Turkey-Syria Earthquake: Why it is a ‘crisis within a crisis’ for war-stricken Syria

We explain here why the earthquake is a crisis within a crisis for Syria.

What’s the aftermath of Syria’s earthquake?

More than five million Syrians may be homeless after the earthquake, according to a United Nations official.

Syria’s representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sivanka Dhanapala, said Friday,  “That is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering mass displacement.” (There are already 6.8 million people internally displaced in the country).

“For Syria, this is a crisis within a crisis. We’ve had economic shocks, COVID and are now in the depths of winter, with blizzards raging in the affected areas. A number of our own staff are sleeping outside their homes because they are worried about the structural damage to their homes. This is just a microcosm of what is happening throughout the affected areas,” Dhanapala added.

Among the worst-hit areas due to the earthquake are Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartus, all of which are located in the north-western parts of the country, according to Syria’s state news agency SANA. Idlib is the country’s last rebel-held enclave.

Across northwestern Syria, apartments, shops, and entire neighbourhoods crumbled in seconds in the earthquake. People in the regions are sheltering in tents, ancient ruins and any other place they could find after their homes were destroyed.

“How can we tolerate all this?” said Ibrahim al-Khatib, a resident of Taftanaz in northwestern Syria who was startled from his sleep early in the morning and rushed into the street along with his neighbors, “With the Russian airstrikes, and then Bashar al-Assad’s attacks, and today the earthquake?” The New York Times reported.

UN resident coordinator, El-Mostafa Benlamlih told Reuters, “The infrastructure is damaged, the roads that we used to use for humanitarian work are damaged, we have to be creative in how to get to the people … but we are working hard”.

At a hospital just outside Idlib, Syria, “every moment, fresh bodies were being brought in,” said Dr. Osama Salloum. One boy, estimated to be about 6 years old, died as Salloum performed CPR on him. “I saw the life leave his face,” he was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

What was the situation like before the earthquake? The Syrian civil war explained

Let’s rewind to 2011. Since before the conflict began, Syrians had been complaining about unemployment and corruption under the Bashar al-Assad-led government. This led to pro-democracy demonstrations sprouting in parts of the country, demanding the president’s resignation. This quickly escalated into a full-scale war between the Assad-led Syrian government, which was backed by Russia and Iran, and anti-government rebel groups, backed by the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc.

The UN Human Rights said that at least 350,209 civilians and combatants were killed between March 2011 and March 2021, but has warned that it is an “undercount of the actual number”. (File/AP)

Assad had then said he wanted to crush what he called “foreign-backed terrorism”, BBC reported. It essentially became a battle between Syrians who stood for or against Assad. Through the years, terror organisations such as the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda also became part of the war, all attacking each other.

With assistance from the US, the Syrian rebels and the SDF have managed to establish certain strongholds for themselves throughout the country. Even today, the Syrian government is under strict sanctions by the US, the European Union, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland.

The civil war has left the country divided into three parts; government-held areas, a part controlled by US-backed Syria’s Kurdish (Syrian Democratic Forces) forces, and an opposition which controls the northwestern parts, such as Idlib.

The UN Security Council also called for the implementation of the 2012 Geneva Communiqué, which calls for a transitional governing body “formed on the basis of mutual consent”. However, nine rounds of UN-mediated talks have failed to make process.

The impact of the Syrian civil war in numbers

Due to this conflict, Syria has been witnessing a socioeconomic and humanitarian crisis, which has resulted in a deterioration of the living conditions of the people. The United Nations said that the crisis remains the largest displacement crisis in the world.

The UN Human Rights said that at least 350,209 civilians and combatants were killed between March 2011 and March 2021, but has warned that it is an “undercount of the actual number”. Out of this, 26,727 victims were women and 27,126 were children.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said that around 90 per cent of families in the country live in poverty, while more than 50 per cent are facing food insecurity. “The economic crisis is worsening negative coping mechanisms and particularly affecting female-headed households while contributing to the normalization of gender-based violence and child exploitation,” it said.

A report from the UN also said that over 13.4 million people (6.1 million children) require assistance and 7 million people are internally displaced (3.1 million children). In 2022, 14.6 million people needed humanitarian assistance, an increase of 1.2 million from 2021.

To add to this, is the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, increasing poverty in the country. Syria currently ranks among the 10 most food-insecure countries globally, with a staggering 12 million people considered to be food insecure, the UN said. A quarter of all hospitals and one-third of all primary health care centres remain non-functional and unable to respond to the growing health needs. There is also a shortage of health care staff driven by displacement, death, injury, particularly in northeast Syria.

Also, half a million children are chronically malnourished and non-communicable diseases and epidemic-prone diseases are the most common causes of illness in Syria, especially among displaced communities, where access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene services is consistently worse than in resident and host communities, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

A report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) dated January 18, 2023 said that over 2.1 million people in north-west Syria live in the most at-risk subdistricts for developing a cholera outbreak.

Taking aid to parts of Syria

Providing aid to Syria is complicated, as the most-affected areas are the northwestern parts controlled by the opposition groups.

“The areas worst affected by the earthquake inside Syria look to be run by the Turkish-controlled opposition and not by the Syrian government,” said Mark Lowcock, the former head of UN humanitarian affairs, Reuters reported. “It is going to require Turkish acquiescence to get aid into those areas. It is unlikely the Syrian government will do much to help.”

After more than a decade of fighting, millions of refugees have settled in Idlib and Aleppo, which remains outside government control.

The massive earthquakes come on top of decades of civil war in Syria, which has created millions of refugees and a spiralling economic crisis (Reuters)

In Aleppo, fighting stopped in 2016, but only a small number of the numerous damaged and destroyed buildings have been rebuilt. The population has also more recently struggled with Syria’s economic downslide, which has sent food prices soaring and residents thrown into poverty. Rebels captured the eastern part of the city in 2012, soon after the civil war began. For the next years, Russian-backed government forces battled to uproot them. Hence, the shock of the quake is too much.

Hovig Shehrian told Associated Press that during the worst of the war in Aleppo, in 2014, he and his parents fled their home in a front-line area because of the shelling and sniper fire. For years, they moved from neighbourhood to neighbourhood to avoid the fighting. “It was part of our daily routine. Whenever we heard a sound, we left, we knew who to call and what to do,” the 24-year-old said. “But … we didn’t know what to do with the earthquake. I was worried we were going to die.”

Another difficulty is that the only crossing between Syria and Turkey which is approved by the UN for aid movement has been stopped due to damage caused to roads around it.

A total of 14 trucks crossed into opposition-held areas of Syria from Turkey at Bab al-Hawa, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) informed Friday. The shipment had been due before the disaster, which caused damage to roads and temporarily halted deliveries. Till then, the UN had said that it was finding it difficult to access these parts. However, locals expressed disappointment at the failure to send the specialist equipment they need to save lives, as it took nearly four days before aid reached parts of northwestern Syria.

Meanwhile, the US has temporarily eased its sanctions on Syria in an effort to speed up aid deliveries to the north-west parts. It was also reported by The Guardian that Syria has been resistant in allowing aid into a region serving more than 4 million people because it regards the aid as undermining Syrian sovereignty and reducing its chances of winning back control of the region.

However, late last night, the Syrian government approved humanitarian aid delivery across the frontlines, saying aid would arrive to those who needed it with the help of the UN, Syrian Red Crescent and international Red Cross, state media reported. It also said that the government had declared areas worst-affected by Monday’s deadly earthquake – Lattakia, Hama, Aleppo and Idlib – disaster zones and would set up a fund to rehabilitate them.