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.

Read the full article The Mirror.