The tents are so close to the border wall between Syria and Turkey that they almost touch it.
Those living here on the Syrian side may have been displaced by the country’s more than decade-long civil war. But they could also survive an earthquake.
The earthquake, which does not disturb international borders, brought chaos to both countries. But international aid efforts have been thwarted by checkpoints. In southern Turkey, thousands of rescuers with heavy lifting equipment, paramedics and service dogs are stuck in the streets and still working to find survivors. None of that is happening in this opposition-held part of northwestern Syria.
I have just crossed the border after four days in the city of Antakya, Turkey, where humanitarian aid is a cacophony – ambulance sirens blare all night, dozens of earthmoving machines rumble and tear up concrete 24 hours a day. Among the olive groves in the village of Bsania, in the Syrian province of Idlib, it is mostly quiet.
The houses in this border area were recently built. Now more than 100 are gone, turning into ghostly white dust that drifts across farmland in gusts. Climbing through the chalky remains of the village, I see a gap in the ruins. Inside, there is a perfectly preserved bathroom decorated with pink tiles.
The earthquake engulfed Abu Al’s house and killed two of his children.
“There’s a bedroom, that’s my home,” he says, pointing to a pile of rubble. “My wife, daughter and I slept here – Vala, a 15-year-old girl, was on the edge of the room facing the balcony. The bulldozer was able to find her, [тому] I took her and buried her.”
In the dark, he and his wife held on to olive trees as aftershocks rocked the hillside.
The Syrian Civil Defense Forces, also known as the White Helmets, which operate in opposition-held areas, did what they could with picks and crowbars. Rescuers, who receive funding from the British government, lack modern rescue equipment.
Abu Ala breaks down as he describes the search for his missing 13-year-old son Al. “We continued digging until the evening of the next day. God give strength to those people. They went through hell to dig up my boy.’
He buried the boy next to his sister.
Bsania was not much, but it was our home. Rows of modern apartment buildings with balconies overlooking the countryside of Syria and Turkey. Abu Ala describes it as a thriving community. “We had good neighbors, good people. Now [вони] the dead”.
A deeply religious man, he is now deprived. “What am I going to do?” he asks. “There are no tents, no help, nothing. We have received nothing but God’s grace so far. And I stayed here wandering the streets.”
As we leave, he asks me if I have a tent. But we have nothing to give him.
I meet with the White Helmets, hoping to find them in search of survivors. But it’s too late. Ismail al-Abdullah is tired of the effort and what he describes as the world’s disdain for the Syrian people. He says that the international community is bleeding.
“We stopped looking for survivors after more than 120 hours had passed,” he says. “We did everything we could to save our people, but we couldn’t. Nobody listened to us.
“From the first hour, we called for urgent action, urgent help. No one responded. They just said: “We are with you”, nothing more. We said we need equipment. No one responded.”
Apart from a few Spanish doctors, no international aid group has reached this part of Syria. It is an enclave of resistance to the rule of Bashar al-Assad. Under Turkish protection, it is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist group once linked to al-Qaeda. The group has severed those ties, but almost all governments have no relationship with them. All the time we were in Syria, armed people who did not want to be photographed accompanied us and stood at a distance.
After more than a decade of a stalled Syrian civil war, the region’s 1.7 million people continue to resist the rule of President Assad. They live in temporary camps and newly built shelters. Most moved more than once, so life here was very difficult even before the earthquake.
International aid that reaches this part of Syria is negligible. Many victims of the earthquake were taken to Bab al-Hawa Hospital, which is supported by the Syrian American Medical Society. According to surgeon Dr Farooq al-Omar, they treated 350 patients in the immediate aftermath, all of whom underwent just one ultrasound.
When I ask him about international aid, he shakes his head and laughs. “We cannot talk about this topic anymore. We talked about it a lot. And nothing happened. Even in a normal situation, we do not have enough medical personnel. And imagine how it is in this disaster after the earthquake,” he says. .
At the end of the corridor lies a tiny child in a vat. Mohammad Ghayat Rajab’s skull is bruised and bandaged, his small chest rising and falling thanks to a respirator. Doctors can’t be sure, but they think he’s about three months old. Both his parents died in the earthquake, and a neighbor found him crying alone in the dark amid the rubble of his home.
The Syrian people have been abandoned many times and tell me they are used to being disrespected. But there is still anger that more help is not being provided.
In the town of Harem, Fadel Gadab lost his aunt and cousin.
“How is it possible that the UN sent only 14 aid trucks?” he asks. “We didn’t get anything here. People on the streets.”
More aid has arrived in Syria, but not much, and it’s too little, too late.
Due to the lack of international rescue teams in Harem, children are cleaning up the debris. A man and two boys use a jack to pick apart the ruined remains of a building, carefully saving animal feed on a blanket. Life in Syria is not cheaper, but it is more unstable.
The day is ending and I have to go. I cross the border into Turkey and soon find myself stuck in traffic or in an ambulance, construction equipment – a dead end for national and international aid.
My phone receives a message from a Turkish rescuer saying his team has found a woman alive after 132 hours buried under her home. Behind me in Syria, as darkness falls, there is only silence.
Quentin Sommerville
