It is the most dangerous job in the world.
Brave Syrians pick their way through killing fields peppered with the most sophisticated and brutal terrorist explosives on the planet.
This determined and close-knit unit of “high-risk searchers” are highly trained mine-hunters who could be vaporised or made limbless with one wrong step.
And after nine years of war and a country brutalised by the evil Islamic State each of them represents a tragic and terrible story of their own.
Yet they put that aside as they slowly clear Syria’s murderous, buried harvest, all the while trying to dodge the eyes of ISIS sleeper cells which are everywhere.
We have spent the past week with the mine-hunters, both men and women, who know Syria is unlikely to be mine-free within their lifetime.
British veteran Major Chris Hunter, 47, who was an SAS bomb disposal expert, along with two other former UK military men – Rob Wood, 45, and Jon Carr, 46 – leads the Syria humanitarian project.
He says: “These are our brothers and sisters, a tight team and we depend on their bravery and skill to clear the mines.
Fellow veteran Rob, from Aberdeen, adds: “The lives of us bomb technicians depend on them.
“They find the mines, we clear them and we trust them all with our lives.”
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Two dozen Syrian high-risk searchers are being mentored by the three British veterans, who fought in war zones all over the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each bomb they deal with here has twice the explosive potency of the Manchester bomb and three times the strength of the devices used in the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005.
The team work for ITF, a Slovenian humanitarian NGO sponsored by the Austrian Development Agency and the Knights of Columbus. The process is clear, searchers find the bombs and mark their location and the British bomb techs defuse them.
At a secret location in Hasakah, in north-east Syria, Zeelan Ismail, 20, has been a high-risk searcher” since she was 17.
She earns around £800 a month hunting bombs – more than the average Syrian salary of around £220 a-month.
Zeelan has personal reasons for doing the job in the face of cultural limits on what woman can do.
Her dad was killed in a massive blast, leaving her mother, four sisters and two brothers under financial strain.
And of her friends she shakes her head and says: “I don’t know how many I have lost or are missing. I lost so many.”
But she is also doing it for her country’s future, and the generations to come.
Referring to the Arab Spring uprising in Syria which led to civil war, Zeelan, who has been married for a year, says: “The revolution in Syria has made it possible for females to do the jobs that men used to do because we have to do something to clean up the country.
“When I first started doing this job I had to keep it secret from my family because they would not want me doing what was once thought of as a man’s job.
“But when I started bringing home the money I had to tell them the truth. They were not happy but it is my choice. Even my husband said to me if this is my chosen profession then I must do it.”
Asked who is the boss at home she smiles and says: “It’s half, half of course. I hope this is the new way here.”
In just three years Zeelan has helped clear more than 100 mines from Syria’s bomb-riddled plains, deserts and cities.
She says: “I am doing this for the future of Syria and her children. I will have children one day but not just yet. I want the world to be safer for them.”
We watched as the high-risk searchers picked their way through a massive minefield, a two lane belt of grimly potent improvised explosive devices, estimated to be round 30 miles long.
The VS500 explosives, made in their thousands by men, women and children forced to work in ISIS sweatshop factories, are planted every two metres and in multiple lanes.
Detecting them requires discipline, an ability to switch off peripheral thoughts and concentrate, entirely, on signals a bomb may lie under the soil.
British bomb disposal veteran Jon says: “The other day one of the searchers alerted us to the possible presence of a device just by spotting slight discolouration in the vegetation.
“They are trained to attune to the ground sign and spot initial signs of something suspicious and it was a very good call. Culturally they are a very calm people.
“We all believe they are the best we have worked with and we have done this in war zones all over the world.”
What it took ISIS a few days to plant, with thousands of bombs unloaded from the backs of lorries will take many years to clear.
There are signs of bomb planters, almost certainly coerced at gunpoint to do the job, having been blown up while carrying out their deadly work.
Some blast craters have bits of scorched clothing around them, occasionally even body parts picked apart by wildlife over the years. It is also possible they are the remains of poor farmers or other locals who stumbled into the minefield.
Another searcher Judi Murad, 23, dressed, like his colleagues in anti-blast bib and face mask and scouring the desert with a Vallon mine detector, is desperate to undo as much of ISIS’s evil as he can.
And he has good reason. His closest friend, Ahmed Chavshin, was aged 23 when he was pulled over just a year ago by ISIS gunmen while travelling from their former stronghold Raqqa to Qamishli, near the Turkish border.
Nobody knows why they tortured him for hours, all filmed on video, and then beheaded him.
Judi says: “They killed him in a dirty, disgusting way. It disgusted a lot of people because Ahmed was a good person. I am doing this in revenge against ISIS and the dirty things they did and are still doing to my people.
“I am still very sad about this, of course, but I keep going. I want to make this place better.
“There are still ISIS people here. They have not gone away and I believe they will be here for some time.”
His colleague Abdulrahman al-Remo, 22, was just 16 when he joined the Kurdish military the YPG which has been fighting ISIS.
Abdulrahman says “there still fragments inside me”, from when he was shot in the chest as ISIS fighters attacked al-Kamayl village in 2015.
He lay wounded for 16 hours before being saved by comrades.
But in the past few days he had the honour of helping hand back a large area of land outside the village which thanks to him and his ITF colleagues is now completely cleared of mines.
Abdulrahman, who wants to be a teacher, says in the meantime: “I am very happy doing this job, which I love.
“It is a risky job – there are ISIS sleepers everywhere still. But is very fulfilling work. Handing back land to the village I once defended is a really important moment for all of us.”
