When the earthquake trembled across the towns in the rebel-held province of Idlib in Syria, people thought it was another airstrike from the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers. Mohammed Hadi, who lived with his wife and five children in a five-story apartment block, destroyed by the quake, in al-Haram, even thought that Moscow was testing a new type of weapon on people, one capable of making the earth shake. Hadi said the earthquake struck while he was still sleeping and that, within seconds, he grabbed his wife and two of his children and took them with him, outside the building.
‘’My wife was gripping my hand tightly as we ran,” he told the Guardian. “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.
“She realised two of our daughters were still inside and ran back in to save them”.
Mohammed Hadi
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 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. 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.
The schools in Idlib, which had been converted into hospitals, are collapsing, where the few doctors available are busy treating patients with very serious injuries. These makeshift facilities are run on a shoestring and lack most of the basic medical supplies and medications that us needed to treat earthquake survivors. Hundreds of children were orphaned after the earthquake, joining the other hundreds of orphans from the war. – The Guardian.
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