A man was lying on the cell floor bleeding profusely from a head wound when a prison guard turned to Moaz Al Safrawi and told him to treat it.
Moaz was terrified. Before he was incarcerated, he was a businessman with a degree in French literature, not a doctor. He had zero medical training.
He took up the needle and thread, and with no anaesthetic, started stitching up his fellow inmate’s gaping wound.
“I said to the wounded man, ‘Please forgive me, I’m scared, but I’m doing my best to treat you’,” Moaz tells Foreign Correspondent.
To his surprise, his patient urged him to keep going, knowing the guards wouldn’t take him to hospital and he’d likely bleed to death without treatment.