Northern Syria in ruins on dead mother’s umbilical cord: Syrian baby rescued hours after earthquake

Numerous buildings that were razed to the ground. Children rescued from the rubble. Sniffer dogs try to track people down among the ruins. The images of the earthquake on the Turkish-Syrian border show only part of the extent of the devastation.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 23 million people are affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. The death toll has since risen to more than 7,000 and more than 30,000 people have been injured.

The earthquake’s epicenter was in western Turkey, near the city of Gaziantep, which has a population of two million, according to the US earthquake agency. The tremors were felt in central Turkey, northern Syria, as well as Cyprus, Lebanon, Greece and Israel.

The humanitarian situation is particularly precarious in the cities of Aleppo and Idlib, which are already ravaged by civil war. Even before the earthquake, entire provinces in northern Syria were razed to the ground by the war and infrastructure was severely damaged.

There was no money for reconstruction. Many people lived in fragile and collapsing buildings or in refugee camps. Now many of these shelters have also been destroyed. The ground was pulled out from under your feet again. Mark Kaye, Middle East director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), describes the situation in northern Syria as “a crisis within a crisis within a crisis”.

The situation of a country already suffering the consequences of the civil war:

Overcrowded hospitals

Hospitals and clinics are overrun with injured people, corridors are overcrowded and there is a lack of staff and equipment, reports the South African non-governmental organization Gift of the Givers, which provides earthquake relief in Syria.

British doctor Shajul Islam, who has been working in a hospital in the city of Idlib for seven years, speaks of the “worst days” of his career. He told the AP news agency: “I take a patient off the ventilator and immediately use the device on the next patient. In between I have to decide which patient has the best chance of survival.”

Precisely because many hospitals in the area are not operational due to the war, they are now struggling with an enormous overload of the healthcare system.

But queues in hospitals are also getting longer due to a lack of resources. “Most of the people rescued from the rubble have serious injuries that require special treatment and advanced equipment,” Syrian doctor Osama Salloum told the BBC. The problem: in the hospital in Aleppo where he works, there is only an old computer tomograph.

inaccessible areas

The rescue teams had reached their limits, many areas could not be reached due to lack of personnel, Salloum reports. It is therefore not yet possible to estimate the magnitude of the catastrophe.

closed borders

Disaster relief is also made more difficult by the closed borders. Patients cannot be transferred to Turkey. Access to northwest Syria, the country’s rebel-held enclave, is also being made more difficult.

The government in Damascus only allows the import of relief supplies through a small border crossing on the Turkish border. The UN is currently working on a solution.

Destroyed refugee camps

In Northern Syria, there are many refugee shelters for about 6.8 million internally displaced persons. About 62,000 Palestinian refugees also live in the camps. Until now. Because: Many of these camps have been destroyed by the earthquakes.

According to Reuters news agency, people in the damaged accommodations are exposed to freezing temperatures and heavy rainfall. Many have taken refuge in buses to warm up and for fear of another earthquake.

memory of the war

The current situation is reopening old wounds. For the Syrian doctor Salloum, the current situation is very reminiscent of the bombings in Aleppo, which destroyed countless homes and killed civilians.

Hopes for a lasting stabilization of the country are also probably under the rubble.

This confirms the prediction of Carsten Hansen, regional director for the Middle East at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC): the disaster will exacerbate the suffering of Syrians, who are already grappling with a serious humanitarian crisis.

Millions of people have already been displaced from their homes to another region – now many more will be displaced by the disaster.