Syria earthquake survivors left to fend for themselves

Mohammad, 3 months old, is alone in the ICU, his little head and face covered in bandages and tubes connected to a ventilator. He’s alone in every hard breath he takes.

Neighbors found the baby, who lost both parents in Monday’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake, and took him to hospital in the last rebel-held territory in northwest Syria. In the hours following the earthquake, this hospital in Idlib alone received 700 patients.

The few hospitals left standing after years of bombing by the Russian and Syrian regimes were ill-equipped to handle an emergency of this magnitude. Medical facilities across the northwest were overwhelmed, with the wounded lying in hallways and on the ground.

The total death toll in Turkey and Syria currently passed 36,000 as of Monday night. The confirmed death toll in Syria at that time was 4,574. That number includes more than 3,160 in opposition-controlled parts of northwest Syria, according to the health ministry of the Salvation Government governance authority.

The situation in Syria is totally different from Turkey, where dozens of countries and international organizations have offered rescue teams, donations and aid. The delivery of urgent supplies to earthquake-hit areas in northern Syria has been complicated by a long civil war between opposition forces and the Syrian government, led by President Bashar al-Assad, accused of killing its own people.

Little significant international aid reached the enclave, and doctors felt helpless.

“This is the biggest disaster we’ve had,” doctor Ahmad Alaabd told the CNN , during a visit to Babs Al Hawa Hospital, run by the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), this weekend. “We deal with war casualties, but we’ve never dealt with so many deaths.”

SAMS and others appealed to the international community for urgent help, but it only started to appear late last week – too little, too late.

“We asked for help but there was no response, especially in the first two, three critical days,” Alaabd said. “We lost many patients due to lack of medical supplies. If we had that, we could have saved more lives.”

Dozens of people needing complex surgeries remain in the hospital, many of them in intensive care. The necessary supplies and equipment have yet to arrive.

Syrians say their pleas for help during the darkest days of the war have been ignored and once again they are left to pick up the pieces without international support.

Whole neighborhoods were devastated in Idlib and rural Aleppo. On Saturday (11), the CNN witnessed residents of Bsaina and Harem, which are among the hardest-hit towns in Idlib, digging through the rubble with their bare hands and gardening tools. They have lost all hope of finding survivors – now they just want to bury their dead.

Children were clearing debris and searching through the bodies of their loved ones. One man said he was looking for brothers, cousins, nephews and nieces. “Twenty-one. Two of them are children,” said Ahmad, expressionless and numb.

feeling of abandonment

In this part of Syria, life feels like an endless cycle of loss and grief. Most have fled their homes several times, escaping a ruthless campaign by the Syrian regime and Russia.

The lack of urgent mobilization by the international community after the deadliest natural disaster the region has witnessed in generations has left them even more disillusioned.

Ismail Abdullah of the White Helmets told the CNN that his group has been documenting the suffering for a decade, but his repeated pleas for help have come to nothing.

“We called the whole world a million times to stop the bombing. Nobody stopped. We said they used chemical weapons. Now, after the humanitarian crisis, we know that they don’t consider the people of northwest Syria as human beings,” said Abdullah.

“Had they sent in heavy equipment and advanced search and rescue equipment to locate those trapped under the rubble, of course we could have saved more people.”

On Friday (10), after 108 hours of searching, the group – also known as the Syrian Civil Defense – announced the end of the rescue operation. Instead, the mission became one of search and recovery.

Aid groups were already warning of a humanitarian crisis when the harsh winter weather began.

In Bsaina, the lucky ones have stalls. Others sleep out in the open with children, desperate for any shelter.

“We were sleeping under the trees, but it’s so cold that we came here,” said Umm Sultan, in tears with her 2-year-old grandson in her arms.

“I wish we had died with everyone else so we wouldn’t have to go through this,” she said. “We survive only to live in this misery and agony.”

The mother of eight has lost all the faith in the world responding to Syria’s pleas. She and her family have not owned a home for seven years. They fled air strikes in Aleppo province and approached the Turkish border believing they would be safer.

“We came here to escape the planes. The air strikes were killing us,” she told CNN .

UN admits failures in Syria

On the night of the earthquake, people ran through the streets barefoot and screaming, soaked and freezing from the pouring rain and with nowhere to shelter, she recalled.

“We heard people shouting, ‘Get us out of here, get us out of here.’ Then they were quiet. They all died. There was no one to take them. Two days later, they pulled out a boy and a girl. Their corpses were still warm.

There were no aid trucks at the Turkish-Syrian border on Saturday. Instead, there was a constant stream of bodies. More than 1,000 Syrian refugees died in the earthquake in Turkey and are now returning home in body bags.

As the men pray for their dead, a mother burst into tears. Her anguished screams for the entire family echoed through the parking lot.

Help finally began to arrive, with UN convoys crossing into the region from Turkey via the Bab Al-Hawa pass over the weekend. But how far will it go?

On Sunday, Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, tweeted from the Turkish-Syrian border saying that the people of northwest Syria “rightly feel abandoned”.

“Until now, we have failed the people of northwest Syria,” Griffiths said, adding that his focus and obligation now is to “correct this failure as soon as possible.”

*With information from CNN’s Celine Alkhaldi and Chris Liakos and journalist Zaher Jaber