic along alternate routes. These detours increase physical distance and often overload remaining links, producing higher round-trip times (RTT), increased jitter, and packet loss that manifest as higher latency and degraded throughput for cloud services. Microsoft’s status update in September 2025 warned Azure customers of precisely these symptoms and described traffic rebalancing and rerouting as immediate mitigations while repairs are planned. (reuters.com)

Practical impacts for enterprise and public-sector services​

The Azure advisory made clear which workloads are most at risk:

• Chatty, synchronous applications (database replication, tightly-coupled microservices) are sensitive to increased RTT and may experience timeouts.
• Real-time communications (VoIP, video conferencing, live streaming) suffer higher jitter and packet loss.
• Large cross-region backups and bulk data transfers take longer and may experience errors under congestion.
• Control-plane operations may be less impacted if they use alternative endpoints, but data-plane workloads are the primary concern.

For many organizations, these effects translate into user-facing slowdowns, longer service windows, and operational stress at peak times. IT teams must validate whether their cloud topology actually uses the vulnerable corridor; multi-region deployment does not automatically guarantee diverse physical routing unless carriers and peering arrangements have been verified.

Repair timelines and attribution: expect uncertainty​

Repairing subsea cables is a complex maritime operation requiring specialized cable vessels, safe access to the fault site, and on-site splicing work. Timelines can range from days to months. Geopolitical constraints, permissions to operate in specific territorial waters, and the global fleet availability of repair ships are all practical constraints. Public reporting of Red Sea cuts has sometimes speculated on causes — anchor drag, shipping accidents, or hostile acts — but definitive forensic attribution typically requires multiple operator confirmations and can remain contested. Treat attribution claims cautiously until independently corroborated.

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Critical analysis: strengths of current responses and systemic risks​

Notable strengths​

• Rapid operational transparency: Microsoft’s quick Service Health advisory on Azure is an example of timely, clear communication that helps customers triage risk and respond operationally. Public advisories reduce surprise and prioritize mitigation. (reuters.com)
• Mature humanitarian response models: Organizations like HALO Trust, MAG and national demining projects such as Masam have developed multi-decade expertise in survey, clearance and risk education that meaningfully reduce casualties and enable economic recovery when properly funded. Their multidisciplinary approaches — combining clearance with conservation — are proven at sites like Herat. (halotrust.org, projectmasam.com)
• Increasing funding focus: International attention and donor funding (including a noted rise in mine-action funding in recent years) have supported scaling of clearance programs, especially in major crises like Ukraine and Yemen, enabling significant device destruction and area release. (maginternational.org)

Systemic risks and weaknesses​

• Physical concentration of critical infrastructure: Submarine cables are not uniformly distributed. Corridors such as the Red Sea represent systemic single points of failure for interregional traffic. Even large cloud providers with extensive backbones are exposed when multiple geographically proximate cables fail simultaneously. This physical concentration is a structural risk to digital continuity.
• Attribution and political friction: When cable damage occurs in geopolitically sensitive waters, investigations and repairs can be delayed. Similarly, in mine-affected zones, access limitations and political fragmentation hamper independent verification and consistent clearance. Both scenarios slow recovery. (halotrust.org)
• Resource and capacity gaps: Demining and archaeological conservation both require sustained, specialized funding. Where donor attention wanes or security conditions block access, contaminated areas can remain dangerous for years. The same is true of subsea repair capacity: the global fleet of cable ships is finite and can be fully booked during concurrent incidents. (projectmasam.com)
• Community protection vs. rapid reopening: Pressure to reopen land for returnees and to restart tourism can push timelines. If clearance is rushed or standards are compromised, the tragic result can be post-clearance accidents that erode public trust and prolong recovery.

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Practical recommendations — what governments, funders and IT teams must do​

For governments and heritage agencies​

• Prioritize integrated mine-action and conservation plans for heritage sites that combine survey, manual clearance zones, artifact recovery protocols and long-term preservation funding.
• Ensure independent verification of clearance results and publish accessible, georeferenced maps of cleared areas so that communities and reconstruction planners can make informed decisions.
• Include mine-action timelines and safety benchmarks in broader reconstruction roadmaps; do not assume that structural repair equals safety without certified clearance.

For mine-action actors and donors​

• Fund multidisciplinary teams that pair deminers with conservators and risk-education specialists to maximize cultural and humanitarian outcomes.
• Support local recruitment and training, which builds sustained capacity and creates resilient livelihoods for communities recovering from conflict.
• Standardize reporting methods for clearance stats to improve transparency and reduce discrepancies between project claims and independent verification.

For IT leaders, cloud architects and Windows-centric operations teams​

• Verify physical route diversity: don’t assume multi-region deployments guarantee submarine-cable independence. Check carrier paths and peering agreements to understand whether your traffic traverses strategic chokepoints such as the Red Sea corridor.
• Harden applications against latency: implement exponential backoff, raise client timeouts for cross-region calls, and test asynchronous failover for critical services.
• Postpone non-urgent bulk transfers: defer large backups or migrations that rely on trans-Red Sea paths until capacity normalizes.
• Use alternate delivery and private-peering options judiciously: satellite or temporary overland links can be stopgap solutions but bring higher cost and latency and should not be considered long-term fixes.
• Maintain clear escalation and communication plans with cloud account teams: for business-critical workloads, engage providers to explore temporary transit arrangements and document impacts for contractual remedies.

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What we still do not know — and why cautious language matters​

• Exact cause attribution for some subsea cable cuts is often uncertain in the immediate aftermath. Publicly reported causes may be provisional; rigorous forensic confirmation usually takes time and multiple operator acknowledgments. Treat attribution claims as tentative until corroborated by operators or independent investigators.
• Clearance totals reported by national or project-level actors can vary over time and by reporting methodology. Where precise counts matter for fund allocation, demand third-party verification or standardized reporting frameworks. Project Masam’s tallies have increased substantially over time but should be read in context with reporting dates and categorizations (UXO vs. antipersonnel mine). (projectmasam.com)

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Conclusion: parallel vulnerabilities, shared solutions​

The world’s hidden hazards take many forms — a landmine buried at the edge of a ruined citadel and a severed fiber pair lying unseen beneath the Red Sea. Both are legacies of conflict that demand patient, resource-intensive responses and both expose structural fragilities in how modern societies protect cultural assets and sustain digital services.
There are practical, evidence-backed steps to reduce harm: rigorous mine-action practice linked to conservation, transparent verification of clearance, diversified submarine routing and cloud architectures that assume physical constraints rather than abstract redundancy. Donors, governments and private-sector actors must invest in the long game: funding the skilled human teams who clear mines and repair cables, building local capacity for sustained recovery, and developing policy frameworks that protect both cultural heritage and global connectivity.
The story is not only about destruction. It is also about repairable systems: places can be made safe again, monuments can be conserved, and cloud traffic can be rerouted and restored — but only if stakeholders recognize that the foundations of culture and commerce are physical as well as digital, and they commit the resources and governance structures to protect them. (halotrust.org, reuters.com, projectmasam.com)

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Source: Arab News PK Microsoft says Azure cloud service disrupted by fiber cuts in Red Sea