The doctor was talking to me when the bullet hit him in the head. His scrubs were clean; not a drop of blood had yet spattered his white surgical slip-ons.
We were standing outside a private garage that had been converted into a frontline medical post when it happened. It was a cloudy Saturday afternoon in Ain Zara, a southern suburb of Tripoli. Around us were shrapnel-scoured and abandoned buildings, the road outside marked with shell craters and earthen berms.
Doctor Abdurauf Gibani and his team had been expecting casualties: six gurneys were already lined up inside the garage to receive the wounded when the first peals of automatic fire and the thud of mortars came from beyond the compound walls.
The front had been
