Guardian readers fund life-changing surgery for Somali boy injured in US airstrike

Abdiqadir Salah and his mother, Marian Haji Abdi Guled. ‘I didn’t know people like this existed,’ she says of the people who raised the money for her son’s surgery. Photograph: Mohamed Gabobe

On the rickshaw ride to the hospital, Marian Haji Abdi Guled felt a mixture of joy and apprehension: the day they had been waiting for had finally arrived.

Almost a year earlier, her then seven-year-old son, Abdiqadir Salah, had been seriously injured, alongside his two siblings, in what a Guardian investigation found was a US drone strike on the village of Jamaame in Somalia that killed at least 12 civilians, including eight children.