Deep down in the southern Turkish province of Hatay, not far from the town of Reyhanli, as a few dozen UN trucks carrying relief supplies for Syria’s earthquake-stricken areas pass the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, Muhammed Sheikh, a 42-year-old Syrian who was displaced from Aleppo a decade ago because of the war, mourns his fate and that of his countrymen.
“In the last 12 years, we have experienced one misfortune after another. As if the war that has affected our lives was not enough, the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken us, then the cholera outbreak, and now the double whammy of earthquake and drought is testing the limits of human endurance,” Sheikh told Frontline while sitting near the sixth-century Arch of Triumph, a remnant of the Roman road that has witnessed the flow of trade, culture, and history in the region for more than a millennium.
With its epicentre in Türkiye’s Kahramanmaras province, the earthquake on February 6 shook five Syrian provinces—Latika, Idlib, Aleppo, Raqqah, and Al-Hasakah—covering 60,000 square kilometre across the border as well, besides Türkiye’s 11 provinces.
But unlike Turkiye, the international community paid little attention to Syria’s misery, leaving local aid organisations to pick through the mountains of rubble with their bare hands, lacking the expertise and heavy equipment needed to help survivors. According to the UN, 6,000 bodies have been recovered so far, including 4,400 in the rebel-held northwest. Initial estimates indicate that more than 2,276 buildings have collapsed. The Response Coordinators Group, a Syrian non-governmental organisation that has offices in Türkiye, said 45 per cent of infrastructure in the region had been damaged.
UN aid reached four days after the quake
Rescue efforts aside, aid trucks from the UN arrived at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, northwestern Syria’s only link to the outside world, nearly four days after the quake, Sheikh said.
Under international pressure, Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad agreed to send humanitarian aid to opposition-held areas on February 10, but it did not begin flowing until nearly nine days after the earthquake. Damascus blamed the head of the militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, for holding the aid deliveries in the name of scrutinising aid workers.
For Sormer Tamr, a volunteer working for White Helmets, the Syrian civil defence group, images of survivors buried under rubble, waving their hands for help will haunt her for the rest of her life.
“We had no equipment. With bare hands and elementary equipment, we tried to get people out of the rubble. The worst image that stuck in my mind was the people under the rubble waving their hands and asking for help. And when you held someone’s hand, they did not let go of it because they were afraid that you will abandon them,” she said.
A handout picture released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) on February 22, shows workers unloading boxes of aid sent by the Norwegian Red Cross, to help victims of the February 6 earthquake, at the Damascus international airport. | Photo Credit: SANA / AFP
The truth, however, is that aid workers had to abandon many of those people because there was no equipment to clear the rubble.
“Despite the storm and aftershocks, we kept hearing voices from the rubble for more than two days, with people asking for help. I apologise to all those who died that we were unable to rescue them,” Tamr told Frontline in a choked voice over phone. Only 5 per cent of the area could see the search and rescue efforts, leaving the remaining 95 per cent unattended for the first 72 hours.
“We struggled with helplessness and time to reach people alive. The lack of proper equipment was a major reason for this helplessness, but we swear to you that we worked and did our best,” said Raed Saleh, head of White Helmets. He accused the UN of wilful negligence towards the victims of the earthquake in Syria.
When a batch of 80 UN trucks reached the partially destroyed Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in eastern Syria located 450 km from the capital Damascus on the banks of the Euphrates River, 14 days after the quake, many residents had turned UN flags upside down in protest.
Western sanctions exacerbate the problem
Since the devastating earthquakes in the northwest of the country, thousands of Syrian families have been sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures because they do not have even temporary shelters.
“I spent the first three days of the disaster in the open until I could find a tent... without the support of aid organisations,” Nidal Mustafa Ibrahim, who had to evacuate a house in the village of Azmarin in western Idlib when it began to burst, told local news outlets.
“We do not have enough tents. One tent houses three to four families, and many of them are without blankets and mattresses. Remember, it is winter here. The cold is starting to hit the children. There is no heating system,” said Tamr.
Across the border from Bab al-Hawa, Idlib province is home to some four million people, 2.8 million having arrived from other areas to avoid war. Human rights groups say some 3,50,000 people have been killed in the country since 2011.
According to the UN, the number of displaced people in the northwest of the country is about 5.3 million. Some 15.3 million Syrians are suffering from the economic crisis triggered by the war, the strict Western sanctions, and the recent financial crash in neighbouring Lebanon. With infrastructure broken in nearby Türkiye, they have lost another shield.
Syrians suffered the consequences of the earthquake not only in their own country but also in Türkiye. Of the 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees camped in Türkiye, 1.72 million live in the earthquake-affected provinces of Kahramanmaras, Hatay, Osmaniye, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir, Malatya, Killis, Adana, and Adiyaman.
