Already scarred by war, Aleppo, the big city in northern Syria, hastily buries its dead while praying for its living still trapped under the rubble following the devastating earthquake.
In the biting cold, rescue workers, soldiers and volunteers try with pickaxes and spades, sometimes with their bare hands, to clear the rubble of a building in the Boustan al-Qasr district.
Through a small opening, a dust-covered rescuer cries out for survivors. A voice answers, and he asks the survivor to guide him to reach him.
In the group of anguished relatives gathered near the ruins, Oum Ibrahim recites a rosary while reciting prayers and dabs her eyes with a handkerchief.
“I am waiting for the rescuers to free my buried children. They are seven. I leave it to God,” the 56-year-old woman, who spent the night in a car near the site, told AFP.
She rushed to the scene as soon as the earthquake shook the city on Monday at dawn. “I haven’t eaten or drunk anything since. How could I when my children are hungry underground? she adds before bursting into tears.
Mahmoud Ali, also arrived as soon as the building collapsed, while it was still dark on Monday, is impatient with the slowness of the relief efforts.
“My relatives did not have time to leave the building. They are under the rubble, he says. I heard their phone ringing when I called them, then nothing, the battery must have run out […] I hope they will hold out until the digger arrives. »
fresh graves
By her side, Oum Mohammad, her shoulders covered with a woolen shawl, is also anxiously awaiting news of her sister and her four children.
“They didn’t have time to get out, maybe they’re stuck under the stairwell,” said the woman who also slept rough.
“The earthquake is harder than the war. During the war, the shell falls, and it’s over. But there, we don’t know anything…”
Boustan al-Qasr still bears the scars of war. The neighborhood found itself in the midst of fighting when Aleppo was divided between army-held and rebel-held neighborhoods at the height of the civil war. It was in December 2016 that loyalist forces took control of the entire city.
A strange calm reigns in the disaster area, where shops and restaurants are closed. Many residents, who had spent the night in public parks or in cars despite freezing temperatures, or in convents for fear of aftershocks, returned home.
Many buildings in Aleppo, near Turkey, collapsed, and the famous citadel overlooking the city was damaged.
The earthquake killed nearly 8,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
In the New Cemetery of Aleppo, gravediggers are digging fresh graves for victims of the earthquake, noted an AFP correspondent.
Vans, and even that of an ice cream merchant, for lack of ambulances, unload bodies brought in as soon as they are removed from the rubble.
The victims are hastily buried.
A group of men from the same family arrive with six bodies placed in white plastic bags. He places them side by side on the ground, and performs a quick prayer before putting them in the ground.
Another group follows him with eleven bodies of members of the same family. He asks the person in charge of the cemetery to save a place for the body of a twelfth person: it has not yet been removed from the rubble.