The boy lay alone on a hospital bed, barely alive. He was about two years old, and starved so thin that his ribs jutted out like the wings of a bird from his bony chest. His head was shaved because of lice, and on one side of his skull an ugly wound seeped. One eye opened and rolled downwards as a nurse covered him in a pink fleece blanket.
In the ward there were dozens more like him — children whose Isis parents had chosen to starve them under the bombs in their caliphate’s final days rather than escape to safety. Green, brown and blue eyes stared out of faces far too big for their twig-thin bodies.
Nobody knew which country the boy came from,