The road to recovery inside Libya’s mountain hospital

By: Bill Law
It is not hard to get to Nalut these days. The town is in the rebel-held Nafusa Mountains in western Libya, about 40km (25 miles) from the border with Tunisia.

We make a quick dash, once we have cleared Tunisian customs, through the empty town of Wazin on to the open road. We pass the risk of Gaddafi’s “Grad” rockets that can come at you from the valley below.
Just outside Nalut we are waved through a rebel checkpoint, the men on guard lounging in plastic chairs under tarpaulins that ward off the fierce heat.
There is a pick-up truck with an anti-tank gun mounted and pointing for no apparent reason back down the highway we have just come up.

The almost-deserted town of Nalut is still being targeted by Colonel Gaddafi's forces

Nalut is like a ghost town. In the late afternoon sun a few cars drive by, but the houses are shuttered and empty, the shops and restaurants closed.
The men are off in the mountains. Sometimes they attack chaotically, sometimes they retreat in utter confusion. Most of the time they sit and watch.
The women, the children and the old folk are across the border in Tunisia where the heat in the desert is stifling. Here in this mountain town, the air is cooler.
I’m travelling with Saleyha Ahsan, a British doctor I first met in 1998, when she was a captain in the British Army and the first Muslim woman to graduate from Sandhurst.
When she left the army she went into medicine. Now in Libya she is volunteering with other doctors, most of them Libyans, helping refugees and the wounded from both sides of the conflict.

“I read online about doctors organising themselves and getting involved,” she says.

“I want to be part of this Arab Spring, even though I was born in Britain and my roots are in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
As we make our way to the hospital, the streets are virtually empty