Sally Becker: I'm still fighting because children are still trapped in warzones

IN THE crumbling streets of Mosul, as machine gun fire crackled in the distance and ISIS 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."

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 Becker 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.

Most people would run from war. In 1993, the portrait painter from Brighton - whose fascinating autobiography has just been published - strode headlong into it. Since then, Sally has spent the past three decades slipping through borders, past bureaucracy and bullets, to bring medical aid and evacuate children from war zones.

At the age of 31, after she saw harrowing television footage of the siege of Mostar during the first Bosnian war, she found herself unable to ignore the suffering of the children in the images.

"I wasn't some trained aid worker or a soldier. I was just someone who saw innocent children suffering and couldn't turn away. Why wasn't anyone doing anything?" she says.

She planned to volunteer for a few weeks before slotting back into her old world. Instead, that first visit changed the course of her life forever.

"I contacted a lot of organisations offering my help, but they didn't want me because I had no relevant experience," she says. "I wasn't a nurse or an engineer."

Undaunted, she volunteered to drive aid to the region and made her way into Mostar, the heart of the conflict.

The eastern part was completely blockaded and as many as 60,000 people were trapped; some dying for want of the most basic medical supplies.

Sally's breakthrough came when she was approached by a UN Civil Affairs officer who'd heard about her work delivering aid to the hospital in West Mostar.

As Sally was one of the only international aid workers allowed to go in and out of the city, he asked her to help evacuate children from the besieged east side.

After gaining permission from the head of the Croat Military Health Authorities to rescue all the wounded children and their mothers, she drove across the front line in an old Bedford ambulance with unshakable spirit and conviction as she came under fire from snipers in the surrounding hills.

"I was naïve," she admits. "But sometimes, that's what it takes. If I'd known everything I know now, maybe I'd have hesitated. And then what?"

Her actions saved countless lives, evacuating sick and wounded children when no one else dared, or seemed to care. But she is still haunted by those she couldn't save.

"People say to me today, 'you must be so proud of what you did'. And yes, of course, I am. But I'm also still devastated today by the kids I couldn't help; children who had to be left behind because there wasn't space."

The ensuing months saw her bring a convoy of 57 ambulances and trucks from Brighton, carrying £1m worth of medical aid and evacuating sick and injured children and their mothers from the area.

"We evacuated around a hundred children and their mothers, but there were children left behind in central Bosnia, and nobody was trying to reach them." Soon she had lobbied hard for support and was able to rescue 28 injured children and their mothers by helicopter from a monastery.

Years later in Iraq, she was collecting those able to reach the safety of the muster point but still going beyond safe limits. "I would drive down labyrinthine streets to collect injured children who were caught in the cross fire between ISIS and Coalition forces. I tried to bring out as many kids and their mothers as I could manage each day."

But she didn't always escape unscathed. During a mission in 1998 to bring 15 injured children and their families across the mountains from Kosovo, the party was ambushed by Serb helicopter gunships.

"There were rocket-propelled grenades, there was gun fire, and the children all raced back into the forest. And I saw a woman and two kids paralysed [with fear] beneath a tree, and I had to make a split-second decision. Do I run or do I stay?"

She was captured and imprisoned for crossing the border without a visa and following her release two weeks later, two masked gunmen ambushed her outside her hotel in northern Albania. As Sally threw herself into the shadows, she was shot through the leg.

"I didn't always make the right decision, but you have to do what you can at the time," she says, musing that she still lacks training. "Had I known I was going to spend 30 years doing this work, I would have got some proper training - about what to do under fire, for example."

After her first mission to Bosnia, Sally became known to the British Press as "The Angel of Mostar", a title she wears lightly. "I was just doing what needed to be done," she explains with genuine modesty.

But there was a price. Returning home after such harrowing experiences meant shifting between two realities. "I would come back and try to be a normal parent. Do the school run. Support my daughter at her graduation. And yet, I'd have these images in my head - the faces of the children I couldn't save."

Billie, now 25 and a journalist "not in war zones", has had to navigate having a mother who was both hero and absent protector. "There were times when I am sure she resented it," Sally admits. "And I understand. No child wants their mother to be the one running into danger."

Two decades on, and Sally continues her work, advocating for displaced children, using her voice to highlight conflicts often forgotten by the world.

"I'm still fighting," she says. "Because the world hasn't changed. There are still children trapped in war zones. And if I can do something - anything - I will."

In recent years, she has been focused her efforts on the charity she founded in 2016. Save A Child is a life-saving initiative that puts a roster of 300 volunteer paediatric professionals in safe countries in contact via an App with front-line medics battling to save lives in besieged or rural areas and is currently operational in countries including Afghanistan and Syria.

"Our paediatric experts are busy people who give their time for free, so we need more of these volunteers to provide remote support in areas where there is a lack of paediatric expertise" she says.

An incredible 32 years have passed since she first went to Bosnia but Sally is still travelling into conflict zones. When war broke out in Ukraine, Sally made a series of dangerous treks by road across the country to help evacuate 240 women and children. And over the last year she has helped organise the evacuation of 40 sick and wounded children from Gaza for specialist treatment.

There was no humanitarian backdrop to Sally's early life. In fact, her parents were so alarmed by her impulsive decision to travel to a conflict in Eastern Europe that her father Jack, a property manager who died in 2013, handed her a knife just before she went to Bosnia. "He told me it was a 'killing knife,'" she tells me. "I told him I couldn't kill anyone. I used it to chop fruit instead."

But her father's determination to protect her, despite being an "undemonstrative" parent, was to reach its nadir when she was on hunger strike in a Kosovo prison in 1998 after being sentenced to 30 days for crossing the border without a visa.
"Every night, I knew planes were going over and bombing villages where I knew there were children, during what was supposed to be a ceasefire," she says.

"The Minister of Justice turned up in my cell, trying to get me to apologise on camera, and I said I'm not eating and drinking until you stop the bombing of innocent civilians. And a few days later my father arrived in my cell up with six bottles of water and told me to drink up.

"I explained that it wasn't lack of water that was the problem."

A practical man, he struggled to understand her relentless drive to put herself in danger for people she had never met.

"He was interviewed when I was in Bosnia and he said, 'I do think she would have done well as an artist.' So it was kind of odd, really, that he thought I should have been painting."

"He wasn't a demonstrative man, but he was told that if I didn't drink, I would die. So he decided to do something about it."

Jack's way of showing love was with action, not words. And in that way, father and daughter appear alike.

"I'm still fighting because there are still children trapped in war zones," says Sally. "And if I can do something, I will."

• Where Angels Fear to Tread by Sally Becker is out now (Harper Collins, £20); learn more about Sally Becker's paediatric support charity at saveachild.uk