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The four Bedouin Arabs made a sorry sight as they limped and hobbled their way into the room earlier this month.
First up was Khamis Ali Ibrahim, a father-of-seven, who had his left leg blown off while farming in Egypt’s western desert wilderness. After him came Abdel-Hamid Gabreel, a 21-year-old who lost his left while tending sheep near the border with Libya. Then Abduallah Salah; blind in his right eye and with nothing but a stump at the end of one arm.
Finally came Fayez Ismail, who now wears a prosthetic limb following an explosion when he was travelling through the desert on safari. “I tried to walk after the accident because I didn’t know I had no leg,” he told The Majalla recently.
The incident involving Fayez happened when he was in the desert 30 miles south of the Mediterranean town of El-Alamein – a clue as to what happened to all four men.
It was at El-Alamein in October 1942 that the British Eighth Army, commanded by Bernard Montgomery, finally repelled the advances of Germany’s Afrika Korps, led by the dashing Nazi General Erwin Rommel.
The British were fighting to prevent Hitler’s forces from seizing Egypt, and with it a gateway to the Middle East’s copious supplies of oil.
After many months of battle, during which German Panzer divisions engaged British Crusader tanks in pulsating cat-and-mouse encounters, Egypt’s western desert expanses were littered with millions of unexploded shells. In addition, vast networks of landmine defences criss-crossed much of the land south of El-Alamein.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the famous October 1942 battle, with World War Two veterans due to arrive in Egypt to commemorate the North Africa campaign.
For the Bedouin of western Egypt, however, World War Two never ended. Many hundreds have been killed since the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, and the overall number of casualties is estimated to be more than 8,000.
Since 2006, when the Egyptian government established a demining programme with the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), hundreds of thousands of pounds has been donated towards decontamination efforts by Britain and Germany as well as their wartime allies.
Yet despite the aid, Khamis Ali Ibrahim, 38, said he felt as though the problem was being ignored. “I feel that the countries don’t understand the problem clearly,” he said. “The mines are still in the desert. The war is still continuing.”
Come the commemorations later this year, veterans will be fondly recalling the conflict which Rommel himself referred to as the “war without hate”.
But for the Bedouin of Egypt, many of whom have had their lives turned upside down by the legacy of World War Two, the goodwill may be in short supply.
