I.C.R.C. is one of the few organizations that offer Afghans cost-free and sustainable medical treatment for amputations and other injuries. It has been working in the country for 30 years and has provided more than 109,000 prosthetics to Afghans since the orthopedic program started. Many of the people who seek assistance were injured by roadside bombs, airstrikes or undetonated bomblets leftover from American cluster munitions dropped after the initial U.S.-backed invasion in 2001. In 2017, a third of the clinic’s patients were children, who are often taken on field trips to learn how to recognize and avoid stray ordnance. In a recent profile written by Mujib Mashal for The Times, Alberto Cairo, the head of I.C.R.C.’s physical rehabilitation program, described how these injuries are about more than physical loss. “When you lose a leg, you don’t just lose a leg — you lose a piece of heart, you lose a piece of mind, you lose a piece of self-confidence.”

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Despite the grim reality that McDonnell’s photos depict, they also demonstrate the resourcefulness of a people who once relied on clothing, scrap metal and tape to build and maintain their own artificial appendages. It’s this intimate sense of survival that makes McDonnell’s photos stand out and that reminds us of a past era of a war that has yet to end.

Lauren Katzenberg is the editor of At War.

TIMES EVENT: Civilian Casualties of the War on Terror

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019 | New York City

A rare convergence of experts on the human costs of war will discuss the often-ignored outgrowth of the global war on terror: two decades of civilian casualties. Times journalist and Marine Corps infantry veteran C. J. Chivers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 story about an Afghan war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, will moderate the discussion. The panelists are Alissa J. Rubin, the Times Paris bureau chief who won a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting on Afghanistan in 2015; Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter and New York Times Magazine contributor, who uncovered civilian casualties among nearly 150 airstrike sites across northern Iraq; and writer Brian Castner, a veteran of the Iraq war and weapons expert for Amnesty International’s crisis team, who also investigates war crimes and human rights violations.

Get tickets here.

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