Tripoli: US surgeons have been performing open-heart surgery on sick children in a hospital in Tripoli, the capital of the western part of war-torn Libya.
The surgeons are from a visiting American medical team led by William Novick from the University of Alabama.
The Novick Cardiac Alliance regularly deploys to Libya because the country's medical infrastructure is unable to deal with the number of heart patients who need serious intervention.
One patient is a one-year-old boy Yazan who was born with congenital heart disease. With just one chamber, his heart pumped so little blood that when he cried, his skin turned black. Without surgery, he would not survive.
Frontlines crisscrossing the country torn by civil war mean that his parents had to travel 1,500 kilometers to get to the hospital.
Lacking cardiac care in their village, they would have normally gone to nearby Algeria which has better health care, but the war has made that impossible.
Tripoli itself is unsafe. Fighting between factions vying for control of the city has killed hundreds of civilians including at least 13 children since mid-January.
Every year about 1,200 children are born in Libya with congenital heart disease. More than 500 will need surgical intervention or a third will die in the first year of their life, Novick says.
But the country has only one active cardiac surgeon who can perform the life-saving operation.
The war has affected every part of life in Libya including the health system which the World Health Organization has described as overburdened, inefficient and short of medicine and equipment.
During their month-long trips, Novick and his team work 15-hour days, performing up to 40 complex open-heart surgeries.
Since they started coming to Libya in 2012, they have operated on about 1,000 children. They do three to four trips a year.
Witnessing the suffering of children with congenital heart disease and the disparities in health services between the US and developing countries gave Novick a life-long mission any child with heart disease should have access to the care they need, no matter where they're born.
He recruited experts to help him trek to places where treatable heart disease means death due to a shortage of specialists and other restrictions.
His team is used to danger since 1994 they have made over 500 trips and operated on nearly 10,000 patients in places like Ukraine, Nigeria, Columbia, Iran, Iraq and Libya.
After an uprising, backed by Western powers, deposed Libya's dictator, Muammar Qadhafi, in 2011, the country has been in chaos, broadly divided between the two rival governments.
For Novick, these trips are not only about helping the individual patients but also about strengthening the country's critical medical infrastructure by offering training to local doctors.
The team works in both parts of Libya, hoping to build bridges between the medical communities of the rival halves.
"We're on both sides of the conflict zone," said Novick. "And that is a specific goal of ours, to be apolitical and help the children."
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(With inputs from AP)
