Images posted to social media Thursday show what experts said are U.S. land mines dispersed across a residential area in southern Iran, in what appears to be the first instance in more than two decades of American forces using the weapons.
The photos show American BLU-91/B anti-tank land mines, which are released from an aircraft as part of the Gator mine scattering system, according to four munitions experts who reviewed the imagery at The Washington Post’s request. The United States is the only party in the Iran war known to possess the system.
The land mines were photographed outside the city of Shiraz, around three miles from one of several nearby Iranian ballistic missile sites. Mobile launchers are often positioned near such sites to access missiles, and the land mines could have been intended to make it more difficult to do so, experts said.
“While these land mines are meant to target armored vehicles, they can still be extremely dangerous to civilians,” said Brian Castner, a weapons investigator with Amnesty International.
In a Telegram post Thursday, the Iranian State News Agency said at least one person had been killed and others injured as a result of the “explosive packages that resemble cans,” and it warned people to stay away from “any misshapen, deformed, or unusual metal cans.”
Central Command, which oversees U.S. operations in the region, declined to comment.
Images of the land mines were posted on social media platforms by Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian independent journalist currently reporting from Iran, and state media outletIslamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
The dispensers that are dropped from aircraft to scatter dozens of these devices at a time often include both anti-tank and antipersonnel land mines, according to a U.S. Army reporton mine and countermine operations. The visuals provide no indication that antipersonnel land mines — small explosive charges buried in or placed on the ground — were released along with the anti-tank land mines.
The last known U.S. employment of scatterable anti-tank land mines in a conflict was during the Gulf War in 1991, experts said. The last known use of a U.S. antipersonnel mine was a single instance in Afghanistan in 2002, when Special Operations troops utilized them while awaiting extraction in a helicopter, according to Pentagon records.
Human rights groups have long called for a global ban on antipersonnel land mines because of their propensity to kill, maim or blind civilians, often years after conflicts have ended. Last year, the Trump administration reversed a Biden-era policy that prohibited the use of antipersonnel land mines except on the Korean Peninsula. The memo, which was signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said limitations on the use of the land mines would be made on a case-by-case basis and steps would be taken to minimize civilian harm.
“If confirmed, U.S. military use of its Gator mine scattering system causing civilian deaths and injuries shows exactly why decades of work to ban these weapons cannot be undone without grave harm being the result,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch.
The images of what appear to be U.S. mines were first reportedby the open-source reporting group Bellingcat.
This type of land mine is designed to detonate when it senses a magnetic signature, like a large vehicle, Castner said. But the devices can sometimes inadvertently detonate when civilians move them, and they have a self-destruct feature that can cause them to explode hours or days after they are deployed.
The Army report said the Gator land mines are primarily used to “disrupt, fix, turn, or block enemy troop movement,” and that the munitions are “well-suited for placing minefields on specific concentrations of forces.” Because of the way they are scattered, the average Gator minefield is 650 meters by 200 meters, according to the report.
The mountains just to the west of the village where the land mines were photographed are home to multiple Iranian ballistic missile sites, experts say. At least two nearby sites have sustained damage since the U.S.-Israeli campaign began a month ago, The Post found.
The locations of the land mines could complicate movement around those mountainous facilities, said Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Paris university Sciences Po who studies the Iranian military.
“Iranian mobile launchers for ballistic missiles have operated in close proximity to the bases throughout the war,” Grajewski said.
Jarrett Ley and Joyce Sohyun Lee contributed to this report.
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