The quake-hit region of Hatay, Turkey, as a reminder to everyone “we are face to face with a great disaster”
Turkey’s government said search and rescue teams have pulled more than 8,000 people from underneath the rubble of thousands of toppled buildings in the past two days. Due to the worsening weather in the region, survivors may risk succumbing to their injuries or Hypothermia.
More than 33,000 people have died across Turkey and Syria since a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on Monday, as hopes of rescuing more survivors dwindle amid freezing conditions.
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.” There were shortfalls by his government in the wake of the earthquake, but Erodgan said nobody would be left in the streets. The worst hit province of Hatay will be visited by the president on Wednesday.
Hamideh Mannulolu stood outside the old residential building she used to live in waiting to hear if her son survived.
Millions living in the rebel-held areas of northern Syria were already suffering from the effects of extreme poverty and a cholera outbreak when the quake hit. Now many are fending for themselves.
The situation in Syria is starkly different to Turkey, where 70 countries and 14 international organizations have promptly offered teams of rescuers, donations and aid.
Over 67,000 tents have been set up in Turkey to house people who have been temporarily displaced by the disaster.
The Unified View of the United Nations: The Role of the Syrian Regime in Aiding Relief During Earthquake Victims
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Some of the areas of Syria most impacted by the earthquake are controlled by the regime, others by Turkish-backed and US-backed opposition forces, Kurdish rebels and Sunni Islamist fighters. One of Syria’s last opposition strongholds is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist group.
Speaking to CNN, the deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa said that Syrians must not be forgotten. Those who are already vulnerable are usually the ones who suffer the worst during disasters.
Turkey is a NATO member which has grown in stature in the last few years. Syria is ruled by a variety of different groups. Iran and Russia are seen by the regime as its closest allies because of the brutal suppression of an uprising there that started in 2011.
Most western countries don’t like the Syrian regime. As his former enemies welcome him back to the fold, leader Bashar al-Assad has begun forging ties with some of them. Last year, the United Arab Emirates welcomed Assad in Abu Dhabi, and last month Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the pair may soon meet for peace talks.
“We are ready to work with all who want to provide Syria, from inside Syria, so access from inside Syria is there,” Syria’s representative to the UN, Bassam al-Sabbagh, told a news conference in New York on Monday. “So, anyone who’d like to help Syria they can coordinate with the government and we will be ready to do so.”
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.
In northwest Syria, where the UN says more than 4.1 million people already depend on humanitarian aid, a political and military standoff between Assad and opposition forces is only expected to stifle international assistance.
“We are exploring all avenues to reach people in need and conducting assessments on feasibility,” Madevi Sun-Suon, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), told CNN on Tuesday. We have aid but the issue of the road is a challenge at the moment.
The Syrian regime has also used the opportunity to call for sanctions against it to be lifted. Its UN envoy Sabbagh said on Tuesday that planes refused to land at Syrian airports because of American and European sanctions. The countries that want to send aid can’t use the cargo because of the sanctions.
In November, a UN-appointed human rights expert called for the immediate lifting of unilateral sanctions against Syria, saying they are exacerbating the destruction and trauma suffered by ordinary citizens there.
It would be ironic if we reached out to the government because it has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now, being responsible for much of the suffering that they have suffered.
“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.
An announcement by the Foreign Minister of Sweden on Tuesday of a “nuclear” attack on the country’s underground cruise missile base
The announcement comes less than a fortnight after a drone attack on an Iranian military plant that the US media said was carried out by Israel. The underground base was built to hold fighters with long-range cruise missiles, and is one of the country’s most important air force bases.
The Prime Minister of Sweden said on Tuesday that he was willing to restart talks on Swedens application to join NATO as soon as Turkey was ready.
Turkey has yet to approve NATO membership applications from Sweden and Finland despite most of the other NATO member states having done so. 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.
The three nations struck an agreement on a way forward last year, but Ankara stopped talks last month after a far-right politician burned a Quran in Sweden. Turkey goes to elections in May.
Bahrain’s foreign minister met with his Qatari counterpart in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on Tuesday to discuss mechanisms to launch talks on unresolved issues between the two countries, Bahrain’s state news agency reported.
Background: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt ended a three-year political and economic boycott of Qatar in January 2021. There has been no bilateral discussions since then between Doha and Manama. 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
A Suspension of the Instagram Account that Shows Quranic Videos and Violence against Islamic Fundamental Laws: Implications for Humanitarian Affairs in Syria
Before the account was taken down, it had more than 13 million followers.
One user said that they didn’t think it violated the rules because it quoted from the Holy Quran. We demand the lifting of the suspension of this account.”
Some users were happy with the suspension. The account’s use of incomplete Quranic verse that they said are taken out of context changes the meaning of the text.
The account owner has sister accounts which are in English, French, and German. Another sister account that shows Quranic videos has been campaigning for the original account to be unblocked.
The UN says the situation for the 10.8 million people affected by the disaster in Syria is getting worse because of fresh snowfall.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) said Thursday’s convoy, made up of six trucks carrying shelter items and Non Food Items (NFI), crossed through the Bab Al Hawa crossing – the only humanitarian aid corridor between Turkey and Syria.
There was no aid arriving at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing from Turkey to rebel-held northern Syria during a three day period, which ended on Thursday.
