QARAQOSH, Iraq — The young Iraqi woman remembers the night she lost her leg.
Wihad Ahmed and her family had hunkered down in their house in western Mosul, hoping to wait out the nearly constant shelling as fighting raged between Islamic State militants and advancing Iraqi government forces.
But after mortar shells destroyed the homes of their next-door neighbors, the 27-year-old and her relatives decided to flee. With four other families, they left in the middle of the night on April 1. Before they reached Iraqi lines, a bomb went off, wounding Ahmed’s right leg so badly that it had to be amputated above the knee.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, she is one of at least 625 people from Mosul who have lost an arm or a leg as the nearly seven-month-old battle for the city. Like others, she is struggling to come to terms with her injuries and the future she faces as an amputee.
The United Nations says more than 12,000 Mosul civilians have been wounded, a count that only includes those who have made it to hospitals outside the city to receive treatment. In the first three months of this year, a small orthopedic facility run by the ICRC has treated 148 people from Mosul who lost limbs.