Raqqa has been mostly destroyed, with vast swathes of the city razed to the ground. Residents trying to rebuild their city are being wounded and killed all the time by explosive devices.

I’m an A&E [Accident and Emergency] specialist in London, and I’m used to dealing with major trauma cases: car crashes, stabbings, the occasional gunshot wound.

But in just one month in Raqqa, I treated more severely wounded people than I’ve seen in the past three years in A&E.

Listen here or download the episode via your favorite podcast provider

MSF opened an emergency room in Raqqa within three weeks of the end of the offensive. It’s just an ordinary house with a few rooms, but we’ve been inundated with patients. During the first fortnight, about 55 blast victims arrived in the small emergency room each week — that’s almost eight a day.

The blast victims ranged from people with shrapnel wounds to people whose arms or lower limbs had been blown off.

Our job was to stabilize the patients: to stop the bleeding, wash their wounds, splint their broken bones, give them strong painkillers such as morphine and ketamine, and start them on antibiotics to control infections. This is all with the aim of transferring them to our hospital in Tal Abyad, two hours’ drive to the north, where we have full trauma surgery services.

There were usually six of us in the room — two doctors and four nurses — working on patients in three beds. We were a mix of Syrian doctors and nurses and international staff, all working together as a team.

In all my years with MSF, I’ve seen nothing more impressive than the work of that clinic in Raqqa.

The main reason there were so many injuries was because the city was littered with improvised explosive devices, many of them quite sophisticated, with heat and motion sensors and trip wires, operating on time delays.

They had been planted in houses, in cupboards, under beds — everywhere you could think of. There were also huge amounts of unexploded ordnance and remnants of war.

We heard stories of men returning to their homes in Raqqa to prepare them for their families. They’d enter the house, trip a time-delayed device without knowing it, and then, three days later when their whole family had arrived, the device would go off.

The former residents of the city are coming back in waves — an estimated 90,000 people have returned so far. With only one organization doing the brave job of demining, it’s clear there are going to be many more casualties.