TRIPOLI, Lebanon: Wrapping her face in a green and white Syrian “Independence” flag scarf – knitted by her mother – a woman describes her resolve to return to her native Homs in Syria to help tend to the wounded.

The 25-year-old mother fled to Lebanon after her husband, Mohannad, was killed in fighting 10 months ago.

Now training as a nurse at the makeshift hospital established at the Islamic Center by the High Commission for Syrian Relief in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, she says she is determined to return to complete her “duty to the Syrian people.”

After one more month of basic medical training, the woman who did not give her name says she will leave her son in the care of friends and volunteers to to return to the city.

There, she will work with a team of volunteers at field hospitals set up in the hardest hit areas of Homs.

Human rights and activist groups have warned of a humanitarian crisis in Homs, calling for doctors, medical supplies and equipment.

“People are dying because we don’t have any supplies,” a field hospital worker told The Daily Star from the Syrian capital Damascus. “We have people with no medical experience doing surgery on the injured.

“We need ... a real hospital. We don’t have an X-ray, or CT scan, or labs. We are asking people for blood for free, but we don’t have enough.”

Asked whether she feared returning to Homs, the woman in Tripoli was resolute: “I am not worried, no. We are all Syrians ... and we have to help each other.”