Landmines Of Afghanistan

The first land mine in Europe was created by Pedro Navarro (d. 1528), a Spanish soldier, who used it in the settles of the Italian castles, in the beginning of the sixteenth century.
At Augsburg in 1573, a German military engineer by the name of Samuel Zimmermann invented an extremely effective mine known as the fladdermine. It consisted of a fougasse (or later, sometimes a shell fougasse, that is, a fougasse loaded not with stones but with early black powder mortar shells, similar to large black powder hand grenades) activated by a snaphance or flintlock mechanism connected to a tripwire on the surface. Combining the effects of a tripwire activated bounding fragmentation mine with a cluster bomb, it was devastating to massed attackers but required high maintenance due to the susceptibility of black powder to dampness. Consequently it was mainly employed in the defenses of major fortifications, in which role it continued to be used until the 1870s.
In Europe in the early eighteenth century, improvised land mines or booby traps were constructed in the form of bombs buried in shallow wells in the earth and covered with scrap metal and/or gravel to serve as shrapnel. Known in French as fougasse, the term is sometimes still used in the present day to describe such devices. This technique was used in several European wars of the eighteenth Century, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War.