The children wouldn’t play with me after I lost my leg but now I’m normal again

parallel bars for support as she learns to walk once more, then tackling a flight of stairs – this time on two feet.

A smile plays across her face and, in place of the tears, a look of proud determination as she takes her first tentative steps unaided into her mother’s waiting arms.

Shahd’s is one of many happy endings that are being made possible by a grant from the EU of more than £500,000.

Thanks to the money, the clinic is about to double the number of artificial limbs which it can make and fit. But staff there say they could handle 60 patients a month if they had enough funds.

There are as many as 20,000 people in need of artificial limbs, many of them children like Shahd.

We met nine-year-olds Majida Ali Omar and Nagham Haj Kaddor, who have each lost a leg – Majida her right, Nagham her left. The shell that hit Nagham’s village near Aleppo also killed her father.

In the clinic, they sat making pictures from Play-Doh. Majida’s showed a smiling young girl with ribbons in her hair. There was a large M above it. It was her – but the girl she made had two legs.

The moment Majida had realised her leg was gone was when she tried to stand up and just fell over. She looked down and saw there was nothing there any more.

The airstrike had torn off her leg above the knee. Her 15-year-old sister Mariam lay nearby, her right leg also gone.

As she waited for a new limb to be fitted, Majida sat on the edge of her bed dressed in a grey hoodie, her leg stump held in a sling looped over her neck. Her one shoe was on