DPA/Kobane, Syria

Four men run down the 13 steps into the emergency field hospital housed in a Kobane cellar, calling out to the doctors.
On their stretcher is a woman in military uniform, her face smeared with blood. She moans softly, semi-conscious.
The second wounded person is in an even worse state, as the medics heave him on to a hospital bed. The two had been fighting Islamic State forces at the front just outside the northern Syrian city near the Turkish border.
Now it is the doctors who have to fight to save their lives.
Hikmat Ahmed is one of them, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves as he hurries to the bedside.
The 45-year-old doctor has been living under war-like conditions since IS militants launched their attack on the city four months ago.
Kurdish forces have now finally cleared the city, but the fighting still rages in its surrounds. Ahmed and his colleagues have scarcely a minute to themselves.
The doctor has seen it all - shrapnel in faces, bullets embedded in flesh, fighters dying on the operating table as he worked in vain to save them.
Ahmed’s field hospital has been forced to move four times. In the current accommodation, bright neon lights shine down from the cellar ceiling. The smell of oil emanates from a heater keeping out the damp and cold of winter.
“The work here is hard,” Ahmed says.
The field hospital is relatively well equipped to provide initial care to the patients. Medication is carefully stored in cabinets.
A small room has been kitted out as an operating theatre, and at the end of the passage there are two wards for the wounded to recover.  The beds are packed closely together.
If the wounds are serious, the doctors are unable to help given their limited resources.
Ahmed says he urgently needs an X-ray machine and a computer tomograph. A laboratory would also be a big help.
There is no thought of abandoning the fight. “Whenever I heard the gunfire and the shells, I hoped that we would win this war,” he says.
Kurdish forces may have reclaimed the city, but the price has been high. Heavy artillery, street battles and air strikes by the international coalition have reduced much of the city to rubble.
Entire quarters have been razed to the ground. The war has also left deep psychological scars among the thousands of civilians who stuck it out in the city throughout the fighting, including families with children and even babies.
“We have all suffered from the fighting. The war has traumatised many of the children,” Ahmed says.
Electricity and water supplies have collapsed, and infrastructure has been destroyed. Shops, markets and cafes have yet to reopen for business.
The Kurds are calling for a “humanitarian corridor” to provide the city with essentials - a demand directed primarily at Turkey, as Kobane is surrounded on every other side by IS fighters.
Idriss Nassan, a spokesman for the Kurds, has warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” if help does not come soon.
Without outside help, rebuilding the shattered city will be virtually impossible. Thousands of residents have lost everything they built over the course of their lives.
One of them is Amar Bakar, 37, a fire service driver. He has turned up this afternoon to see the house that he built here.
It cost $20,000, he says - a large sum in Kobane - but IS fighters attacked before he and his family were able to move in. The walls have had holes blasted through them, and sandbags are lying in the gaps. The house must have been the scene of severe fighting.
But the fireman has no intention of giving up. “We may have lost everything, but we’ve got our city back,” he says.