Meet the heroic mum who faced gunfire and risked her life to save hundreds of children from war

Sally Becker ran into the shadows when she saw a masked gunman standing beneath a lamppost near her hotel in northern Albania. But it was too late. She felt a searing pain through her leg as if someone had punctured her with a staple gun. The ground was wet with blood.

Becker is a humanitarian aid worker who has rescued children from war zones since 1993, and this was the first time she was shot. It was 1998 and the height of the Kosovo conflict, and she was on a mission to evacuate wounded children and their mothers.

The Albanian president organised for Becker, who had a profile because of her work in Bosnia, to be taken to a hospital in the capital Tirana. But she would not leave, even when her wound became infected, unless they also rescued the children.

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“It was nothing to do with selflessness,” Becker says. “How could I leave? The mothers would have lost hope and some of the children were in worse situations than me. They needed surgeries. There was a little girl who was going blind and if she didn’t get surgery soon, it would be too late. I didn’t know I was going to have to wait a couple of months, but I wanted to do right by them.”

Those children are among hundreds saved by Sally Becker over the last three decades, and her extraordinary work is documented in a new memoir Where Angels Fear to Tread, a rare insight into life on the frontline as war continues to rage across the world.

Nearly one in five children live in conflict zones today, with more than 473 million children impacted by the worst levels of violence since the Second World War. Becker’s work remains vital as the founder and chief executive of charity Save a Child, which is helping wounded children from war zones including Ukraine, Afghanistan and Gaza.

“I was always afraid of being killed and being maimed. Losing a limb had always been something that gave me nightmares. But with each mission, it got harder. On that first occasion [on her first mission in Mostar in 1993], I had never been shot at before, so I wasn’t able to imagine it. Once it happened, then I was absolutely terrified,” she tells the Big Issue.

“I didn’t know what to do when the snipers were shooting. I didn’t know whether to hide or run. It was just instinct that made me put my foot down. Next time, I was much more scared, because I knew what to expect. And it did get worse. It got worse every time.”

It became more fraught when Becker became a mother. It made her realise how much faith parents had put in her, entrusting their children’s lives with a stranger. They had to believe Becker would save them – that she would not take them into a barrage of bullets. 

“I don’t know if I could have done that,” Becker admits.

Every time she left for a mission, Becker wrote a letter to her daughter Billie, now 25, and her own mother, and left them in the back of a drawer. A single mother and a volunteer who made her living through speaking engagements and selling paintings, she worried about how Billie would “survive at a young age if anything happened”.

In Where Angels Fear to Tread, Becker recalls hiding from ISIS militants in Mosul. Bursts of machine gunfire indicated they were getting closer.

“All I could see in my mind were those poor people who had been taken hostage, undergoing the most shocking torture or death by decapitation, and I was trying to stay quiet and calm with the others and my phone lit up,” Becker says. 

It was a message from Billie, who thought her mother was safe in Kurdistan. Becker read the words: ‘MUM HELP!’ with the image of a spider trapped under glass.

“I shouldn’t have even touched the phone, but she had a real phobia of spiders at the time. I took the phone carefully from my jacket and told her to slide a piece of cardboard underneath and throw it out the door. That did the trick but it was awful.”

Becker faced another brush with death when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. 

“My body was already damaged by the bullet, so I didn’t have to face the fact that my body was about to be ruined. But it was terrible because I was worried in case I wasn’t around for Billie. I always knew that I risked that happening if I was in a war zone, and I could be killed, but it’s different. That would have been for something noble.”

But she survived the cancer and it has never impacted her work, beyond making it more difficult to hold a child, as she has lost strength where doctors cut through muscle.

Becker says she has often felt forced to choose between the people she loves and innocent victims of war. Her father was never a “staunch supporter” of her career, she writes in the book, but when she went on hunger strike in a prison in Kosovo, protesting against civilian suffering, he travelled on his own at the height of the conflict to deliver her water.

Still, she never considered giving it up. “It has affected me in some ways,” she remarks. “Maybe I’m not as patient as I should be. Maybe I lose my temper more easily about things that shouldn’t matter much, and it’s probably subconscious trauma. That’s what my daughter tells me.

