I'm still fighting because children are still trapped in war zones

N THE crumbling streets of Mosul, as machine gun fire crackled in the distance and Islamic State fighters advanced up the road, Sally Becker huddled in a darkened building. Ordered to keep her phone dark and her presence silent, she had just returned from the muster point in an ambulance when the warning came: “Go inside quickly, ISIS have broken through the lines.”

- By Jane Warren

The tension was suffocating. She knew too well what happened when hostages in Iraq were taken — those horrifying images of captives in orange jumpsuits played on a loop in her mind. And then, in that moment of dread, her phone lit up. Not with an alert from a fixer or a fellow aid worker, but with a photo from home: a glass upside down, trapping a spider, and the words “Mum, help!”

It was the kind of domestic drama any parent might expect on a quiet afternoon in Britain. But her daughter Billie, then 16, had no idea her mother was in Mosul — let alone hiding from terrorists just yards away.

“She remembered that I put the glass over the top of the spider, but she didn’t know what to do next, to slide the piece of cardboard underneath and throw it out of the back door,” remembers Sally of that heart-stopping moment. “I couldn’t tell her because I’m sitting in this building with ISIS coming up the road.”

Unlike the spider, Sally was in danger of being held captive by people who would not be thinking about releasing her...

It was 2017, and Sally was deep in the heart of northern Iraq, doing what she does best — helping children caught in the crossfire of war. “You'd see them in the camps,” she recalls. “Little ones who'd survived ISIS, suffering from shrapnel injuries, burns and untreated congenital illnesses. They hadn’t seen a doctor in years.

“And that’s where my two lives crossed, and I asked myself, ‘What kind of mother are you?’ Because obviously there is this huge desire to help these vulnerable children, but equally I wasn’t there at times for Billie when I should have been.

“And that moment with the spider was one of the moments when my two lives crossed,” she says now, thankful that ISIS on that day eventually passed by.