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For Syrians ravaged by civil war, earthquake aftermath is ‘crisis within a crisis’

For many of the Syrian victims of the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria on Monday, this is just the latest in a series of tragedies spanning a decade.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck in the first few hours, killing more than 5,000 people in both countries and leaving thousands injured. It was the strongest earthquake recorded in Turkey in 84 years.

In Syria, most of the victims were in the northwest of the country, predominantly in the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartus, according to the state news agency SANA.

This region was already struggling to rebuild vital infrastructure heavily damaged by continuous aerial bombardment during the country’s civil war, which the United Nations (UN) estimates has claimed 300,000 lives since 2011.

It is a “crisis within a crisis,” El-Mostafa Benlamlih, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Syria, told Christina Macfarlane of CNN on Monday.

“The infrastructure has been damaged by the situation, the war and so on,” he said. “These cities are ghost towns… A lot of people are very scared. They don’t want to go back to their homes. If we can call them houses in those cases. Sometimes they are ruins”.

Khalil Ashawi, a photojournalist based in the town of Jindiris in Syria’s northwestern province of Allepo, told CNN that he had not witnessed scenes as “disastrous” as the one on Monday in the ten years he spent covering the war there.

“In all the years I’ve covered the war here, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s a disaster. Paramedics and firefighters are trying to help, but unfortunately there’s too much for them to handle. They can’t handle everything.”

His parents, who live in the Turkish city of Antakya, are missing, he said. That city also suffered significant damage.

Half of northwest Syria’s population of 4.6 million have been forced from their homes by the conflict, with 1.7 million now living in tents and refugee camps in the region, according to the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF). ). Last year, the agency reported that 3.3 million Syrians in the area were food insecure.

Several parts of northwest Syria, including Idlib, are still controlled by anti-government rebels.

Source: CNN Brasil

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