“We were sleeping when we felt a strong earthquake (…) With my wife and children, we ran to the door of our third-floor apartment. When we opened it, the whole building collapsed.”
(Follow live the minute by minute of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria)
This is how he told AFP usama abdelhamida Syrian inhabitant of the town of Azmarin, on the border with Turkey, the moment when the building where he lived with his family collapsed during the violent earthquake that early Monday morning shook the area between the Turkish southeast and the Syrian north, and left at least 1,800 dead.
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From a hospital in northwestern Syria, in the city of Darkush, in the province of Idlib, Abdelhamid, wounded at the front, cannot hold back his tears and remembers that was left under the rubble of the four-story building, but “protective God” miraculously saved him and his family, he says. All of his neighbors died.
“The walls fell on us, but my son managed to get out and started screaming. Then people came and pulled us out of the rubble,” he said, moved.
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The hospital where Usama is hospitalized cannot cope. Ambulances do not stop bringing injured, many of them children, according to AFP correspondents. In one of the rooms of the establishment, several wounded people lie on the beds. Some with bandages on their heads, others with fractures or bruises.
I did not feel anything like it during these war years. This was much worse than the bombs and bullets.
The first 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria at around 4:17 am (local time). The latter, at war for almost 12 years, is divided andn areas controlled by the government and in regions controlled by rebel groups. Precisely, Anas Habache, 37, another of the people hospitalized in Darkush, summed up the magnitude of that tragedy: “I did not feel anything like it during these years of war. This was much worse than the bombs and bullets,” he said.
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When Anas began to feel the tremor, he went to look for his son and shouted to his pregnant wife to run to the entrance of his apartment, on the third and last floor of a building in Aleppo. “We went down the stairs like crazy, and when we got to the street, we saw dozens of frightened families,” she recounted. Some were on their knees praying, others were crying, as if it were the day of reckoning.”
The second earthquake was of magnitude 7.5 and was felt around 1:24 pm (local time). Ankara reported that there were also around fifty aftershocks.
These are the keys to sizing up this tragedy, which affects Syria above all at a critical moment in its history.
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Where did it happen?
The earthquake hit a poverty-stricken opposition region of Syria hard, where the majority of the population are people displaced by war and whose The only entry route for supplies is from Turkish territory, also heavily affected by the earthquake on Monday.
The northwestern province of Idlib, Syria’s last opposition stronghold, and parts of neighboring Aleppo, also outside the control of Damascus, are the parts of the country closest to the epicenter of the quake, which also affected provinces in the hands of the Bachar government. al Assad.
In total, this nation at war for almost twelve years and already suffering a serious humanitarian crisis before the quake has so far lost more than half a thousand lives in the tragedy.
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The provisional balance of the two earthquakes rose to 1,121 dead and at least 7,634 injured, according to data from the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD). According to the agency, 2,834 buildings collapsed, so the balance could still increase. At least 783 people were also killed in northern neighboring Syria, where the quakes were felt.
side and side
On the opposition-controlled side, the quake hit territory dominated mainly by the Levant Liberation Agency, an Islamist alliance that includes the former Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda, formerly known as al-Nusra Front.
The Agency maintains a parallel administration in its areas of control, although the White Helmets, a rescue group operating exclusively in the opposition areas of Syria, are leading the rescue effort.as they usually do whenever attacks or accidents occur.
Other areas in north Aleppo have also suffered, where a myriad of rebel groups are present and are areas under direct control of Turkish forces and their allied militias, which seized multiple points in three cross-border offensives launched between 2016 and 2019.
In the rest of the province of Aleppo, and the regions of Tartus, Latakia and Hama, in the hands of the Al Asad government, there have also been a large number of victims and building collapses, despite being further away from the epicenter. , in the southeast of Turkey.
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The Damascus authorities have established an operations center in the capital to coordinate the disaster response in their areasThey have ordered the mobilization of all their health and emergency personnel and have begun to open shelters to offer shelter and food to the victims.
A territory that was already in crisis
The earthquake affects Syria at a time when the country was already experiencing its worst humanitarian crisis since the start of the war and was plunged into a serious economic depression. In fact, international aid for the population had greatly decreased in the last two years.
The UN estimates that 90% of Syrians living in the country live in poverty almost twelve years after the outbreak of the popular revolts against Al Asad and the subsequent start of an armed conflict, which is still active although the violence has declined since the beginning of 2020. In addition, around 70% of the country’s infrastructure, including hospitals and clinics, is destroyed, reducing the capacity to respond to disasters like the one that occurred this morning.
The areas in the hands of the Government have been suffering in recent months from a serious fuel shortage, which this morning led the Council of Ministers to include the supply of fuel in its list of urgent measures to guarantee the development of the rescue work.
Idlib: why is your case alarming?
In the case of Idlib and the opposition areas of Aleppo, the situation is especially worrying, since there are 4.6 million people, mostly dependent on humanitarian aid and almost 3 million of them displaced by the armed conflict.
Many of these people reside in tents in displacement camps, which could have saved some of them from being crushed in landslides.
However, many others live in settlements or integrated into local communities, where the structures of some buildings have previously been weakened by bombardments and ground attacks that still rock the region from time to time despite the ceasefire decreed there three years ago. years.
The opposition areas of northwestern Syria receive humanitarian aid almost exclusively through the Bab al Hawa border crossing, which links Idlib with Turkey, and many NGOs serving them have their base of operations in Gaziantep, in the Turkish area most affected by the seism.
WILLIAM MORENO HERNANDEZ
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
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