HOPE TO SYRIA WAR VICTIMS
the floor. Her mother Zaliha, 40, sat watching as her daughter recalled the horrors of the attack.
She said: “I was going to a village near the border and there was bombing. It’s hard to remember.
“I was with my family. We were going to the car – we were running from the bombing and then the bomb exploded.
“We were trying to get to safety. I tried to stand up but I fell over.
“When I looked down there was no leg there. At the hospital they gave me sticks to help, but I didn’t think I would walk again ever.” She received her first new leg from the clinic seven months ago, but has already outgrown it.
She said: “I was so happy because now I can go to school and play with my friends.
“Before, everyone said they wouldn’t play with me because I had no leg. I couldn’t move and I was always sitting alone in the corner. Now I’m normal again.”
Majida told how one of her brothers was blown into the air by the barrel bomb, dropped by an aircraft in 2014, but he recovered. Her sister Mariam has also received a new leg from the clinic. There are around 2.7 million Syrians living in and around Gaziantep, most in extreme poverty.
Many rely on handouts from aid organisations. Back home, the death and destruction they have fled seems to have no end.
This week, at least 20 people were killed in a series of airstrikes on medical facilities in Aleppo.
At the Al Hakim hospital in the east of the city – which provides specialist child care – staff snatched babies from incubators to rush them to shelter in the basement. Dr Abdul Ibrahim, 41, head of the Aleppo Health Directorate, told the Sunday Mirror that the attacks were targeted on health workers.
Speaking in Gaziantep, he laid the blame for the attacks squarely on the Syrian regime.
Dr Ibrahim said: “I can’t explain my feelings. Imagine you are working to help people and you are targeted. It is a service for the people, like an angel.
“But the Syrian regime is not accountable, it is not adhering to any rule and regulations of inter- national law. This regime is targeting even the ambulances. The health facilities are target number one.”
He revealed he had lost 10 colleagues, including paediatrician Mohammad Wassim Maaz, killed in an airstrike on the al-Quds hospital in the Sukari district of Aleppo in April.
Dr Ibrahim said: “In all conflicts hospitals are protected. Now in Aleppo people run away from the hospital, it is a huge target.”