The aftermath of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in parts of Turkey and Syria is best understood by listening to those directly affected.
Abdulrahman Al-Dahhan, a Syrian American aid worker, told CNN he can’t sleep because he keeps hearing the screams of friends and family desperate for help. He keeps getting voicemails from them, and says “each one is someone crying, telling me they are seeing people dying around them. I can’t stop hearing them.”
He told of a friend who clawed his way out of rubble with his 5-month-old baby, then returned to rescue his wife and daughters, an operation that took two days in the cold and rain.
Al-Dahhan says he is tormented by guilt if he rests, knowing his friends and thousands of others are buried under rubble.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported the official death count from the quake as 31,974 in Turkey, and more than 5,800 in Syria. Officials worry the actual figures are much higher, especially in Syria, where aid workers are encountering difficulty obtaining access.
Each day, Americans hear updates on the death count. And each day, anger in the affected region grows. In Turkey, developers and contractors are being arrested after buildings advertised as safe from earthquakes collapsed. But in both countries, especially Syria, the greater anger is over a lack of humanitarian aid.
The United States, both through official government sources and nongovernmental organizations, needs to do more. More importantly, however, the international community, and especially the United Nations, needs to insist on opening up avenues for aid in an area already rife with stifling political and social problems.
As the Brookings Institution noted in a paper published shortly after the quake struck, getting aid to the affected region of Syria — the last large rebel holdout in that country — has been a challenge since long before this crisis. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has tried everything from chemical weapons to starvation to uproot the rebels. With the help of Russian warplanes, his government already had destroyed much of the region’s infrastructure.
Assad has a history of diverting aid from where it is needed. Western governments are forced to send aid through his regime, which has made many of them reluctant to devote too many resources to the area.
Russia, which retains its veto power with the U.N. Security Council, has succeeded in closing all but one crossing into Syria for humanitarian aid, and Brookings said roads leading to that crossing were rendered impassable by the quake.
Meanwhile, about 3.6 million Syrian refugees already live in Turkey, and many Turkish citizens would prefer to have them forced back to Syria, Brookings said.
Al Jazeera reported last weekend that, “The U.N. Security Council next week is to discuss if it will allow the U.N. to deliver earthquake aid to rebel-held northwestern Syria through more than one Turkish border crossing, a move veto-wielding Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, does not think is needed.”
This is simply unacceptable when so many people are suffering. Reuters said six more survivors were rescued alive from the rubble in Turkey on Tuesday. Time is running out for others, especially in Syria.
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria,” the U.N.’s head of relief efforts, Martin Griffiths, tweeted on Sunday, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal. “They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived. My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can. That’s my focus now.” Small wonder, then, that Syrians feel abandoned and angry.
But the response in Turkey has been slow, as well. The Journal reported that the U.S. sent 159 rescue workers, 12 rescue dogs and Blackhawk helicopters to the area. U.S. ambassador Jeff Flake, a former U.S. senator from Arizona with strong ties to Utah, said the nation is responding to calls for help from Turkey.
Unfortunately, in some more remote areas, such as Hatay, the first responders didn’t show for 30 hours. People were left to do what they could to rescue friends and relatives on their own.
In Syria, the devastation has added more misery atop years of violence and suffering. Al-Dahhan isn’t the only Syrian agonizing over friends and relatives from afar. Another man, Ameer Alsamman, told CNN he was on a call with friends in Syria when the quake struck. He heard them screaming and the line went silent. His first thought was that they had come under an Israeli airstrike.
Such is life in an area where political violence is commonplace.
Disasters quickly strip away the petty and cruel veneer of political divisions and regional hatreds. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake would cause devastation anywhere, and no region is immune from the potential of a natural disaster.
As Brookings noted, “a concerted international funding effort needs to be made …”
There is no adequate explanation for delaying aid to a screaming child or a desperate parent. The world simply has to do better.