An aerial view of a woman sitting next to an art work painted on the rubble of a building that collapsed during the February 6 earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria, in the rebel-held town of Jindayris in northern Syria, on February 22. | Photo Credit: RAMI AL SAYED/AFP
“For Syria, this is a crisis within a crisis. We have had economic shocks, the COVID-19, and now we are in the depths of winter with snowstorms in the earthquake-affected areas,” said Sivanka Dhanapala, Syrian envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
According to aid agencies, although rescue teams from many Arab countries and international humanitarian aid have landed at Damascus International Airport, it did not reach the opposition-held northwestern Syria, where 85 per cent of affected people are living. The Response Coordinators Group alleged that 90 per cent of the aid was disbursed in the government-held areas.
In 2014, the UN Security Council approved four border crossings into Syria for humanitarian aid deliveries: Al-Yarubiyah, an area controlled by Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria on the Iraqi border; Al-Ramtha on the Jordanian border in southern Syria, , an area that has since been retaken by Syrian government forces; Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Hawa, both in rebel-held territory in northern Syria on the Turkish border.
But in 2019, Russia and China used their veto power to prevent the renewal of Al-Yarubiyah and Al-Ramtha. In 2020, they vetoed the renewal of Bab al-Salam’s permit, leaving Bab al-Hawa as the only UN-approved border crossing for aid into Syria.
Fighting continues
What also held aid workers back was the fact that Syrian government forces and rebels were fighting in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous province, in the midst of rescue efforts. Abou Mostafe al-Khatabie, a war monitor with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Middle East Eye, a London-based news website, that shelling from Base 46, which hosts a base of Assad forces, affected western Aleppo, the town of Atareb and the village of Kafr Amma.
Clashes also occurred in Kafr Taal and Kafr Nouran villages, he said. As many as 235 people in Atareb and surrounding areas were killed in the earthquake, and many more were trapped under the rubble when the armed clashes occurred. Clashes between government and opposition forces also erupted in the city of Marea in Aleppo province just hours after the February 6 earthquake.
The region was already witnessing the worst drought of the last 70 years. Syria’s breadbasket, Hasakah, Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, have seen barely 5 to 25 per cent rainfall since 2020. Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid organization, estimates that agricultural production in 2022 has declined by more than 80 per cent compared with 2020, the last harvest before the current drought broke out.
Syria wants to end isolation
There are signs that the Arab world is opening up to Assad after years of isolation, as evident by his recent visit to Oman. He received the Foreign Ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. He also spoke on the phone for the first time with King Hamad of Bahrain and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The US announced that it would ease sanctions on Syria for 180 days for transactions relating to earthquake relief. The decision came at a time when the debate was raging over the impact of sanctions.
After initially sending an aid convoy to rebel-held areas via Türkiye, Saudi Arabia began flying in relief supplies via government-held Aleppo. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told the Munich Security Conference that the status quo was unsustainable and that the world would have to negotiate with Damascus “at some point” on issues such as refugees and humanitarian aid. Last December, a Russia-brokered meeting between the Turkish and Syrian Defence Ministers in Moscow had already marked a turning point for Assad.
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“Arab States that have normalised or want to normalise see this disaster as a platform to accelerate their efforts through phone calls and visits,” Syrian journalist Ibrahim Hamidi wrote in the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat.
If “disaster diplomacy” forces Assad to improve relations with Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, the geopolitics will change forever in West Asia. However, many analysts believe that Assad may find it difficult to warm up so quickly to the Arabs given their animosity towards Iran, Syria’s best friend. Assad’s regime survived the civil war primarily because of the military support from Iran and Russia.
Surprisingly, after the earthquake, Iranian militias have been withdrawing from many areas that they controlled in Deir ez-Zor. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commandos, who are under US sanctions, recently withdrew from their positions on the Huwaijat Sakar river bluff on the outskirts of Deir ez-Zor city and handed the positions over to Syrian Republican Guards.
Iranian militias also vacated their military headquarters in eastern Deir ez-Zor and Ain Ali on the outskirts of Al-Mayadin.
The Iran-backed Afghan Luwaa Fatimyon militia also vacated one of its military headquarters in the security square in the town of Al-Mayadin, considered the capital of the Iranian militias in eastern Deir ez-Zor. They have also cleared a prison in Al-Mayadin city, where they used to detain and interrogate prisoners.
Iftikhar Gilani is an Indian journalist based in Ankara.
The Crux
- With its epicentre in Türkiye’s Kahramanmaras province, the earthquake on February 6 shook five Syrian provinces: Latika, Idlib, Aleppo, Raqqah, and Al-Hasakah.
- Unlike Turkiye, the international community paid little attention to Syria’s misery, leaving local aid organisations to pick through the mountains of rubble with their bare hands.
- According to the UN, 6,000 bodies have been recovered so far, including 4,400 in the rebel-held northwest.
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