KIKLA, Libya — First, Milad Saadi and his men pray. Then they walk into a mine field.

Saadi carries a poker; it looks like a car antenna. The sappers have an old metal detector, the kind used to look for lost coins at the beach, but they don’t use it much; the batteries are weak.

They wear no body armor, no helmets. They dig in the dust with their hands.

Twenty paces from the roadside, they find their first land mine, then a second, a third. They twist off the plungers that would trigger the devices and toss the bland, beige, deadly disks into a blue bucket. The mines are the size of a doughnut.

In less than an hour, they have found 125 Brazilian-made, T-AB-1 antipersonnel mines.

“Stick around, we will find a thousand in this field today,” said Bashir Ghourish, one of the seven-man demining team from nearby Zintan.

As rebels slowly press toward Tripoli, they are discovering ever more extensive mine fields laid by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in and around civilian areas. The number of mines unearthed by the rebels is quickly growing from hundreds to thousands, as opposition fighters move into towns abandoned by retreating Gadhafi troops.

“Over the past weeks, NATO has witnessed an increase in indiscriminate mining and the escalating use of force by pro-Gadhafi forces” in both Brega, an oil port 482 miles east of Tripoli, and the western mountains, said a NATO official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of alliance ground rules.

Opposition forces battling to enter the oil refinery at Brega have been slowed by mines. Col. Ahmed Banni, Libya’s Transitional National Council military leader, told reporters that rebels deactivated thousands of land mines last week to secure a possible route into Brega.

Rebel military commanders at Kabaw in the western mountains say five days ago they watched Gadhafi troops laying mines around towns of Ghazaya, Tikut and Ruwas near the Tunisian border.

“It feels like there are reports of new fields every week now,” said Sidney Kwiram, a consultant for the group Human Rights Watch in Libya.

“In each of the front lines we have visited around the country, the Gadhafi forces have used land mines near their troop positions,” Kwiram said. “These mine fields may be flanking troop positions one day, but the next day they are the reason that civilians cannot return home.”

So far six people have been wounded in mine blasts here in the western mountains, when the vehicles they were driving in struck one of the devices. Three have been hospitalized.

Sappers working here in the Kikla area found 1,500 mines in one field, 196 in another. On Thursday, they returned to a grove of olive trees and shuffled through the dust, searching for disturbed dirt that would signal a buried mine.