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The earthquake struck war-scarred northern Syria.


On Monday morning, Syrians in the country’s war-torn north awoke to scenes familiar for years: collapsed buildings and people being pulled from the rubble.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake, centered in southeastern Turkey but possibly reaching as far as Israel and Cyprus, has brought back painful memories of recent times of the civil war in Syria.

Much of Syria still bears the scars of a conflict that has seen a fragile ceasefire since early 2020. sanctionsARE NOT reconstruction aid from international donors and its own economy in disarray, the rebuilding was partial and limited.

Consequences of war — great destruction, a severe economic impact crisisa currency that is collapsing — will make responding to an earthquake more difficult for all parties.

According to the Syrian Ministry of Health, at least 237 Syrians were killed and 639 wounded in Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartous.

Aleppo, the country’s largest city, is a shadow of its former self, suffocated by power outages, fuel crises and high unemployment.

The government figures do not include the hard-hit northwest corner of Syria, which is under the control of the Turkish-backed opposition. There, the White Helmets, a civil defense force operating in areas beyond government control, reported dozens of deaths and declared a state of emergency. The region is home to about 4.2 million people, more than half of whom were displaced from other parts of the country during the war, with many living in large residential areas. tent camp.

“The organization urges the international community to take responsibility for this disaster and take urgent measures to prevent the situation from getting worse,” the White Helmets said in a statement Monday morning. “It also calls on the international community to support the rescue of civilians in Syria and put pressure on the Assad regime and its ally Russia to ensure that there are no bombings in the affected areas.”

During the early years of the conflict, members of the White Helmets were trained in rescue operations by Turkish rescue teams, who honed their earthquake response skills. .

The White Helmets used that knowledge to rescue Syrians trapped inside buildings destroyed by air strikes and barrel bombs launched by the Syrian and Russian governments.

In Idlib province, next to Aleppo, a hospital supported by the Syrian American Medical Association was damaged and had to be evacuated.

The Assad government has been so short of cash in recent years that it has forced wealthy businessmen to help pay salaries and government services.

According to the World Bank, Syria’s GDP has more than halved between 2010 and 2020. Syria was reclassified as a low-income country in 2018 due to a sharp drop in gross national income. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, causing more economic damage and straining the country’s healthcare system.

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