The UN said roads to the crossing were blocked immediately after the earthquake, and they were clear as of Wednesday.
Bringing Aid to the Lands of Idlib: A New Resolution on the Turkey-Syria Humanitarian Cross-Border Mechanism
A former merchant is volunteering as a nurse in the rebel-held city of Idlib, dressed wounds for quake victims and checking on the injured who have been discharged from crowded hospitals.
Protesters are holding signs asking why bodies are being allowed through the crossing. The bodies belong to Syrian refugees who sought safety in Turkey and are now being sent back to be buried on home soil.
The Independent Doctor’s Association’s Muhammad Munther Atqi is living in Gaziantep, Turkey with his family, but is in close contact with colleagues in Syria. Hospitals there have been overwhelmed with bodies and staff are waiting for the families to identify them so they can be taken away.
As water supplies dwindle, survivors are facing their own challenges. Moutaz Adham, Oxfam’s country director for Syria, said residents are struggling to find food – even bread is hard to come by because so many bakeries collapsed in the quake.
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 able to reduce the number of crossings from four to just one because of their veto power. 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 don’t need the politics. We don’t need the game to be going on. Barnes said that the international community needs to focus on keeping the border crossing open. The first phase of finding people has come to a close and we are moving into the humanitarian phase. We need to provide people with basic shelter, food, and water.”
The number of people who were in need of humanitarian assistance before the earthquake stood at 15.3 million – but that number will now have to be revised, UN Resident Coordinator for Syria, El-Mostafa Benlamlih said.
The aid worker told CNN that people without homes are sleeping in their cars because of the difficult situation.
According to the Country Director for MedGlobal, those that are still alive can die from the cold weather.
He is using the disaster to get rid of sanctions, according to the executive director of Deir Ezer 24. “If we want to bring aid to Syria, we can. It is important that we have time. We are playing with life and death.”
Humanitarian partners are on the ground and can give the type of assistance that happened in the earthquakes. This is not a regime that wants to put the welfare, the wellbeing, the interests of its people first.
Mohammed Juma slept in a heap of rubble that was used to kill his family. In the cold nights, a young man and others in this town burn items in the debris in order to heat their homes.
In the northwest of Syria, the residents of Jinderis heard the cries of the people trapped under the rubble, but they were powerless to save them.
There were not many international crews of rescuers, no trucks loaded with machinery or medical aid and no streams of ambulances when NPR visited this rebel-held enclave. The border crossing into Syria was empty and silent.
The displaced residents of Sawran have no basic services, or how many Syrians had fled to Syria after the fall of their home in Jinderis
Mohammed Juma said his wife, Alia, and his two children — 20-month old Ali and 6-month old Hussein — were alive after their home collapsed on top of them. Juma and his neighbors tried to pull at the shattered concrete for hours, but it was not enough.
Now the Syrian civil defense teams are using the few excavators they do have to recover the dead. On Friday morning in Jinderis, at least 850 bodies had been pulled from the rubble. Zakaria Tabakh, 26, remembers cuddling his son, 2-year-old Abdulhadi, to sleep and laying him in his bed, where he was killed by the falling debris. Tabakh’s wife died in the bed beside him. He said that most of the friends who came to the funeral were busy with burying their loved ones.
Many of the 4.6 million residents had fled here from other parts of the country, searching for safety from the barrel bombs and airstrikes of the Syrian regime and its ally, Russia.
They have been left without anything after years of war. Tens of thousands now live with almost no access to basic services in makeshift tents set up in the olive groves where the mud clogs and weighs down the legs of children playing outside.
Less than an hour’s travel from one of the open border crossings, the town of Sawran now has no running water. The destroyed home of the Turki family is on one side of the road. Seven people were killed across the road. The Syrians relocated to Sawran after the government of President Bashar al-Assad used a nerve agent against the population, killing 89 people.
Security Threat to the United Hatzalah-Israel Search-and-Rescue Mission in Turkey after the Second Black Hole Integral on Saturday
The White Helmets said to CNN on Saturday that the number of deaths was going to go up much higher.
There was an increased aggression between groups in Turkey that led to operations being suspended early on Saturday. Austrian Army spokesman Michael Bauer said on his social media accounts that teams were back in action.
Israeli search-and-rescue group United Hatzalah also announced Sunday that it was leaving Turkey after six days on the ground due to a “significant security threat.”
United Hatzalah chief executive Eli Pollack and vice president of operations Dov Maisel said in a statement they had “received intelligence of a concrete and immediate threat on the Israeli delegation and we have to put the security of our personnel first.”
“We knew that there was a certain level of risk in sending our team to this area of Turkey, which is close to the Syrian border but we took the necessary steps in order to mitigate the threat for the sake of our lifesaving mission,” Maisel said.
The Austrian Forces Disaster Relief Unit (AFDRU) said a rescue dog handler was again helping Turkish rescue workers, with Turkish forces providing security in the search areas.
The team of Palestinians along with local volunteers is also providing mental health services to about 300 children and their families in shelters and hospitals, who are suffering from severe trauma and depression as a result of the earthquake.
“Difficult times have been experienced by children since the earthquake. The statement said some of them were lucky to avoid death, but that the psychological teams of the Red Crescent were working to help them survive.