[News] Syria earthquake: Survivors in Idlib feel forgotten

[NesT_YT]

 

Sedra remembers the moment the earthquake struck.

 

The 13-year-old was out of her wheelchair, asleep inside her home in north-west Syria. She and her brother Abdullah could not get to safety.

"We screamed for help and no one could hear us," she tells me. "Everyone in the building had left, but we were stuck in there because the door handle broke."

"I thought I had lost my family," recalls Ali Muhammad, Sedra and Abdullah's father.

"The hallway was filled with rubble, but we managed to carry the children out and lay them down outside on solar panels that had fallen into the street."

"They were terrified and crying. We covered them in blankets, but the rain was pouring heavily."

The family's home was so badly damaged that they are now living in a tent.

"Life right now is very difficult. Living in tents is miserable, but we thank Allah that we are alive," Ali says.

 

 

Sedra and Abdullah both have cerebral palsy and osteoporosis, and need special care. But now there is no bathroom for them, no kitchen, no water.

It is difficult for Sedra to manoeuvre her wheelchair across the stones left by the collapsed buildings, but she is resilient.

She beams as we talk about the princess-covered schoolbag stuffed with books next to her in the chair. But when she remembers the quake, her face is different, still filled with fear.

"I'm scared of another earthquake," she says.

Scars of war
Syria's children know trauma all too acutely.

The country was already suffering badly from the effects of 12 years of war.

More than 7,000 people died in February's devastating quake and for those who survived the situation is now even tougher.

 

According to the UN, more than four million people in north-west Syria depend on humanitarian aid, the majority of them women and children.

In each place we travelled to, earthquake survivors told me they felt forgotten and still had not received the help they badly needed.

At least 148 communities in north-west Syria have been affected by the earthquakes.

Rows of fresh graves
A few miles from Sedra's home, on the side of a hill, the sun beats down on a peaceful, tranquil spot. In the last few weeks, this cemetery has doubled in size.

Some graves are older, almost hidden from view by tall grasses and purple flowers. But row upon row of them are fresh, marked out by white breezeblocks on the neatly-dug brown earth.

Birds sing in the ancient olive trees and the view into the valley is a beautiful panorama of green trees and fields all the way to the edge of Syria and the mountains that mark the Turkish border.