Bradley Secker/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Erbil, Iraq—More than 60 percent of 14-year-old Belen’s* body is burnt. The afternoon sun shone through a window to reveal a fragile girl lying motionless in her hospital bed at the burn unit at West Erbil Emergency Hospital in northern Iraq, her mother by her side. The unit was eerily quiet and cold, and modern like so many other buildings popping up in the region.
Belen lay still as Dr. Zawand Alrashaeed, the resident doctor who’d been assigned to show me around, pulled back her sheet to show the extent of her burns. Her body was thickly bandaged except for her face and parts of her legs. Her mother interrupted to pass around sweets—an unwavering gesture of Kurdish hospitality.
