The World Health Organization and Turkey is Sending Emergency Kits to Syria after the Sept. 8th Earthquake: a Prime Minister’s Address
More than 21,000 people have died in Turkey and Syria after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck on Monday, and rescue workers are now racing against time to pull survivors from the rubble of collapsed buildings in freezing winter conditions.
In other parts of Syria controlled by the government, the Syrian Health Ministry said more than 1,200 people have died from the earthquake. The overall death toll across Syria and Turkey has passed 16,000, according to The Associated Press. More than 100,000 have been injured.
In a visit to Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter of the quake, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to survivors, saying “we are face to face with a great disaster.” Erodgan admitted there were shortfalls by his government in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but said nobody would be “left in the streets.” Erdogan will also travel to the worst-hit province of Hatay on Wednesday.
She was waiting for her son to survive, so she stood outside the building where she lived with her family.
Efforts to help people affected by the disaster in Syria have been difficult due to the destruction of the border crossing, a top aid official told CNN.
Seventy countries and 14 international organizations have offered Turkey relief following the quake, Erdogan said on Tuesday, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the UAE, Israel and Russia.
Turkey’s emergency management agency, AFAD, reports it has set up more than 70,000 tents for emergency shelter to the more than 380,000 people who have been temporarily displaced by this disaster.
DUBAI — In a dusty, industrial corner of Dubai, far from the city’s gleaming skyscrapers and marbled buildings, boxes of child-sized body bags are stacked in a massive warehouse. They will be shipped to Syria and Turkey for earthquake victims.
The World Health Organization is struggling to help people in need. But from its global logistics hub in Dubai, the U.N. agency tasked with international public health has already loaded two planes with critical medical supplies, enough to help some 70,000 people. There are two planes that are destined for Turkey and Syria.
Color-coded labels help identify which kits are for malaria, cholera, Ebola and polio for countries in need around the world. Emergency health kits that are green are reserved for Istanbul and Damascus.
“The ones that we used in response to the earthquake are primarily trauma and emergency surgery kits,” says Robert Blanchard, the team lead in Dubai for the WHO’s emergency operations.
Blanchard is a former firefighter from California who worked in the Foreign Service and U.S. Agency for International Development before joining the WHO in Dubai. He says the organization is facing immense logistical challenges reaching victims of the earthquake, but their Dubai warehouses help deliver aid rapidly to countries in need.
The U.N is attempting to get into northwestern Syria through a humanitarian corridor. The 4 million people displaced in Turkey and Syria do not have much heavy machinery of the kind you can find in other parts of Turkey. Volunteers are digging through the rubble.
“The weather conditions are now not looking so great. So it just depends on the condition of the roads, the availability of the trucks and then the permission to cross the border and deliver the humanitarian aid,” he says.
The International Humanitarian City: The largest humanitarian hub in the world — a human rights lawyer and a critic of the Assad regime
They’re not allowed to go home because their homes are not sound, according to Blanchard. “They’re sleeping and living in the office trying to do work at the same time.”
The International Humanitarian City is the largest humanitarian hub in the world and is home to the WHO’s warehouses. The zone is also home to warehouses for the U.N. refugee agency, World Food Program, Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations, UNICEF and others.
Storage facilities, utility and flights carrying relief items in affected areas are covered by the government of Dubai. The agencies buy the inventory.
Saba says $150 million worth of emergency stock and assistance is dispatched every year to between 120 and 150 countries. That includes personal protective equipment, tents, food and other critical items needed in climate disasters, medical emergencies and global outbreaks, like the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The reason we are doing quite a lot and the reason why this hub became the largest one in the world is exactly because of its strategic position,” Saba says. “From Dubai, in a few hours’ flight, you can serve two-thirds of the world’s population living in Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa.”
The WHO supplies to Damascus are still stuck in the Middle East, due to the issue with the plane’s engine. Blanchard says the organization is trying for direct flights to Syria’s government-controlled airport in Aleppo, a situation he describes as “evolving by the hour.”
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Syrian victims of the devastating earthquake that hit their country and Turkey on Monday may become hostages of the politics that have divided Syria for over a decade, analysts have warned.
