EU FUNDED CLINIC OFFERS
FOUR-YEAR-OLD Shahd lay covered in dust when her mother found her. Her right leg was gone, taken off by the blast of a barrel bomb.
Close by, her brother lay dead, his head smashed.
A moment earlier they had been just another family struggling to cope with the harsh daily life in the besieged city of Aleppo in Syria.
Then the barrel bomb – an improvised device dropped by a government helicopter – exploded beside them.
“Mama, how am I going to walk?” Shahd cried. “Can I go to the street? Can I walk in the street, mama? “Why can’t I walk?” Yet incredibly, little Shahd Al Mounbark can now walk – thanks to a clinic across the border in Turkey, where EU funds are helping to temper the tragedy of her and so many innocents like her.
Shahd is one of tens of thousands of injured children who have fled the war in Syria. Thousands still wait to be fitted with artificial limbs.
The clinic that treated her is in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, just 30 miles from the Syrian border and 60 miles from Aleppo.
Doctors there are fitting 15 refugees every month with prosthetic limbs – but are having to turn away three times that number.
Shahd was their first patient – brought to them with a piece of plastic drainpipe taped to her stump as a makeshift leg.
RECOVERY
Her story has been captured in a heartbreaking video, produced by the clinic to show her recovery.
In the film, shared with the Sunday Mirror by Relief International, Shahd is seen crawling across the floor dragging the pipe behind her, and trying to negotiate a flight of concrete steps on her bottom.
She is shown being carried through Aleppo by her uncle Mustafa, then cuddled by mum Yasmin – who tells her story as the little girl sits on her lap and weeps.
Yasmin said: “There was an explosion and the stones scattered round and I was looking for my children – but I couldn’t find them.
“Everywhere was dust and I was alone. My husband came and he wanted to hold me and I asked him, ‘ Where are my children’ and he said they are fine, they are safe.
“When my husband held me I said, ‘Leave me, I want to see my children, where are they?’
“I said to my husband, ‘My heart is really hurt, something bad has happened’. When I found Shahd, she had lost her leg.”
Later, as the little girl sits on the ground with dad Muhammad, she tells him: “Children are not playing with me any more.”
Asked why, she replies simply: “I haven’t got legs.”
Despite terrible injuries, Shahd has fought bravely in the 30 months since the attack.
Now six and living with her parents in Urfa, Turkey, she visits the clinic twice a year to have the limb adjusted as she grows.
The video shows her gradual recovery – the little girl being fitted with her new limb, clinging to