When Abu Hamza uttered the last sentence, his body shivered and tears filled his weary eyes. He took his amputated right hand out of the sleeve of his shirt and released a deep sigh.
Six months ago, Abu Hamza, a 36-year-old father from the city of Deir ez-Zor northeast Syria, was hit by a shrapnel in his right arm when a mortar shell fired by Assad terrorists targeted his place.
Abu Hamza was rushed then to a regime-run hospital where he received poor medical treatment. Two days later, he was discharged from hospital but his situation kept worsening and became completely unable to move his hand.
Abu Hamza went back to the hospital but doctors told him that they could do nothing for him and that he had to go through a long process of physiotherapy along with the daily doses of an expensive and unaffordable medication that he should buy on his own.
Being a public servant with a low salary that has become insufficient to get by, Abu Hamza found out that the cost of his medication and physiotherapy would reduce his already shrunken salary into few Syrian pounds that can barely buy him bread in the city long known before for producing wheat and providing Syria with food produced in its rich and fertile plains.
However, the embattled city overlooking the Euphrates has become now a stage of a bloody and inhumane siege in which Assad regime’s military officers keep extorting civilians through selling them food for extremely high prices and showing loyalty for the regime.
Realizing the high cost of treating his hand and watching his own malnourished children suffering from hunger, Abu Hamza took the painful decision to have his right hand amputated in the hospital so that he would be able to save the treatment money to feed his children.
When Abu Hamza told doctors in the hospital about his decision, they were surprised for the first while but being aware of the hell-like life in the besieged city of Deir-ez-Zor they accepted to carry out the surgery and gave him some painkilling medication for free!
Though missing his limb and becoming partially disabled, Abu Hamza feels convinced that he has done the right thing when he took that decision. He believes that any father would do the same and sacrifice his own body for the sake of his own children because their groaning from hunger is much painful than losing a hand or even life itself.
Story adapted and edited from All4Syria
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