Some collapsed buildings in northern Syria, outside the control of the Assad government

We write as Syrians in response to the devastation of Monday’s earthquake, to emphasize the following points:

– We are horrified at the scale of the destruction in southern Turkey and applaud the ongoing international effort to aid our Turkish brothers and sisters in that region, which is also home to many Syrian refugees, and to reinforce the Turkish government’s rescue efforts.

-With respect to Syria, we wish to emphasize that the damage wrought by this catastrophe is overwhelmingly in the areas of Northwestern Syria outside the control of the Assad regime.

-On the third day after the catastrophe, NO international assistance is getting into the Northwest, whose population was already in an extremely vulnerable state due to years of bombing and shelling by the Assad regime and its Russian allies, the closure of its borders, and extremely bad weather conditions that coincided with the earthquake. As a result of these conditions, the men, women, and children still buried under the rubble will die of the cold before they can be rescued. 

-Local organizations and rescue workers have been working heroically for days, even as they themselves and their families are coping with the effects of the disaster, but the scale of this catastrophe is beyond their capacity and the resources they have access to now.  They lack the heavy machinery they need to move the rubble, and they lack the facilities to adequately assist the survivors. 

-The United Nations and its agencies are ignoring these needs and apparently interested in sending aid to Syria only through the Assad regime.

-The Assad regime, which has been waging an opportunistic propaganda campaign to convince the international community to lift sanctions against it, continues to bomb and shell civilians living as displaced people areas outside of the regime’s control that have been devastated by the earthquake. This criminal regime has long blocked humanitarian aid from reaching the liberated areas, and stolen humanitarian aid intended for the areas of Syria under its control.

-There is a limit to how much suffering human life can bear, and the population of Northwest Syria has passed that limit. How is a Syrian child, who already lost her parents to regime bombing and is now pulled out from rubble where the rest of her family has died, to understand what is happening to her? How are all these children, young people, and old people supposed to see their place in a world that is willing to let them die rather than confront an immoral political status quo?  Their suffering needs to be addressed now, not regretted ten years from now as a stain on the conscience of the international community.

The following steps are urgently necessary:

Open all of the border crossings to allow the immediate passage of aid.

-Provide such aid, in the form of international governmental and private contributions, including not only humanitarian assistance but also heavy equipment and technical and logistical help.

-Facilitate the entry into the region of teams of experts equipped to assess the damage to buildings and also to critical infrastructure such as bridges and dams, whose collapse could cause secondary catastrophes in this heavily damaged region.

Syrian human rights organization.