Thursday 13 October 2016

A young girl and a city struggling for life


Asma in hospital

The BBC's Safa AlAhmad is one of few journalists to have reached the besieged city of Taiz, at the heart of Yemen's civil war. She found a city destroyed by shelling - and a doctor struggling to save the life of a six-year-old girl.
At the al-Thawra hospital in the besieged city of Taiz, doctors gather outside the operating room to discuss which of their patients will be left to die. Without enough medicine and oxygen to treat all those injured in Yemen's pitiless civil war, hard decisions have to be made.
On the day I arrived, in mid-December, the choice was between a tiny six-year-old girl, Asma, and an old man with a gangrenous wound to the abdomen.
Asma had been hit by shrapnel as she queued to collect drinking water from a lorry. Nineteen other children were injured in the attack, and five were killed. The impact had broken away a shard of Asma's skull as big as the palm of my hand. Despite the severity of her injuries, the trauma surgeon began a desperate effort to save her.
The smell in the operating room was nauseating - a stench of blood and disinfectant, and of the white surgical plaster that the surgeon was shaping in his hands to patch the hole in Asma's head. He worked fast, racing to complete the operation before the oxygen ran out and increased the damage to the child's brain.

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