Prosthetics centers in northwest Syria have begun using 3D printing to produce custom limbs for amputees, offering a partial answer to a shortage of prosthetics capacity in a country where nearly three million people have been wounded since the conflict began in 2011. Two centers in Idlib province now rely entirely on the technology and together serve between 100 and 150 patients a month, while four more centers are partially operational and building toward full adoption.
The scale of the need is stark. Syria has roughly 86,000 amputees, according to figures cited by Dr. Waddah Ghazi al Khatib, director of the Directorate of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Syria’s Ministry of Health, and many have been unable to access prosthetics or ongoing rehabilitation care at all. Al Khatib said the number of prosthetics centers currently operating remains far too low to meet the country’s needs, with capacity split across public, private and humanitarian-run facilities, private centers typically charge high fees, while humanitarian organizations provide prosthetics free or at low cost.
From plaster molds to digital files
The shift to 3D printing has changed the entire prosthetics workflow, not just the final manufacturing step. Alaa Sabri, a 33-year-old orthopedics technician and volunteer in Idlib, said the scale of need has forced centers to move beyond older techniques: “Given the large number of wounded and amputees in Syria, prosthetics manufacturing can no longer rely solely on the traditional methods used in the past. We have shifted to a modern workflow that begins with digital scanning and ends with 3D printing,” he said.
That workflow starts with a high-resolution scan of the area where the prosthetic will attach, used to map pressure points and areas needing extra protection. Technicians then refine the resulting digital model, sometimes to sub-millimeter accuracy, before printing it layer by layer as a lightweight lattice structure designed to cut weight without sacrificing durability. Mechanical components are then assembled onto the printed shell to complete the finished prosthesis.
Traditional plaster molds have largely been replaced by these digital files, which can be stored, adjusted and reprinted later without starting the process over, a particular advantage for children who need frequent replacements as they grow. The Idlib workshop runs on solar panels and the national electricity grid, and relies on low-cost 3D printers imported from China, chosen because they are easy to maintain and their parts can be repaired locally.
“Faced with the challenges years of war have imposed on Syria’s health sector, this model aims to establish more sustainable rehabilitation services based on locally developed technologies that can be maintained, improved and scaled up to meet the growing needs of the wounded,” Sabri adds.
Cutting costs and wait times
The technology has meaningfully lowered the barriers that kept many Syrians from getting a prosthesis at all. Rawan al Beirouti, a 29-year-old prosthetist and physiotherapist, said digital labs can now produce a customized prosthesis in about a day, compared with the weeks required by conventional methods. For Adnan al Raslan, whose seven-year-old daughter Salwa lost her leg to a landmine in early 2025, the savings were direct: he said the new technology cut the cost of her prosthesis to about $100, compared with roughly $500 for the conventional articulated prosthetics his family had bought previously.
Those gains matter most for children like Salwa, who need frequent refitting as they grow, and for families like that of Abdullah al Aqdi, who lost his foot at seven months old in a bombing and has required continuous surgeries and prosthetic adjustments since. Despite the progress, al Beirouti acknowledged the approach remains in an early stage in Syria and has not yet achieved widespread adoption, with centers still facing shortages of equipment, raw materials and trained specialists able to operate and further develop the technology.
Muhammad al Ismail, a prosthetics technician who helped fit Salwa’s new limb, described the work as demanding but purposeful: “It’s a major humanitarian mission facing many challenges. But helping amputees restores life and hope to the wounded and relieves their pain, and that is our motivation to carry on,” he said.
A repeated strategy for conflict-zone care
The approach these Idlib centers are taking is part of a wider strategy humanitarian and medical groups have relied on for years to close resource gaps in conflict and crisis settings: combine low-cost printers with digital scanning to sidestep the shortages, damaged supply chains, and slow turnaround times that traditional prosthetics manufacturing struggles with in a war zone.
In Gaza, organizations like Glia have applied a similar strategy to a related problem, building an external fixator for fractures from a mix of 3D printed components, recycled plastic, and solar-powered equipment, allowing production to continue even without a stable power grid or reliable access to imported supplies.
In The Gambia, a British charity’s pilot programme, co-financed by the European Union, is testing whether 3D scanning and printing can produce prosthetic sockets more precisely than conventional methods, where even a one-millimetre error can make a device too uncomfortable to wear.
Across each of these efforts, the underlying strategy is the same: treat the printer itself as decentralized infrastructure, letting care be produced locally and repeatedly rather than depending on scarce imported parts or centralized manufacturing that a warzone or resource-poor setting often can’t sustain.
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Featured image shows Syria Relief runs the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs in Syria. Photo via Syria Relief. (File photo, unrelated to the events described in this article.)