“The Assad regime has systematically siphoned off aid and/or blocked it from reaching non-regime areas (in the past),” tweeted Mai El-Sadany, a Washington-based human rights lawyer and managing editor at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “The international community must urgently find ways to ensure that emergency assistance and support reaches the people of northwest Syria.”
Turkey is a NATO member whose international stature has only grown in recent years. Syria, on the other hand, is ruled by a myriad of disparate groups. Iran and Russia are both global pariahs because of its brutal suppression of an uprising there that started in 2011.
Most Western countries dislike the Syrian regime. As regional states welcome him back into their fold, leader Bashar al-Assad has began forging ties with his former enemies. Turkish President said that he may meet with Assad soon, after the United Arab empire welcomed Assad in a year ago.
Lister told CNN that there is likely to be less international assistance given to opposition areas. It is difficult for aid operators to navigate because it is not controlled by a government.
That hasn’t been received well by activists and observers who fear that the regime could hamper timely aid to thousands of quake victims in rebel-held areas, most of whom are women and children, according to the UN.
A political and military standoff between Assad and the opposition is expected to stifle international assistance in northwest Syria, where 4.1 million people rely on humanitarian aid.
Madevi Sun-Suon, a UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OHCA) spokeswoman, told CNN on Tuesday that they are exploring all avenues to reach people in need. “We do have aid but this road issue is a big challenge as of now.”
The Syrian regime has also used the opportunity to call for sanctions against it to be lifted. The UN envoy said that planes wouldn’t be allowed to land at the Syrian airports because of American and European sanctions. He explained in New York that even countries who want to send humanitarian assistance can’t use airplane cargo because of the sanctions.
The UN-appointed human rights expert said that the sanctions are making the situation worse and should be lifted immediately.
A State Department spokesman said Monday that it would be ironic if we were to reach out to a government that had brutalized its people.
“It’s a very convenient time for the regime to be making that argument because if sanctions were dropped, the ramifications of the much broader geopolitical situation would be game changing,” said Lister.
Syria’s left-behind Earthquake-Mime Implication for Saudi Arabia and the Middle East: Iran, Turkey, and the United States
Background: In May, Iran’s army gave details about another underground base, which houses drones, constructed as the country seeks to protect military assets from potential air strikes by regional arch foe Israel.
The prime minister of Sweden said he was prepared to restart negotiations over the application to join NATO as soon as Turkey became a member.
After the Russia invasion ofUkraine, most NATO members gave their approval, but Turkey hasn’t given its approval, which requires a unanimous process. Turkey last week said it looks positively on Finland’s application, but does not support Sweden’s, even though the two Nordic neighbors are seeking to join at the same time.
Why it matters: The three nations last year reached an agreement on a way forward, but Ankara suspended talks last month as tensions rose following protests in Stockholm, where a far-right politician burned a copy of the Quran. Turkey is going to elections in May.
Why it matters: The move comes amid an apparent thaw in relations. two years after the Arab boycott of the states was lifted, the Crown prince of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spoke to the emir of Kuwait. The meeting of the emir and king of Saudi Arabia took place after the summit in Abu Dhabi.
In January of 2021, Saudi Arabia and four other Arab countries ended a three-year political and economic boycott of the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. But since then there have been no bilateral discussions between Doha and Manama to resolve remaining differences. All but Bahrain restored travel and trade links in 2021.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/middleeast/syria-left-behind-earthquake-mime-intl/index.html
The Suspension of the Quranic Twitter Account of AlMosahf (The Quran), a Humanitarian Aid Corridor between Turkey and Syria
AlMosahf (The Quran), an account that tweeted snippets from the Islamic holy book, had more than 13 million followers before Twitter took action against it.
The user said that he didn’t believe it violated the rules due to the fact that it’s quotes from the Holy Quran. We demand the lifting of the suspension of this account.”
Not all users were upset with the suspension. Some people decried the use of incomplete Quranic verse that is taken out of context and change the meaning of the text.
The account owner appears to run sister accounts in English, French and German, on which it posts translations of Quranic verses. The original account that shows Quranic videos has been campaigning for unblocked.
