Hundreds of thousands of Syrians who had found refuge in Turkey after fleeing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, find themselves homeless and destitute after the earthquake.
In the ruins of the old city of Antakya, an excavator digs through the rubble, 10 days after the earthquake that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria. A team of rescuers pulls out a first body, then a second, a baby only 10 months old. His uncle, Abdelhamid, gently lays his remains on the sidewalk. “Nine people in my family died in this building”explains Abdelhamid. “The disaster is so huge that it takes a long time to find them. We’ve been looking for a week.” The burial will be in Turkey, near Antakya “Because at home in Aleppo, Bashar al-Assad considers us all terrorists. So it’s impossible to bury them there. If we go back, he kills us.”
>> Earthquake in Turkey and Syria: follow the evolution of the situation in our live
Thousands of people are still homeless. Among them are many Syrians. The earthquake hit the region bordering Syria, where several hundred thousand of them have gone into exile after fleeing the war in their country. After having lived under the bombs of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian ally, they are now experiencing a new catastrophe with this earthquake.
Abelhamid is from Aleppo. He fled the city razed by bombs from the Syrian regime. Today, he lost everything again. “The hardest part is that we have nowhere to take refuge. The Turks have relatives or friends they can go to. But we, here, are foreigners”.
“We come from Homs, Aleppo, Damascus. We had rebuilt our lives here. And suddenly, the city is devastated. And everything is destroyed.”
Abdelhamid, Syrian refugee in Turkeyat franceinfo
Since the earthquake, his family has found refuge in makeshift tents, in a field of olive trees, on the heights of the city. Her cousin, Ayman, is 25 years old. “In Aleppo, it took years of war, with air strikes to destroy everything, says Ayman. Here, a few seconds were enough to raze all the buildings. It’s incomparable, but I think it’s even worse.”
All around the children are agitated. Omar, 30, is warming himself by the fire. “We are five families in this tenthe said, We don’t even have water. We have to walk a kilometer to get it. We really lost everything he adds, everything we had been in our house… She collapsed. We no longer have any memories, neither in Syria nor in Turkey”. Next door, a mother piles up the few belongings she has left in the trunk of a car, her family has found a relative to house them in a nearby town.