Mansour Rahim, 20, reclines while his roommate works with their physiotherapist. Rahim suffered spinal damage and is partially paralyzed from the waist down. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

Pharmacist Mohammed al-Sela, right, one of two pharmacists at the hospital, speaks with head nurse Maisaa Ahmed. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

Mustafa al-Shegh, 19, helps his 2-year-old cousin Ignue climb up to join him on a ward bed. Al-Shegh suffered spinal damage from shrapnel and is semiparalyzed from the waist down. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

Dr. Abdul Dader advises a patient on a forearm injury. Dader is a neurologist who works with many of the most severely wounded patients as well as those with less serious nerve damage. Like many of the other staffers, he is a refugee himself. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

Patients make their way up the stairs of the postoperative medical center. It has three floors but no elevator, so patients with spinal-cord injuries are given priority for ground-floor rooms. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

The medical center is gated and always has a guard on duty for the protection of the patients, staff and facility. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

At the Dar al-Istshfaa Syrian Medical Center, a physiotherapist sits with patients. The hospital has become a destination for many casualties of the war in Syria. KJ Dakin for Al Jazeera America

REYHANLI, Turkey — The first missile struck when Najeebeh Ahmed Hussein was clearing dishes from breakfast. The debris had barely settled when the second one hit and she found herself running from her village home on al-Zawya Mountain in northern Syria, her 5-year-old son bleeding in her arms, paralyzed from the waist down by shrapnel.

She fled to a neighboring village, Kansafra.

“Then the planes came and bombed that village,” Hussein said.

The rest of her travels that hot day in early September were difficult for her to recount — the car that took her to a third village, the field-hospital ambulance that appeared, presumably called in by someone in a rebel-controlled area, and then the 60-mile drive to the Turkish border, where instead of a passport, all she could present was an injured child.

Another ambulance, this one Turkish, rushed them to a hospital. And once it became clear that her son’s injuries would require long-term care, she embarked on yet another transfer and arrived at Dar al-Istshfaa, a haven for those wounded in Syria’s deadly civil conflict between rebel forces and those of President Bashar al-Assad.

With a name that roughly translates as “house of healing,” the Dar al-Istshfaa Syrian Medical Center sits here in this dusty Turkish border town, a few hundred meters from the Syrian border and next to a meandering mini-mountain of exposed rock and scraggly golden grass, a landmark that serves as a boundary between the two nations.

Founded by the Paris-based Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations (UOSSM), an aid organization created by Syrian physicians from Europe, the U.S., Canada and other Middle Eastern countries, Dar al-Istshfaa was designed to provide free medical care to all Syrians, regardless of religion or politics.

The three-story blue-and-white concrete building is the UOSSM’s largest postoperative recovery center in Turkey, with capacity for 80 patients. It was the first facility of its kind in any of Syria’s neighboring states, opening its doors in July of 2012.

Since then, it has served more than 10,000 people whose stays lasted at least a week, along with 700 long-term patients who remained for several months.