In earthquake-hit Syria, there was a desperate wait for help that never came

Feb 10, 2023 at 4:44pm EST

Local residents pass through the rubble of houses and buildings in their streets in the Syrian town of Jenderes, today, Friday, after it was destroyed by the large earthquakes that hit the area. (Sloan George/The Washington Post) Comment on this story

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JINDIRES, Syria – It took four days and nights after the earthquake for the ruins here to become silent. Residents said the strongest votes were for women. They were separated from their children, or they fought to save them, and they screamed until their lungs were lost.

In this forgotten pocket of rebel-held northwest Syria, there were no international rescue workers to rescue them. No shipments of painkillers were brought to the survivors when stocks ran low. Just six miles away, across the border in Turkey, thousands of tons of relief items have poured in; Support teams from as far away as Taiwan have responded to requests for help from the Turkish government. But Syria, divided and cut off from most of the world, has been left to pick up the pieces on its own, as it has done time and again over more than a decade of war and turmoil.

And in the shattered town of Jenderes, at least 850 bodies had been recovered by Friday morning. Although hundreds were still missing, few thought there were any lives left to save. “We needed help here, we asked for help,” said the city’s mayor, Mahmoud Haffar. “He never came.”

The Bab al-Salama border crossing with Syria was almost empty on Friday. A single ambulance with flashing lights was waiting to get in. The only Syrians who have crossed paths are those who have been reunited with their families in body bags.

On a rare visit to this Syrian enclave, which is controlled by armed groups backed by Turkey, The Washington Post found communities besieged in shock and bewilderment, and deeply alone. In Jinderis, fathers stood on the ruins of their homes and told of waking up to find their wives and children dead. As massive excavators plowed through the rubble, searching for a 13-year-old boy, a man asked reporters to help him contact the United Nations for help. “Maybe they don’t know what happened in Jenderes,” he said. “Nobody can see this and not come here.”

This part of Syria has experienced crisis after crisis and is home to millions of people who have faced war, displacement, hunger and disease. Even before the earthquake, 4.1 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance.

Access to areas outside government control has been weaponized during the conflict by President Bashar al-Assad, who has imposed restrictions on the movement of humanitarian organisations—helped by allies like Russia at the United Nations and, on occasion, by neighbors like Turkey and Jordan, who have periodically impeded the flow of humanitarian aid. aid. UN officials have rarely complained publicly, a move critics argue is intended to preserve access to Damascus at the expense of the millions of civilians living outside Assad’s control.

In the small town of Soaran, 10 miles from the Turkish border, residents remembered the shaking roar of the earth, and it sounded so loudly that the earth was roaring. As the buildings collapse, residents remember screaming into the sky. Thirty-six people were killed, and 20 were injured.

News soon reached the survivors of what had happened 40 miles away, in Jenderes.

“We heard that Jenderes was the worst,” said Mohammed Jasim, 21, who went to help with the rescue effort after learning his aunt, her husband and their children had been killed in their home there. “They said there are hundreds under the rubble and they don’t have the equipment to help them.”

He heard screams all day. There were scratches on his hands from the ground claws. “Imagine you are still crying four days later,” he said, and his expression turned hollow. “It is unimaginable. Everyone died.”

With the front lines largely flat after 12 years of grinding war, northwest Syria has become a last resort for millions of civilians or former combatants who fear for their safety if they return to government territory. Many Aboriginal people are still too poor to go elsewhere, even as conflict draws in on them.

Jenderes, in particular, survived the worst of the prolonged fighting, until Turkish-backed armed groups drove Kurdish forces out of the area in 2018.

Zakariya Tabakh, 26, came here from Aleppo, a city devastated by Assad’s barrel bombs and airstrikes and of which whole parts lie in ruins. He built a new life in Jinderis, where he married and had two children. He had put their two-year-old son, Abdulhadi, to bed on Sunday night, lying with the baby for a while before slipping off to sleep with his wife. He remembers only fragments of what followed. She was dead under the quilt. Abdul Hadi died as he was put out at night. Rubble was everywhere.

Attendance at their funerals was low, Tabakh said: “Everyone is busy with their own issues.”

The United Nations migration agency said Friday it had sent 14 truckloads of humanitarian aid to opposition-held Idlib, the second such delivery since the earthquake. In Jindris, the only visible aid distribution came from local charities – plastic bags of food and blankets piled on flatbed trucks.

The death toll in northwest Syria is more than 2,000, a far cry from the 20,000 dead in Turkey. But there are still many buildings to comb through, and many people are still missing.

Rescue workers and residents were painfully aware that the only equipment at their disposal – mostly battered shovels and bulldozers – were sometimes hurting the people they were trying to save. How can you use these to perform such delicate operations? You can not. “Impossible,” said a member of the White Helmets civil defense force in the area. “People died there because we don’t have the equipment.”

The director of the White Helmets, Raed Saleh, said on Friday that international aid, when it does arrive, will come too late to help find survivors, and will go toward clearing demolished buildings.

Sanitation facilities in the area were hanging by a thread long before Monday’s quake. Assad’s forces and their Russian allies have systematically bombed health facilities, forcing hospitals to operate underground as doctors flee. Monday morning’s tidal wave pushed the remaining facilities to breaking point. In the town of Afrin, doctors estimate that about 70 percent of the patients they have seen have come from Jenderes.

“We had to refer several of them for amputations,” said emergency nurse Ahmed Saqer, 53, by phone. Without support, one of his colleagues said, his team was exhausted – survivors and saviors at the same time.

They need a break. Everyone does.

As darkness fell and the temperature dropped towards the cold, the surviving residents took up residence in the olive groves, some now homeless, others fearful that their homes might collapse. By nightfall, the fires they were burning from olive branches were the only light they had left.

Sloan George in Jenderes, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad, and Claire Parker in Washington contributed to this report.

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