My heart is broken

Fatima Al Hasan, one of the victims of the earthquake on 6 February, had been working as a health outreach worker in Jinderis, northern Syria, for many years before she joined volunteer organisation the White Helmets in 2022, in a similar role. Her friend Elaf Keni, also a White Helmet worker, had become close to Al Hassan at the health care centre and tells me: “I was so happy to be working at the same place [as her] again.” After the earthquake struck, she says, “I kept lying to myself, praying she was still alive, but I knew I’d lost one of my best friends.” Al Hasan had died along with her husband and two very young daughters.

“After the earthquake, I called all my colleagues, but couldn’t get through to Fatima,” says Aisha Almasri, Al Hasan’s manager, “so I went to her street, but it had been totally destroyed. I started to scream…” her voice cracks with emotion. Almasri immediately called her colleagues from the White Helmets rescue team, who arrived and tried in vain to help, but “we couldn’t get the bodies out until the day after,” she says. “It was horrible to see my colleague being removed from the rubble; my heart is broken.”

The White Helmets have a long pedigree of helping after air strikes, both in terms of rescuing people from the ruins and providing care afterwards. However, for years the people of NW Syria have been surviving in desperate conditions and the White Helmets have been trying to help without enough of the equipment they need, such as heavy lifting gear. The area is not under the control of Assad, the dictator who controls the majority of the rest of Syria, so aid was deliberately cut off before the earthquake, and it’s barely any different now. “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned” said Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

By the time a few aid trucks made it over the border, people had been sleeping outside in near freezing temperatures for days, either because their homes had been destroyed or they were too scared to re-enter them. Unlike earlier in the war, the border into Turkey is sealed off to Syrians, so they have nowhere to go. This means the work of the White Helmets, especially that of the medical teams, is needed now more than ever. Not that Turkey isn’t also suffering the results of the earthquake, but it’s a functioning country that is connected to the outside world.

As people were coming to terms with the original quake on 6 February, another struck on the 20th, measuring a magnitude of 6.3. It was felt as far away as Egypt, a distance of around 800 miles. Total panic ensued in towns already damaged by the first quake and 470 people in Syria were reportedly injured. While there are no confirmed deaths at the time of writing, that is likely to change. Yet again the White Helmets swung into action, but so far none of the extra heavy lifting equipment they requested has arrived.

Over four million people were already dependent on aid in north-west Syria, so these earthquakes are a catastrophe on top of years of tragedy, making already very vulnerable people homeless. The White Helmets rescued almost 3000 people from the rubble, but their role now is clearing roads, trying to reinstate water and electricity, providing first aid and psychological care, and assessing which buildings can be re-inhabited.

“In a deeply conservative country, the women provide care that can’t be provided by men,” says Anna Brown, an international development gender specialist. “It might not be culturally appropriate for a male aid worker to sit down and then discuss needs with a widow, or to enter her home, whereas a woman aid worker would be able to,” she adds.

“We will continue our work the best we can despite the earthquake. It’s so hard that after twelve years of war and hunger, people were already homeless,” says Almasri. “The hardest thing I find about this job is not the physical [strain], it’s the mental [stress]. When there is an air strike it happens in one place, but the earthquake was much bigger – there were so many people to help.”

Many more women wanted to join the White Helmets after seeing so many of them in action after the first earthquake. Almasri sees herself carrying out a dual role: in addition to her work for the White Helmets, she is trying to change the perception of the way women are viewed. “Everything I do I do for my society. I have skills and I should use them. I’m very proud of the work we do.”

Remembering her friend and colleague Fatima Al Hasan, she says: “The thing I miss most about her is that when she entered the doorway there was always a very beautiful smile on her face. In the White Helmets Centre we were like a family.”

Fatima’s mother, Zaynab, was there when her daughter’s body was pulled from the rubble. “I hugged her and told her: we are all your daughters,” says Almasri.

Will Wintercross is a foreign correspondent based in London