Just 18 months old, Dalal is fighting for her life with extensive burns. Sadly, her story is not unique | World News

*Warning – this story contains descriptions of a child who has suffered extensive burns*

The vicious conflict in Syria has been raging for 10 years. One of the worst humanitarian disasters in history, more than 6.5 million people have been displaced, forced to escape the violence.

Many of them live in camps in the Idlib province in the northwest of the country. In recent weeks they have been battered by storms and flooding that has destroyed tens of thousands of tents, affecting 120,000 people.

Among them is 18-month-old Dalal, currently fighting for her life with horrific burns suffered when a fire engulfed her family’s makeshift home.

When the toddler arrived at hospital over the border in Turkey, she was so badly wounded that doctors who first saw her thought there was no hope.

“I thought, ‘what can we do for her?’,” Dr Cagatay Demirci told Sky News.

Almost her entire body appeared burned. All her fingers were black, her nose was black, her ears were black. “Like coal,” the doctor said. “That means it was already done. There was nothing to do for these.”

Dalal’s lips and eyelids had also gone, melted by flames. She lost all her hair, burned down to the scalp, her follicles completely incinerated meaning it will never grow back.

Most of her small body was chalky white. “That means the skin was still burning underneath and often means very severe burn wounds,” Dr Demirci said.

“I could see traces of carbon in her nose and mouth, which indicated she’d breathed in the hot air and probably meant she had severe trauma to her lungs. I thought she’d fallen into a fire or been caught up in a bomb, she looked so badly wounded.”

Dalal is one of the millions of children trapped in Syria’s long…