Thirteen-year-old who lost his legs in a Sudan drone strike gets a surprise call from Vinícius Júnior
A teenager in a Cairo apartment sat still as his favourite player spoke to him from the screen. Real Madrid winger Vinícius Júnior greeted him in Arabic, by name. The boy, Zaher, did not say a word.
A year earlier, he had been a different child. When a BBC team first found him in war-ravaged Khartoum, he was withdrawn and soft-spoken, moving through the rubble in a wheelchair. Today he is 13, talkative, quick with a joke, and standing on two prosthetic legs. He hugged the returning reporters at the door, and his mother, Habibah, did the same.
Zaher lost both legs in 2024. He and Habibah were stuck in Khartoum, where the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces had been fighting since 2023. Supplies were scarce, and with no money to leave, the pair sold lentils on the roadside. A drone hit while they were working together one morning. “There was blood everywhere,” Habibah recalled in last year’s report. Afterwards, she said, her son kept asking why she had let the doctors cut off his legs, and she had no answer.
Football had been his great love before the war. Once he lost his legs, he could only play on his knees, which risked dangerous infection. He told the BBC then that he longed for prosthetics so he could play with his friends again.
Viewers around the world responded to his story. Dena Latif, a Sudanese-British lawyer in the UK, helped lead an online fundraising drive that brought in £45,000 (about $60,000) for his care. Leaving Sudan was still hard: the family had no passports, and their birth certificates were lost in the fighting. After months of arrangements, they flew to Cairo, where an apartment awaited them with a stocked fridge and medical appointments already booked.
Nearly a year of surgery and rehabilitation followed, with doctors and physiotherapists teaching him to use the new limbs. He can now walk and kick a ball.
When Zaher told the BBC in 2025 that Vinícius was his hero, the reporters passed the message along, and the player offered to record a reply. Watching it together in Cairo, Zaher heard him say he knew how hard the past months had been, call him a hard-working young man, and hope the new legs would bring him back to football and to happiness. Then came an invitation to attend a Real Madrid match and spend the day together.
Zaher left the room, overwhelmed, and came back wearing his new Vinícius shirt. He hopes to get a visa one day and take up the offer. “Tell Vinícius, I love him,” he said. His mother said it felt as though the whole world was cheering for her son.
The war’s toll on children remains vast. Unicef says more than 17 million Sudanese children need humanitarian aid and that it has verified at least 4,300 killed or maimed, though it believes the real number is much higher.
Source: BBC
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