“We were asleep when the earthquake struck – I thought it was an airstrike so I ran outside,” said Mohammed Hadi, weeping gently as he clutched his baby daughter. “I grabbed my wife and two of my children and took them with me. My wife was gripping my hand tightly as we ran. But then, once we got outside, she realised two of our daughters were still inside and ran back in to save them.”
He described seeing a flash of white, which cleared to reveal the rubble of what was once his new home. The collapse of the five-storey apartment block had claimed his three loved ones’ lives as Hadi watched.
Hadi’s tent was one of at least 65 flimsy canvas dwellings now dotting the rocky hillside in the town of Al-Haram, in Idlib province, north-west Syria, all of them overlooking their occupants’ former homes, destroyed by last week’s earthquake and aftershocks. Chalky white dust blew across the hills from the piles of shattered concrete, sticking in the throat of every person it reached.
The earthquake has compounded layers upon layers of humanitarian crisis in Idlib. These were homes of people already internally displaced once when the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his backers in Moscow had attacked their villages, forcing them to seek shelter in Idlib. Most said they had arrived so recently that they had been sleeping in houses with bare concrete walls and little else.
“It took rescue workers three days to take out the bodies as our apartment was on the top floor,” Hadi said as his other surviving children – a young son and daughter – clutched at his legs. The children were covered in dust; the daughter wore no shoes and the son had a large, bloody wound on his elbow.
Idlib had been a place of last resort for thousands displaced by more than a decade of war. Across the province, some pitched their tents among ancient Byzantine ruins in sheer desperation for somewhere to live. Elsewhere, tent cities stretched for miles in the shadow of looming limestone mountains.
The Syrian rebel leader Ahmed Hussein al-Shara, better known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the de facto ruler of Idlib, told the Guardian that the province was crying out for international aid, after accusations that he had played a role in blocking aid to parts of rebel-held Syria. “We are a new government with a lot on our shoulders and the scale of this crisis is bigger than the capabilities we have,” he said.
The Salvation Government, a political organisation that nominally rules the rebel-held north-west, launched a website to record the number of people displaced and missing, in an effort to respond swiftly. But since the earthquake only 52 trucks carrying food and other aid have entered the region, where at least four-fifths of the estimated 5 million population are classed as in urgent need by the UN.
On the hillside in Al-Haram, a rebel fighter in a green uniform with an automatic rifle slung around his torso handed out pieces of a single loaf of bread to a crowd of children. Boys gathered around him, their hands lifted to the sky, begging him for food.
Nearby, at a former school converted into a hospital during the Covid-19 crisis, girls clutched at intravenous drips in their arms and cried out in pain from their injuries. “The corridors were full of people,” said a doctor, Fatima al-Toufran.
Medical workers attempted to attend to the latest crisis, as local officials said they had struggled to contain an outbreak of cholera stemming from contamination of a local river prior to the quake. Two weeks before the tremor struck, the UN said 2.1 million people in Syria’s north-west were acutely at risk from cholera.
The head doctor, Wajih al-Karrat, said the tiny hospital was running on a shoestring and lacked most of the basic medical supplies and medications needed to treat earthquake survivors. He feared a resurgence in cholera cases. “Of course I’m worried, as the water supply is now further damaged and the water is bad,” he said. “Our infrastructure is destroyed.”
The local health minister, Hussein Bazaar, said Idlib’s medical infrastructure had been weakened by years of attacks by the Assad regime even before Covid and now the earthquake, and the system was having to lurch from one crisis to another on what little supplies it received. Doctors said they dreamed of modern equipment or even many basic surgical tools.
“We need to build proper medical facilities from the ground up,” Bazaar said at Bab al-Hawa hospital, which forms part of the border with Turkey. “But we have to make do with what we have, the capabilities we have in hand.”
