In Syria, volunteers that have been pulling civilians out of the rubble of homes bombed by Russian and Syrian air strikes for years did their best to rescue earthquake survivors. They had none of the advanced rescue equipment brought to Turkey.
Two small boys lay in adjacent beds on the ground floor of the main public hospital in Afrin, a small, rebel-held city in northern Syria. The dimly lit room had the sombre silence of an intensive-care unit, punctuated by the soft beeping of heart monitors. A female nurse with a grave look on her face whispered 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 taken to a different hospital.
Both the boys are from Jindires, a small town about twelve miles away dotted with dilapidated cinder-block apartment buildings and small shops. Between rows of olive trees, tents had been erected for survivors of last week’s earthquake. The boys’ homes had collapsed, killing their parents and most of their siblings.
Though the number of dead remains uncertain, the Mayor of Jindires told us that the death toll stands at twelve hundred. With more aid, it likely could have been lower. After the earthquake struck, just after 4, survivors overwhelmed the hospital in Afrin. About eight hundred injured people arrived in the first three days, doctors and nurses told me, with another hundred and nine declared dead on arrival.
Citing the sudden arrival of journalists in the area, he and other hospital staffers bitterly noted that the world seemed more interested in their experiences treating children killed in an earthquake than in their years of fighting to keep children alive during war. They said that they were astounded by the lack of response by the outside world in Syria, compared with Turkey.
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