There are a shocking number of amputees in the battle-scarred country after eight years of grinding war - and even if peace was declared today, Yemen is likely to be dealing with the aftermath of explosives for possibly decades to come.

Engineers at the prosthetic centre in the Al Thawra Hospital in Taiz are working at a furious pace to chisel out what look like fairly rudimentary artificial limbs. Rudimentary they may be, but they offer a lifeline to those whose limbs have been blown off.

"They are so grateful when they receive their artificial limbs from us," engineer Anwar Abdullah tells us. He has travelled to Cambodia recently to receive training in the creation and adaptation of prosthetics.

Twenty-five years after the end of Cambodia's war, the country is still dealing with the scourge of landmines and the devastation they've caused to its civilian population.

Yemenis are now finding out the difficulties in not only locating the explosives and dealing with them safely, but also the expense of that - and the cost of helping victims cope with life-changing injuries.

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The country is trying to cope when war is still very much ongoing. There may have been huge strides made in recent weeks in moving towards a negotiated political settlement, which could eventually lead to a ceasefire - but right now the country is still in the grip of conflict.

This means the doctors and prosthetic specialists in Taiz are kept extremely busy. The hospital is thronging with people - many of them children. They recount the most tragic events in their young years in a mostly deadpan, unemotional manner.

'I looked down and saw my leg and the blood'

Abdullah, 10, had been sent to collect water with his friend when they got caught up in a shelling. Abdullah had his leg blown off. The friend he was with lost his hand.

"I looked down and saw my leg and the blood," Abdullah tells us without a flicker of emotion, "But I didn't cry."

Instead, Abdullah is still smiling while doing his physio. He chatters enthusiastically about football and taekwondo - and about who is the world's best footballer: Ronaldo or Messi?

Abdullah thinks Ronaldo and he's young enough to still have wildly ambitious dreams - he still holds out hopes of playing professional football.

If charm was all you needed to overcome a horrifying amputation, being terribly poor and growing up in the Arab world's poorest country, Abdullah would, without doubt, be the centre forward in the Yemeni national football team in a few years' time.

But he now faces a lifetime of problems - not least making sure he continues to get access to prosthetics as his body develops and grows.

Mother traumatised from hearing explosion

Just down the corridor, 13-year-old Anaih is sitting while her mother waits patiently to see the man from the charity she is hoping to get some help from.

Her daughter still has her left leg heavily bandaged. Her leg was blown off seven months ago but she's had to have two further operations to contain the infection. It is still obviously painful and tender for her.

Her mother is still traumatised by what happened. She'd gone to fetch water and left her children playing outside their home. She heard the explosion and when she ran back, her husband was carrying Anaih, her leg hanging in bits over his arm.

She had stepped on a mine left at the back of their home.

She still has shrapnel lodged in her surviving leg. She has to attend a clinic regularly to get her wound cleaned - and it's a tortuous affair as the nurses, who know her well, battle to apply antiseptic liquid and wipe it, a procedure which is clearly uncomfortable for the teenager.

Anaih instinctively insists on trying to touch the open skin to dull the pain while the nurse urges her to keep her hands away. "Stop doing that," he says with her, worried about more infection.

"It hurts," she says in response, calling out for her mother and father. The whole procedure lasts about ten minutes and by the end, nurse and patient are laughing and smiling again. Aniah will be back to do it all over again in five days. She cannot even begin to be measured for a prosthetic until her wounds heal.

Until then, she struggles to get by on crutches.

'We have had our salaries cut in half'

The small mine clearance team in Taiz tells us that despite this urgent need to locate and destroy the countless landmines and ordnance scattered everywhere, their funding from the United Nations has been slashed as money is diverted to other conflicts like Ukraine.

"We had our salaries cut by half in November," one of them tells us.

"Sometimes we have to buy the equipment ourselves, like paint to mark out the areas we have cleared."

A team of about ten are taking it in turns to search a steep rocky hill on the edge of Taiz city. They've already found dozens of anti-personnel mines and 43 different rounds, as well as three bombs and three explosive devices just in this area alone.

In parts of the city once occupied by the rebel Houthis militia, landmines have been discovered in ovens primed to detonate when the owner returns. Others have been found buried on streets, in alleyways and in back gardens.

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The mine clearance charity the Halo Trust, which receives British funding, has just arrived in Taiz and will begin trying to deactivate or destroy mines and any ordnance they discover in the next few weeks.

A small team has already been working their way through key streets in Taiz to try to log and prioritise areas to search. Within minutes of turning up in one area, a small child brought them some explosive remnants prompting an immediate impromptu street class in the dangers of handling any suspicious or unknown objects.

Matt Reilly from Halo told Sky News: "The scale of this problem is quite huge. It's potentially going to take decades to make this area safe."