The ‘Angel of Mostar’ on plucking children from the killing zone

As they drove, they watched mothers and children emerging from the rubble, some stick-thin after months under siege, others with injuries from mortars and shrapnel.

“We were going into areas which had just been liberated, where people hadn’t seen a doctor for a year. We were literally treating sick kids from the back of an ambulance,” she says. “Sometimes it was just handing out paracetamol and antibiotics. If they were particularly sick we took them to the nearest hospital.”

In two weeks her team rescued about 260 people, including 43 injured women and children who were treated at a makeshift trauma clinic.

Becker, 56, is no stranger to danger or unorthodox methods. She first made headlines in Bosnia in 1993 when she became known as “the Angel of Mostar” for her work driving an old Bedford ambulance across the front lines, braving sniper fire to rescue children under Croatian attack. Later she returned with a convoy to rescue 150 more and airlifted 55 wounded children and mothers from central Bosnia.

Then it all started going wrong. Becker had no medical training — her only qualifications are A-levels in English and art and her previous job was as an extra in a failed BBC soap. She was accused of recklessly endangering the lives of other volunteers in the convoy for self-publicity.

In Kosovo a few years later she was imprisoned for trying to smuggle out refugees and had one of her vehicles hijacked and in Albania in 1998 she was shot in the right leg.

Jack Straw, then home secretary, refused visas to refugees from Kosovo who Becker wanted to bring to Britain, saying she had gone against government advice.

She was undeterred, despite ending up pregnant after a war romance straight out of Hemingway with a British Army major who rescued her and tended her shot leg, cutting out infected tissue with his knife to stop gangrene. Becker keeps the bullet engraved with the words “Forget Me Not” but Major Bill Foxton turned out to have a wife back home.

Since then she has carried out similar rescue missions in Iraq, Chechnya, Gaza and Lebanon, funding them by giving talks. She has also had battles of her own.

In 2009 her daughter Billie turned on the television news to see that her father, Foxton, had taken his life after losing his savings in the Bernie Madoff scandal. “She’d always hoped we’d be reunited one day,” says Becker. Then in 2013 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy.

The following year, as she recovered, she was horrified by the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis, driven out of their homes by Isis fighters, their men killed and women captured. When she was contacted by someone who was linked to the spiritual leader of the Yazidis asking for help in getting specialist medical treatment abroad for those who needed it, she set off for northern Iraq.

In the refugee camps she teamed up with a retired Italian paediatrician, Dr Marino Andolina, and they managed to get three badly injured children to America for treatment and others to Italy.

Then the battle for Mosul started and Becker’s team began heading to the edge of the city in March to get people out. “I assured my daughter that would be it but the battle didn’t end,” she recalls.

A wounded child is treated at a field clinic in Mosul. Some residents had not been able to see a doctor for a year

As the fighting to drive out Isis intensified, she returned to the city nine times. “I was almost commuting from Brighton,” she laughs. She went home because her daughter was taking her A-levels.

Becker insists that she had not expected the mission to be so dangerous.

“I thought I’d be taking people out of the city, not going in,” she says. “But when I realised kids were trapped I had no choice. It’s what I’ve been doing for 25 years.”

Every morning they drove to the mustering point, less than half a mile from the front line: “Men, women and children would arrive there exhausted, unable to go on, and we would go back and forth ferrying them to a safe area.”

But as the fighting intensified inside the Old City, the injured there could not get out. “So three weeks ago we decided we would go right in as that was the only way,” says Becker. “No other aid organisations could go because of their rules. We were the only civilian ambulance going in.”

Every day from 8am to 7pm they drove from street to street looking for people, then taking them to a field clinic operated by the Iraqi army 9th Division. “We acted like a taxi service half the time but that’s what people needed,” she says.

Among the wounded children they found a girl aged six. “Her family had presumably been killed, as she was on her own. She asked for milk but wasn’t allowed to drink as they might need to operate to remove some shrapnel,” says Becker.

“My driver brought her a can of formula milk we kept for babies and placed it by her pillow, explaining that she could have it later. After a while they came to transport her and the other children to hospital and she looked at him and asked, ‘Who will make the milk for me?’”

Everything Becker did, she insists, was with the support of the Iraqi army: “People who accused me in Mostar didn’t realise what I was doing. They thought I was dashing across a front line on a whim. It wasn’t like that at all. I built up relations with the Croat army. I worked with the UN.”

Of all the conflicts she has been involved in, she says what she has seen in the past few weeks has been the most shocking: “I saw Grozny after the Russians flattened [Freedom] Square and I had never seen anything like that before. But the destruction in Mosul made that look like nothing.”

It was also a far harder mission: “There were mortars, drones, snipers, mines, everything I’ve ever encountered all in one place. People think you get immune but now I’m more scared every time. Maybe as you get older you become more aware of your own mortality.”

They slept in an abandoned car repair workshop that was being used by a German aid organisation. There was constant shooting outside. One night a drone circled overhead. “Someone told us it was an Isis drone looking for foreigners,” she says. “My greatest nightmare was to be captured by Isis and for my daughter to see such a thing.”

One afternoon that nightmare came frighteningly close. An Iraqi brigadier who had been shot in the neck had been brought in to the trauma point: “Suddenly all hell broke loose. Around 40 Isis fighters had popped up three streets away. The two houses opposite were on fire and we could see all this black smoke.”

She wrote farewell messages to her mother and daughter and emailed them to a friend in case the worst happened. That was when she got the text about the spider.

“Spider in the bedroom there and Isis round the corner here,” she laughs.

Finally the gunfire ceased and the sun came up. Later the army brought in a digger and built a wall of rocks topped with razor wire around the garage to prevent car bombs from penetrating the area.

That wasn’t all. One day, exhausted after carrying out 12 or 13 missions, they saw a cloud of dust and no vehicle. “I thought, how odd. The next thing I knew, my eyes were streaming,” says Becker.

“The driver shouted that we should leave, but there were still a couple of families, so I said, ‘We can’t leave them.’ We grabbed them. By the time we got back I couldn’t see and my chest was hurting.”

Back at the clinic they were told it was a chlorine gas attack. “For two or three days it felt like sand in my eyes,” she says.

When Mosul finally fell last Sunday, Becker was travelling back to Brighton. Andolina is still in Mosul and estimates there are about 2,000 children stranded in the Old City.

Becker will see Billie off to university but she is already planning her next mission back.

@christinalamb

www.roadtopeace.org.uk