JINDERIS, Syria — It was quiet here again only four days and nights after the earthquake. Residents said that the women were the ones with the loudest voices. They screamed until their lungs gave out because they were separated from their children or fighting to save them.
There were no international rescue workers in this forgotten part of rebel-held northwest Syria. No more painkillers were sent to the survivors when they ran out. Just six miles away, on the other side of the border in Turkey, thousands of tonnes of aid poured in, and teams of helpers from as far away as Taiwan came to help the Turkish government. But Syria, which was split up and cut off from most of the rest of the world, was left to pick up the pieces on its own, just as it has done over and over again during more than a decade of war and moving.
At least 850 bodies had been found by Friday morning in the wrecked town of Jinderis. Even though hundreds of people are still missing, few people thought there were still any lives to save. Mahmoud Hafar, the mayor of the town, said, “We needed help here, and we asked for help here.” “It didn’t come.”
Friday, almost no one was at the Bab Al-Salama border crossing into Syria. A single ambulance with flashing lights was waiting to get in. The only Syrians who could cross back were those whose bodies were being carried back to their families in body bags.
On a rare trip to this Syrian enclave, which is run by armed groups backed by Turkey, The Washington Post found people there shocked, confused, and very much alone. In Jinderis, fathers stood guard over the ruins of their homes and told stories about waking up to find their wives and children dead. As big machines dug through the rubble looking for a 13-year-old boy, a man asked reporters to help him get help from the United Nations. He said, “Perhaps they don’t know what happened in Jinderis.” “No one would not come here if they saw this.”
Crisis after crisis has hit this part of Syria, where millions of people have lived through war, being forced to move, hunger, and disease. Even before the earthquake, 4.1 million people in this area needed help from charities.
President Bashar al-Assad has used access to areas outside of government control as a weapon throughout the conflict. He has made it hard for humanitarian groups to move around, with the help of allies like Russia at the UN and neighbours like Turkey and Jordan, who have sometimes stopped the flow of aid. Critics say that U.N. officials rarely complain in public because they want to keep access to Damascus at the cost of millions of civilians who live outside of Assad’s control.
In Sawran, a small town 10 miles from the Turkish border, people remembered hearing the ground shake so loudly that it sounded like it was growling. People remember crying out to the heavens as buildings fell down. There were 36 deaths, and 20 people were hurt.
Soon, the survivors heard about what had happened in Jinderis, 40 miles away.
“We heard that Jinderis was the worst,” said 21-year-old Mohammed Jassim, who went to help save people after learning that his aunt, her husband, and their children had been killed in their home there. “They said that there were a lot of people under the rubble, but they didn’t have the tools to help them.”
He heard the cries all day. He had cuts on his hands from digging into the ground. “Imagine crying for four days straight,” he said, and his face went blank. “It’s unimaginable. Everyone died.”
After 12 years of war, the battle lines are mostly still, so the northwest of Syria has become the last refuge for millions of civilians and former fighters who fear for their safety if they go back to areas controlled by the government. Even though the war was getting closer, many of the original people still live there because they are too poor to go anywhere else.
Jinderis, in particular, had avoided the worst of the fighting for a long time, until Turkish-backed armed groups pushed Kurdish forces out of the area in 2018.
Zakaria Tabakh, who is 26 years old, came here from Aleppo, where Assad’s barrel bombs and airstrikes have destroyed so much of the city that large parts of it are still in ruins. He made a new life for himself in Jinderis, where he got married and had two children. On Sunday night, he put their 2-year-old son, Abdulhadi, to bed. He then laid down with the child for a while before sneaking away to sleep with his wife. He only remembers bits and pieces of what happened next. Under the duvet, she was dead. Abdulhadi died where he was put down to sleep. There was trash everywhere.
“Everyone is busy with their own cases,” Tabakh said, “so not many people came to their funerals.”
The U.N. agency for migration said on Friday that it had sent 14 trucks full of humanitarian aid to Idlib, which is controlled by rebels. This is the second time the agency has done this since the earthquake. Local charities were the only ones who could be seen giving out aid in Jinderis. They put plastic bags of food and blankets on flatbed trucks.
The death toll in northwestern Syria stands at more than 2,000, a far cry from the 20,000 killed in Turkey. But there are still many buildings to comb through, many people still unaccounted for.
Rescue workers and residents were painfully aware that the only equipment available to them — mostly shovels and battered backhoes — were at times hurting the people they were trying to save. “How can you use these to conduct such delicate operations? You can’t. It’s impossible,” said a member of the area’s White Helmets civil defence force. “People have died in there because we don’t have the equipment.”
The White Helmets’s director, Raed Saleh, said Friday that international aid, when it arrived, would come too late to help find survivors, and would go towards the removal of broken buildings.
The area’s health facilities were hanging by a thread long before Monday’s earthquakes. Assad’s forces and their Russian allies systematically bombed health facilities, forcing hospitals underground as doctors fled. On Monday morning, the tidal wave of casualties pushed remaining facilities to the breaking point. In the town of Afrin, doctors estimate that around 70 percent of the patients they saw came from Jinderis.
“We had to refer many of them for amputations,” an emergency nurse, Ahmed Saqar, 53, said on the phone. Without backup, his team was exhausted — survivors and saviours at the same time, one colleague said.
They need a break. Everyone does.
As darkness beckoned and the temperature dipped towards freezing, surviving residents were camped in the olive groves, some of them homeless now, others fearing their houses may still crash down. By nightfall, the fires they were burning from the olive branches would be the only light they had left.
Salwan Georges in Jinderis, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Claire Parker in Washington contributed to this report.
