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Syrians fend for themselves in war-torn Idlib after deadly quake disaster

The war in Syria has been going on for more than 11 years. To add insult to injury, displaced Syrians who had found refuge in the north, were hit by the two massive earthquakes emanating from southeast Türkiye.

Reuters Archive

A man sits atop a rubble in the Syrian rebel-held town of Harem in Idlib on Tuesday in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake on February 6.

Syria's opposition-held northwest was already in dire straits before the twin Türkiye quakes struck. Having lived through more than a decade of bombardment, faltering international support and a crippling economic crisis, the country was not ready for what followed.

Instead of bombs from the sky, the earth rumbled from below early on the morning of February 6 – sending multi-storey cinderblock houses tumbling onto the heads of residents.

The earthquake left more than 5,800 dead in Syria and over 35,000 in Türkiye, where international help could easily flow in.

But the complex politics of humanitarian assistance in Syria's opposition-held northwest left many war-weary citizens there fending for themselves.

Walid Ibrahim lost more than two dozen of his family members – among them his brother, his cousin, and all their children. He only managed to remove their bodies from under the rubble two days after the quake.

"We were removing rock after rock and finding nothing underneath. People were under the concrete screaming, 'Get us out! Get us out!' But we'd come up with empty hands," he said.

"Your hands alone aren't enough."

AFP

Medics care for an injured youth at a hospital in the town of Harim in Syria's rebel-held northwestern Idlib province on the border with Türkiye.

'Hardest hit areas'

Parts of the provinces of Idlib and adjacent Aleppo suffered the bulk of the quake's casualties in Syria: over 4,000 of the entire Syrian death toll of more than 5,800, according to the United Nations and government authorities.

Four Syrian towns in a stretch bordering Türkiye were among the hardest hit: Salqin, Harem, Jinderis and Atareb.

On an organised press tour on Tuesday, Reuters saw around 20 men and boys trying to salvage what they could from pulverized homes in Harem and its outskirts, without protective gear or uniforms.

Only some wore work gloves, covered in the grey-white dust of smashed cinderblocks.

Even their eyelashes, cracked lips and beards were coated in the chalky substance.

One man prayed among the rubble as a lone excavator cleared debris. Children chased each other around mounds of ruins and twisted rebar.

The frontlines had become relatively quiet over a decade into the conflict - which erupted in 2011 with protests against Syrian regime leader Bashar al Assad that ended up carving the country into competing cantons.

'Hardest week'

Raed Saleh, who heads the 'White Helmets' rescue force operating in opposition-held areas, is more accustomed to rescuing victims of bombardment.

He said rescuers had been allowed to go home to see their families for the first time on Tuesday, after round-the-clock operations for the last eight days that required every volunteer and every piece of equipment.

"It was the hardest week of our lives," he said.

"What happened to us – it's the first time it's happened around the world. There was an earthquake and the international community and the UN don't help," he said.

Saleh and others in the northwest said more lives could have been saved in Syria if the outside world had acted faster.

The earthquake hit Turkish cities where major humanitarian organisations running aid operations in Syria are based and the single border crossing from Türkiye was closed for days.

Dozens of UN aid trucks later brought food and medicine through that crossing, authorised by a 2014 Security Council resolution that allowed aid into Syria without Assad's approval.

On Tuesday, a second border crossing for aid delivery was opened after Assad gave his assent, marking a shift for Damascus which has long opposed cross-border aid deliveries to the rebel enclave.

But the move was met with scepticism and even anger by many residents of Idlib, where a bulk of the 4 million residents hail from other bombed-out provinces.

"If Assad wanted to help these poor people, then he wouldn't have displaced them to begin with," said Joumaa Ramadan, a day labourer.

SOURCE: TRTWorld and agencies