(13 Apr 2017) Fatima Bakhshi was travelling through the Balkan darkness on a cold winter night, afraid she might lose her mother and two young sons.
A smuggler told the two women and children from Afghanistan to squeeze into a car along with over a dozen other migrants trying to sneak into western Europe.
Bakhshi was crammed so tight in the back she could barely breathe.
Her two boys in her lap, she tried to tell the driver to stop swerving, but other migrants snapped at her to keep quiet.
The 26-year-old dozed off, dreaming of a new life she hopes to start with family living in Ireland - away from a brute husband and a controlling father.
But what happened next turned all her dreams into a nightmare.
The car carrying Bakhshi and other migrants hit a protective barrier and overturned in southern Serbia, killing two people on the spot and injuring 10.
Bakhshi's legs had to be amputated above her knees; her mother died and her younger son was hurt.
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"I wake up in the hospital, I see I didn't have feet," Bakhshi said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"Where is my mother? Where is my feet? I am calling, crying. All the time I am crying, crying."
"It's very hard for me," she added, her dark eyes filling with tears.
Bakhshi's tragedy illustrates the dangers facing migrants - particularly women - who are relying on people smugglers to take them over lands and borders in hopes of rebuilding their lives in the West.
Tens of thousands remain stranded all over the Balkans after countries throughout Europe last year tightened migration rules and border controls.
In most cases, they are fleeing war or poverty in their homelands.
Back when she was 16, Bakhshi's father pulled her out of school to marry a man 10 years older whom she had never seen before.
Her husband turned out to be a drug addict who beat her severely.
A year ago, Bakhshi tried to leave her abusive husband and return to the parents' home, but her father wouldn't take her in, telling her she had a husband.
Bakhshi's mother then decided she must help her daughter get away.
The two set off with the boys - aged nine and five - to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece and Macedonia.
They were arrested and pushed back once to Greece from Macedonia, before finally reaching Serbia last December.
"It's very hard, you don't understand because you don't see," Bakhshi said of the trip.
"It's very hard (on) my feet. Walking to mountain, and from Iran to Turkey. It's very hard."
More than three months after the 29 December accident, Bakhshi is now out of hospital, staying in a small care home for people with disabilities in the village of Doljevac, in southern Serbia.
She has started a rehabilitation programme that should result in prosthetic limbs.
Her children are well, by her side.
Faced with her immense loss, bed-ridden and desperate, Bakhshi said her only wish remains to join her relatives in Ireland - her mother's brother and other cousins - so that her children could have a future in a wider family.
"I don't want to live. I live just (for) my kids," the young woman said sadly, bowing her head.
Bakhshi said that for her, moving to Ireland would mean a connection to her late mother - the only friend she had ever had.
"I had just mother in life, why is like this, why?"
The United Nations refugee agency in Serbia has offered to help resettle Bakhshi in a third country, but could not guarantee it would be Ireland.
"This depends on the quotas that are at hand," explained Davor Rako, an Associate Protection Officer at the agency.
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