In war-torn Syria, boy's leg is amputated on hospital floor, sent home in a truck

Damascus, Oct 13: The Daily Mail, London on Saturday published horrific pictures of wounded people getting treatment on the floor of a hospital in Syria, and then transported in trucks because of lack of ambulance. One heartrending picture showed a boy lying on the floor of a crowded hospital in Aleppo, Syria, his right leg heavily bandaged below the knee after surgeons have performed an emergency amputation. His eyes, full of fear and pain, are fixed on the man taking his photograph, while surrounding him are discarded surgical instruments, other medical staff and desperately wounded civilians - and his severed right foot. The boy was among scores of civilians treated on Saturday by overstretched staff at the blood-soaked Dar al Shifa Hospital, a seven-storey building that was itself extensively damaged by shelling two months ago.The wounded boy lost part of his leg in a Syrian Army artillery shelling, and he was brought to doctors in the back of a flatbed truck with his badly injured father. After being treated, the boy and his father - still covered in their own blood - were taken back in the same truck to the remains of their home and an uncertain future. Witnesses say that places such as bread lines, hospitals and schools - where women, children and the elderly take refuge - are daily targets for Syrian Army snipers and artillery shelling. Experts and observes say about 90 per cent of the wounded and the dead in Aleppo are civilians. Syrian rebels claim to have completely cut off the highway linking Damascus with the city, preventing government troops from mounting anything more serious than artillery salvos and sniper attacks. Rebels battled to hold onto Syria's main northeastern highway on Friday as government forces fought insurgents on several fronts across the country. The rebels captured an air defense base east of Syria's biggest city, Aleppo, and government forces unleashed air strikes and artillery bombardments on the western city of Homs, activists said. On the Turkish-Syrian border, Turkey scrambled two fighter jets after a Syrian military helicopter bombed the Syrian border town of Azmarin.