How Assad prevented aid to the victims of the Syrian earthquake

Two young children lie in adjacent beds on the ground floor of the main general hospital in Afrin, a small rebel-held city in northern Syria. The dimly lit room was the dreary silence of the ICU, punctuated by the soft beeps of cardiac monitors. A nurse whispered with a hard look on her face that the mother and father of each child were dead. “They don’t know their parents are dead yet,” she said in broken English. “We tell them they have been transferred to another hospital.” The boy on the left was about five years old and was unconscious, his little head visible above the sheet that covered him, his body dwarfed in front of the hospital bed. His right hand was broken and his right foot was bandaged due to surgery. Both have undergone surgery. In the bed next to him was a boy of about 14, light for his age, still, only his eyes moving as he watched me talk to a group of doctors and nurses. His left leg also underwent surgery. I smiled at him, and he stared back softly. A medical tube was inserted into his nose and tape across his cheek.

Ibrahim al-Youssef, a nurse in pink overalls, told me he was pessimistic about the little boy’s chance of survival. “Before they got here, they were in bad shape,” he said. “Rescue teams in the field made great efforts to save them.” He added that the older boy was recovering. “This kid is doing well, but the other one is not so good,” he said, pausing. “God willing, we hope that he will pass through this critical situation.”

Both children are from Jenders, a small town about twelve miles away dotted with run-down apartment buildings and small shops. Among the rows of olive trees, tents have been pitched for survivors of last week’s earthquake. The boys’ homes collapsed, killing their parents and most of their siblings. Growing up in rebel-held Syria during the country’s brutal twelve-year civil war, they lived in poverty, were largely cut off from the rest of the world, and faced little opportunity for anything resembling a settled life. Now about the earthquake their future is even darker.

Jenderes and Afrin were among the most affected in Syria by the earthquake. Buildings in rebel-held parts of the country have collapsed on sleeping families just as they have across the border in Turkey, but in Syria, no one from the outside world has come to help. The White Helmets, a volunteer rescue service that has been working to extract civilians from the rubble of homes that have been bombarded by Russian and Syrian airstrikes for years, did their best to rescue survivors. But they had none of the advanced rescue equipment brought to Turkey, where teams flew in from around the world with sniffer dogs, sensitive microphones and earthquake sensors. The Syrians mostly dug with bulldozers, shovels, and bare hands. People told us that there were some buildings, full of families, with no survivors coming out.

They said the Assad regime and its ally Russia are preventing international aid from entering rebel-held areas. Many of the border crossings with Turkey are located within half an hour’s drive from the Mankouba area of ​​Syria. So far, though, Assad has only allowed aid to be distributed by the United Nations through one of them, and none of the aid has included earthquake relief or rescue equipment. Responding to the criticism, Assad promised to open three border crossings on Monday. Meanwhile, those trapped under the rubble are slowly dying in places like Jindires, and their deaths are a microcosm of what has been happening in northwest Syria for years. Martin Griffiths, the UN’s chief of emergency relief, tweeted on Sunday: “People in northwest Syria have so far failed us. They are right to feel abandoned. I’m looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”

Although the death toll remains unconfirmed, Mayor Jenders told us the death toll is 1,200. With more aids, you will likely be less. After the earthquake struck, shortly after 4 am, the survivors overrun Afrin Hospital. About eight hundred wounded arrived in the first three days, the doctors and nurses told me, nine dead and nine more pronounced on arrival. With little ability to extract trapped survivors from collapsed buildings, the number of wounded arriving at the hospital, which was surrounded by olive trees, decreased rapidly.

Hospital staff have developed grim experience treating blunt force injuries and responding to mass casualty incidents after more than a decade of war. They have become experts at keeping people alive. Few places in the world today have suffered as much violence for so long as rebel-held Syria. Of its five million residents, 2.8 million have fled there to seek safety from the Assad regime’s forces. Dr. Youssef Idris, a surgeon at Afrin Hospital, told me that despite years of regrouping people after bombing and artillery, he struggled with the wounds inflicted by the earthquake. A tall man with a short beard and dressed in robes, he described the decisions he faced. “Most people with broken bones can be saved, but shattered bones mean that a leg or an arm must be amputated, especially if there is a delay of twenty-four or forty-eight hours before they arrive with us,” he said. Exhausted, he sits on an office chair. With war wounded, we can easily locate the wound, but with this type of injury it is difficult; We have to do a full body scan. . . . It could be the kidneys or the abdomen.”

Citing the sudden arrival of journalists in the area, he and other hospital staff bitterly noted that the world seemed more interested in their experiences treating children killed in the earthquake than in the years of fighting to keep children alive during the war. They said they were stunned by the lack of response from the outside world in Syria, compared to Turkey.

International media coverage of the war in Syria, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions, has faded since the Assad regime regained control of large parts of the country with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the low-level conflict, with still high levels of suffering, continues, as different countries vie for influence in Syria. The Turkish government, which controls access to the area, has restricted journalists’ access to rebel-held northern Syria in recent years. In the aftermath of the earthquake, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has been criticized for its slow response to the quake inside Turkey, granted foreign journalists permission to cross the border and provided them with escorts.

Afrin’s main hospital is funded by the Turkish government and Qatari charitable organizations. It is staffed by a mix of Turkish and Syrian medical professionals. “We are here to extend the merciful hand of the state of Turkey to the local population,” the hospital’s director, Kenan Karacalar, told a group of reporters, as an official from Erdogan’s office stood nearby. Residents and hospital patients find themselves caught between the various factions vying for influence in Syria, fighting over areas that millions of displaced children now call home. Afrin is currently controlled by a group of rebels supported by the Turkish government. A few miles south of the Afrin hospital is Idlib province, which is controlled by a Sunni opposition group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that was once allied with al-Qaeda.

On the top floor of the hospital, seven-year-old Mohammed braved the chaos around him. In his short life, he lived years of war and then, after the earthquake, three days in the rubble next to his family members. Of the ten family members in the house, only Mohammed was pulled from the rubble. He, like the two boys on the floor below, stares at us from under a gray blanket on a metal-frame hospital bed, without saying a word. On the bed next to him sat Yasmine Morgan, an old widow. Yasmine, a distant relative, is now the only family member living at Mohamed’s. On her phone, she showed me pictures of Muhammad in his parents’ arms, next to two other children – a little girl and a baby boy. All of them smiled. Mohammed stared into space in front of him, a bruise across his left temple and an IV drip in his hand. Salah El-Din Hawa, a professor of comparative literature, blamed the Assad regime and its allies in Moscow and Tehran for the lack of aid reaching rebel-held areas. “How can we explain why so many planes bringing aid to Bashar al-Assad arrived very safely in Assad’s area, and we find nothing here?” Asked. “Imagine that this earthquake happened anywhere else in the world. What would it be like?” ♦

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