Photographer Markus Rhineland, is a long standing friend of FSD, he visited our Laos programme twice in the past (2007-2008). He has recently teamed up with FSD in Sirte to take a photographic pulse of the city and of FSD humanitarian interventions for the communities benefit.

FSD runs two projects in Sirte at the moment, House to House Battle Area Clearance funded by the European Commission and

Looking down Sirte's battered streets of burned out buildings, I thought "this is a long way from Laos." My introduction to FSD - and to unexploded ordnance in general - was in Laos photographing the remnants of the Vietnam War. Sirte was the scene of the heaviest fighting in the last phase of the Libyan Revolution: a war only months - not decades - old, whole city blocks in ruins, abandoned, still contaminated with UXO. Three days photographing with a FSD team offered a quick glimpse of the problems faced by the town - and the work that's slowly helping the it recover from the war.

The scale of what the teams are finding is enormous: an early morning seaside stop yields belts of heavy machine gun ammo and the ubiquitous rounds of 23mm, a burned-out house contains a pile of RPGs, 57mm rockets lie in a field behind a mosque, a 120mm mortar in an alley. Located, defused, taken to the CDS, added to the piles of UXO waiting for demolition. Every day, the de-mining teams and the local people working together to make the town a little more safe. An artillery shell marked by a local boy with a FSD flier. A local man emerging with glasses of juice for the team after they pulled a 122mm rocket from his front yard. Recently reopened shops marked with the spray-painted blue check mark meaning cleared of UXO. Life in Sirte is slowly returning to normal...