Raed Saleh, who heads the 'White Helmets' rescue force operating in opposition-held areas, is more accustomed to rescuing victims of bombardment. The frontlines had become relatively quiet over a decade into the conflict - which erupted in 2011 with protests against President Bashar al-Assad that ended up carving the country into competing cantons. Children chased each other around mounds of ruins and twisted rebar.

One man prayed among the rubble as a lone excavator cleared debris. Even their eyelashes, cracked lips and beards were coated in the chalky substance. Only some wore work gloves, covered in the grey-white dust of smashed cinderblocks. On an organised press tour on Tuesday, Reuters saw around 20 men and boys trying to salvage what they could from pulverized homes in Harem and its outskirts, without protective gear or uniforms. Parts of the provinces of Idlib and adjacent Aleppo held by Turkey-backed rebels suffered the bulk of the quake's casualties in Syria: over 4,000 of the entire Syrian death toll of more than 5,800, according to the United Nations and government authorities.įour Syrian towns in a stretch bordering Turkey were among the hardest hit: Salqin, Harem, Jinderis and Atareb. People were under the concrete screaming, 'Get us out! Get us out!' But we'd come up with empty hands,' he said. 'We were removing rock after rock and finding nothing underneath. He only managed to remove their bodies from under the rubble two days after the quake. Walid Ibrahim lost more than two dozen of his family members – among them his brother, his cousin, and all their children. But the complex politics of humanitarian assistance in Syria's opposition-held northwest left many war-weary citizens there fending for themselves. The earthquake left more than 35,000 people dead in Turkey, where international help could easily flow in.

6 – sending multi-storey cinderblock houses tumbling onto the heads of residents. Instead of bombs from the sky, the earth rumbled from below early on the morning of Feb. HAREM, Syria, Feb 15 (Reuters) - After more than a decade of bombardment, dwindling international support, and a crippling economic crisis, Syria's opposition-held northwest was already barely hanging on when calamity struck.

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