Mezyan Abdulhamed Mohamed, 12, is photographed Tuesday near her home in the city of Jindires, Syria. Mohamed lost her immediate family in the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the region and now lives with her grandparents and uncle. (Salwan Georges/Washington Post)
February 14, 2023 at 6:37 p.m. EST
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JINDERIS, Syria — In the days after the earthquakes, it was difficult to tell which of the children here still had parents. When local officials attempted to match survivors to their mothers and fathers, they found that some of the families they had not known at all.
After 12 years of civil war, this corner of northwestern Syria is home to millions of people from across the country, whose names and stories are often obscured by displacement and isolation. As aid workers searched hospitals for missing people, families prayed and hoped.
“We couldn’t check databases, we couldn’t check lists,” said Nour Agha, an aid worker in the devastated city of Jinderis. “Some of the kids couldn’t even tell us their names, they were so shocked.”
More than a week after the disaster, with a death toll of over 41,000, extended families and authorities on both sides of the Turkish-Syrian border are still trying to find out how many children have been orphaned and how to care for them. They are spread out in tents and infirmaries, sleeping in cars or in the homes of the closest relatives they have left.
In Jinderis, where more than 1,200 people were killed, according to local officials, Rakkan Hassan Haji pointed to the deep cracks in the wall of his family’s three-bedroom house and then gently placed a hand on his niece Mezyan’s shoulder. “We wish she just had cracks in her house,” he said.
She was the sole survivor of her immediate family, whose third-floor apartment collapsed sideways in the quake as concrete rained down on residents. “It’s better not to see it,” the man said.
Twelve-year-old Mezyan is tall for her age. She was the eldest daughter and had a twin brother, Rasheed. Everyone is gone now. She stood close to her uncle and spoke softly. She hadn’t returned to tour her home since rescue workers pulled her out of the ruins. She did not want to regain possessions. “I just want my mother,” she said.
City council officials walked around town, flipping through handwritten forms for the names of families who were in similar situations. “It was a nightmare,” one of them said, scanning the columns with his finger. “We just don’t know all these people. It’s a good thing she had her relatives around.”
Some children emerged from the rubble, stunned or crying. A worker recalled how a girl tried to fight the rescue team that was taking her to safety, screaming hysterically at her that she wanted to be taken back to her family, who are still buried beneath their house.
According to the United Nations, ninety percent of Syrians live below the poverty line. Large families like Mezyan’s in one of the poorest parts of Syria worry about how they can afford another child. Haji and his wife already have two children, and his salary as a day laborer is barely enough for the bare necessities.
“She’s going to be the apple of my eye now, she’s going to be our daughter,” he said. His face darkened. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this.”
While Turkey is doing its best to track the number of new orphans — the government there said on Friday the families of 263 rescued children could not be reached — Syrian authorities face a more complex battle. Figures collected in government-held areas are not shared with those collected in the rebel-held Northwest, where NGOs register their own figures but have few opportunities to compare them.
In earthquake-stricken Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came
“Most of them are very young, so it’s difficult to communicate with them,” said Layla Hasso of the Hurras Network, which provides psychosocial support to minors in north-west Syria. She was most concerned about children aged 11 to 14 – those who had strong memories of the earthquakes and the war years before.
“We saw suicides in this age group before the earthquake. The trauma is most severe for the children who remember,” Hasso said.
In Jinderis, one of the worst-hit cities in Syria, the aftermath of the earthquake is omnipresent. Ashen rubble clogs the spaces where houses once stood. Rubbish covers the red earth in the olive groves, where families slept nights in the freezing cold before a local relief group set up tents.
According to the International Organization for Migration, 17 trucks loaded with relief supplies entered north-west Syria via the newly opened Bab al-Salam border crossing on Tuesday. The cargo included material for shelters, mattresses, blankets and carpets.
Aid and rescuers from all over the world have arrived in Turkey. Government records are better. But the task of caring for grieving children is just as daunting.
Ayse Hilal Sahin, the facility’s head of care, said Monday at a Gaziantep hospital that they had treated at least 60 minors since the earthquake and that most of them had lost at least one parent.
At one ward, a nine-year-old boy in a soccer jersey sat chatting with his uncle while he recovered from his injuries. He survived under the rubble for 156 hours before being rescued from his collapsed home. The boy said his favorite player was Cristiano Ronaldo. He wanted to be a pilot when he grew up. His uncle listened in silence.
He didn’t tell the boy his parents were dead. “The psychologists told us to tell him early because we don’t want him to get his hopes up,” he said. “We’re waiting for him to recover physically and then we’ll tell him.”
Back in Syria, injured orphans were taken to a hospital in the city of Afrin on Tuesday. Some of the children were waiting for relatives to pick them up. Others awaited treatment.
Eight-year-old Mohamed Mohamed had yet to be released because doctors feared he was still too stunned to speak. His aunt Yasmine, sitting at his bedside, said both of his parents had died.
“He’s with me now,” she said.
Elsewhere at the hospital, a teenager was awaiting amputation of his leg. “Most major surgeries are amputations,” said Wardan Nasser, the senior doctor at the Turkey-run hospital. “These are the hardest things you do; those are the hardest things to tell families.”
For some of the children there are no families to tell. The doctors here are angry. Many parents could have been saved, they believed. When international relief efforts stalled in the immediate aftermath of the tremors, north-west Syria was once again on its own. The rescue workers lacked the equipment. Medicines were running out in the hospitals.
Ahmed Haj Hassan, the head of the Afrin district health directorate, was blunt: “I don’t want only body bags to come to me after a disaster,” he said. “I want people to get to me before they need those body bags so we can save their lives.”
In Jinderis, Mezyan said she has spent the days since the earthquakes contacting her friends. “Some of them are alive,” she said. “I haven’t been able to reach everyone.”
Mustafa Salim in Baghdad contributed to this report.