“But I’ve had to talk about it. My work has always been quite public. It’s the people who don’t talk about what they’ve experienced that I think suffer most.”

The bureaucracy is what exasperates Becker most – delays that cost lives and red tape where there should be lifelines. She makes no secret of the fact she clashed with the United Nations. 

In December 1993, Sally Becker joined forces with the UN in a mission dubbed Operation Angel, taking 57 ambulances and trucks filled with medical supplies and equipment to hospitals in besieged areas in Bosnia. They evacuated 98 wounded children and their families, some of whom were evacuated to Britain, Italy and the US.

But Becker’s relationship with the UN turned fractious, and they criticised each other publicly. “I think we could have done so much more if we worked together,” she laments.

However, while she resents the establishment, she praises the “incredible” aid workers who risk their lives every day. “I was in and out, but there are people who are sleeping there, eating there. The aid workers in Gaza are there all the time. All I can do is admire that.”

Becker and her team at Save a Child responded to the crisis in Gaza by organising medical evacuations for sick and injured children. After months of negotiation, with the help of Gaza Kinder Relief and Project Pure Hope, some children are undergoing treatment in Italy.

There are still many more children in Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine and other conflict zones needing treatment. Save a Child has a global network of paediatric specialists, doctors and healthcare workers, who are available to offer medical advice remotely to help save lives.

“We need more specialists,” Becker stresses. “We’ve managed to help thousands of children in Afghanistan through this app since 2021 but we don’t have enough neonatal specialists, so it falls on three or four individuals, and they’re trying to do normal work in normal hospitals.

“We have a couple of orthopaedic specialists, but we need more, and it takes two or three minutes of their time. In those two or three minutes, they’re able to help save a life.”

Becker was also involved in helping evacuate families through the UK’s Homes for Ukraine scheme, bringing 240 women and children to safety. She says the Home Office, then led by Richard Harrington, was initially “brilliant” at helping families, but her team inevitably faced red tape and it took months to bring orphaned children to safety.

“I think there has to be a way that children can come here to be treated privately, from funds raised by private individuals and charities,” says Becker, who has never received government funding for her work.

In January 2024, Becker teamed up with Project Pure Hope, who raised a million pounds to cover private treatment for children from Gaza who are severely injured or ill with cancer. 

“The government wasn’t very forthcoming, but over a year later, they’re reviewing some cases and I’m hopeful. There has to be a way to do this that is not going to affect people’s lives here. It’s not going to impact the NHS and it’s not going to end up with a whole load of people trying to claim asylum.”

It is the children for whom Becker keeps returning to war zones. She recalls her first mission, where she evacuated five injured children out of Mostar, including Selma Handzar and her little brother Mirza. 

They had been seriously injured after 10-year-old Selma suggested they sneak outside for some sunshine, having been trapped in their home hiding from shelling for weeks.

“She didn’t understand what the danger was, and they were only out there for a few minutes when the rocket propelled grenade hit,” Becker says. 

Selma’s arm and part of Mirza’s foot had to be amputated, but the hospital only had enough anaesthetic for one child. Selma insisted her brother have it. She bit onto a teddy bear for pain relief.

“It broke my heart that she had gone through that horror,” Becker says.

Selma and her family were granted asylum in the US, and Selma went on to graduate from Pace University in New York City with a degree in psychology. In November 2009, Selma invited Sally to attend her wedding in New York. 

It was the first time they had seen each other since the evacuation 16 years earlier, which was a remarkable moment. Today, Becker is still in touch with several of the children she rescued.

“I don’t really know who I saved,” Becker says humbly. “Some might have survived anyway. Some might have found another way out. I don’t know what happened to all of them because there’s too many, but for the handful I do know, it’s been one of the great experiences of my life seeing where they are now. Most of the children were extraordinary individuals who went on to be extraordinary adults.”

Where Angels Fear to Tread is out now. Find out how to support Save a Child by donating or joining the network of healthcare specialists here.

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