Tec Crunch
Asem Hasna, 22, heard dead silence for five minutes after a shell blew his left leg off in a small town southwest of Damascus in April 2013.
A mathematics student turned volunteer paramedic Hasna had opened the ambulance door after loading injured rebels from the battlefront in Khan El Shih when Bashar Al Assad’s Syrian military forces had shelled the area.
“The explosion was so loud that I didn’t even realize that my leg was no longer there. It all happened so quickly” Hasna told TechCrunch, on the sidelines of the republica tech conference in Berlin.
Hasna was captivated with the democratic groundswell that was building in Arab capitals in 2011. He had been going to demonstrations against Al Assad’s regime throughout the year facing tear gas and bullets.
Yet, as the situation worsened into a full blown civil war that has now claimed over 250,000 lives and displaced over 4 million, he decided to leave Qatana, his hometown in rural Damascus, in February 2013.
Police raided his home searching for him and detained his father instead, who ironically worked as a translator in the defense ministry. He was released weeks later after spending time in the notorious Adra prison.
In Khan El Shih, the town that borders Israel, Hasna worked in a makeshift hospital that was housed in a underground cooler part of a vegetable warehouse.
“I saw the stuff of nightmares there. Lots of corpses and severe injuries, we treated everyone even soldiers from the regime. We didn’t discriminate we had to save as many lives as we could” he added.
He was in and out of consciousness as his severed leg haemorrhaged badly and his hospital colleagues immediately sent him along with 13 other fighters to Jordan for treatment. Smuggled in a truck and dodging bullets and checkpoints in the dead of night Hasna barely survived.
“There was no water or food. We just wanted to get to Amman. Two of our group unfortunately died on the way as their injuries were so severe”.
After treacherously making it across the border, he bounced around from hospital to hospital undergoing five major operations on his amputated leg.
During his rehabilitation he was part of a joint State Department and Red Cross program aimed at training Syrians to be prosthetic technicians to develop new limbs for other war survivors. He saw a 3D printer for the first time and was hooked.