Earthquake victims in north and east Syria are still in desperate need of aid, despite three weeks passing since the disaster hit, said the Shahba Regional Council on Tuesday.
Shahba is a region to the north of Aleppo, affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). Around 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) have settled there in villages and camps from the Kurdish region of Afrin, under the control of Turkey since 2018.
The earthquakes in Shahba injured ten civilians including two critical injuries, damaged a thousand homes with some left inhabitable, and destroyed three schools, the council reported.
Following the quake, around 20,000 people from the city of Aleppo have also descended on the region. The AANES distributed 400 tents to affected families, and 25 litres of fuel per family. Camps were set up to receive newcomers with another 420 tents.
Shahba’s council noted that the earthquake has exacerbated the suffering of people already forcibly displaced and surviving under an embargo imposed by Syrian government.
Meanwhile, the AANES passed new standards regarding earthquake-proof construction, and will monitor damage to the nearly 90 schools and 650 civilian buildings registered with the planning office, said the co-chair of the AANES Planning, Development and Statistics Office, Hajar Abdul Fatah, in an interview with North Press.
Fatah put the high number of damaged buildings down to ‘irregular construction’ and non-compliance with technical and engineering criteria. He said that the solution lay in ‘a geological study’ and ‘committing companies and contractors to having specialist teams during construction’. No further details have been forthcoming.
Meanwhile the people the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) have been donating medicines, baby formula, tents and other requirements to the Kurdistan Red Crescent (Heyva Sor) and others in support of earthquake victims in northern Syria.
Since February 22, Turkish-backed authorities that control the KRI, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), prevented the passage of humanitarian aid between Iraq and Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria for delivery to people in the Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods of Aleppo, instead sending aid only through Turkey, according to the Kurdistan Red Crescent.