There are more people affected by the disaster in Syria as fresh snowfall worsened the situation for others.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Thursday’s convoy, made up of six trucks carrying shelter items and Non Food Items, crossed through the Bab al-Hawa crossing – the only humanitarian aid corridor between Turkey and Syria.
The Bab al-Hawa border crossing from Turkey to rebel-held areas of northern Syria had no aid for three days, but on Thursday the delivery ended.
Immediately after the quake, the United Nations said roads to the crossing were blocked, but as of Wednesday they were clear, raising questions as to why it was taking so long for help to arrive.
Doctors Without Borders: The Emergency Relief Program in Idlib City, Turkey, Following the 2014 September 11 Outburst of the Earthquake
The former merchant is volunteering as a nurse in the rebel-held city of Idlib to help with earthquake victims and to look out for patients who have been discharged from crowded hospitals.
At the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, protesters hold signs asking why only bodies are being allowed through. The bodies of refugees who fled Turkey are being sent back to their homeland to be buried.
Muhammad Munther Atqi, from the Independent Doctor’s Association, is living out of his car with his family in Gaziantep, Turkey, but is in close contact with colleagues in Syria. He said that hospitals there have been overwhelmed with corpses, and staff are waiting for families to identify them so they can be taken away.
There are 11,000 homeless families in the part of Syria that is held by the rebels. The United Nations says there has been up to 2000 deaths and thousands of injuries.
Sherwan Qasem, spokesperson with Doctors without Borders, said access to the area had been restricted by the cross-border mechanism, agreed by the UN Security Council resolution in 2014 to allow aid to cross four places on the Turkey-Syria border.
Russia and China have been given veto power that reduced the number of crossings to only Bab al-Hawa. In January, less than one month before the quake, the UNSC unanimously voted to keep it open, a vote reluctantly backed by China and Russia, whose ambassador said it enabled aid to flow to a Syrian enclave “inundated with terrorists.”
We do not need politics. We don’t need the game playing that’s going on. Barnes said that the international community needed to focus on the border crossing staying open. We are moving into the humanitarian phase now that we have reached the first phase of finding people. We need to give people shelter, food, and water.
Before the earthquake, there were 15.3 million people who needed humanitarian assistance, but now that number needs to be revised, the UN Resident Coordinator for Syria, El- Mostafa Benlamlih said.
A worker in northern Syria told CNN on Thursday that homeless people slept in their cars while they were receiving supplies.
“Those who are still alive under the rubble might die from the cold weather,” Dr. Mostafa Edo, the Country Director for the US-based NGO MedGlobal said.
The executive director of Deir el-Zour 24, a research organization that delivers news from Syria, said that the disaster is being used to remove sanctions. “If we want to bring aid to Syria, we can. Time is critical. We are playing with our lives.
Humanitarian partners on the ground can provide the type of assistance that was provided in the wake of the earthquakes. This is a regime… that has never shown any inclination to put the welfare, the wellbeing, the interests of its people first.”
Syrians do not know where their next meal will come from. When we say meal, it’s not about vegetables, not about meat… it’s about simple bread,” said Moutaz Adham, Oxfam’s country director for Syria.
The crowd is chanting ” Allahu akbar,” Arabic for God is Great. Volunteers and civil defense groups — themselves earthquake survivors — pull a boy out from the rubble alive in rebel-held northwestern Syria.
A video showing volunteer rescuers helping a family from under the rubble of a rebel-held part of the country went viral a day earlier.
The world knows about these rescues because of Karam the resident and photographer. Over four million people have been displaced by the Syrian civil war. The area was devastated by bombs and poverty before the earthquake. Aid was often hampered by politics and the Syrian government.
He described the little help that is making its way into the region as a fragmented grassroots effort by individual groups.
Civil defense groups and civilians are helping with the rescue efforts. “Everyone’s waiting for international rescue and aid just to be able to process what’s happened, this catastrophe.”
“The situation remains grim in north-west Syria where only five percent of reported sites are being covered by search and rescue,” the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report.
Freezing temperatures: The scale of the challenge is amplified by the fact that affected areas in both Turkey and Syria are facing colder than normal temperatures. For example, the Syrian city of Aleppo is forecast to have lows of -3°C to -2°C (27°F to 28°F) through this weekend, whereas February low are normally 2.5°C (36°F).