Quake conundrum: Politics first, aid second in Syria

By D Hodali, K Knipp

WASHINGTON: It was not long before dawn when the first tremor woke Khawla and her two brothers up — the family live in Idlib, in northwestern Syria, near the epicenter of the devastating earthquake that struck the area early Monday morning. “We were so scared. At first we had no idea what was happening,” Khawla, 47, told DW over the phone. “There was no way we could leave the house. My two brothers are ill and it’s freezing outside. And where would we have gone anyway?” Together with their neighbors, the family decided to stay indoors and hope for the best. Happily, although their building shook, it remained standing. “A lot of homes here have suffered structural damage and are in danger of collapse,” Khawla continued. “But there’s no emergency accommodation here, nowhere safe to go. There are people who spent last night on the street or in their cars for fear [of more tremors].” That’s despite the fact that it’s been freezing outside, she added.

Khawla preferred not to give her full name for security reasons because she lives in one of the last areas in Syria that is not under the control of Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad.

Idlib, near the Turkish border, is run by the last opposition fighters remaining, who took part in the Syrian civil war. The area has been under constant attack from Syrian government and Russian military. In fact, shortly after the earthquake hit, Syrian forces shelled the opposition-held town of Marea. As a result of years of fighting, infrastructure here is already heavily damaged, with scarce medical supplies, hardly any rescue services, and many people living here dependent on international aid. Locals living beyond these rebel-controlled areas, in government-held territory nearby, have also been heavily impacted by the earthquake. The death toll from both rebel-held and government-controlled areas in northern Syria is already in the thousands and likely to continue to rise. There are a lot of challenges to getting emergency services into these areas, said Anita Starosta, who helps bring aid into the northern Syria for Medico International, a human rights organization based in Frankfurt.

Getting help to places like Aleppo, which is controlled by the Assad regime, is tricky, she explained. “It means that in these areas one cannot get around coordinating international aid with the Assad government,” Starosta said. This is problematic, Starosta noted. “Because we know from past experience that all the aid money that goes through the government in Damascus also ends up helping to finance the government. It goes to aid organizations that are closely connected to the Assad family.”

That’s something that became very clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, Andre Bank, a senior research fellow at the GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies based in Hamburg, confirmed. During the pandemic, the Assad government tried to control the import of vaccines and only distribute them to groups it favored — that is, not those in the opposition-controlled territories. “This just shows how selective the [Assad] regime is and how it uses aid to maintain its domination,” Bank told DW. “Basically the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Western states just can’t cooperate with the regime.”

Only a handful of days after the earthquake struck, it’s already evident how the Syrian government hopes to use the disaster to further its own aims. “The aid organization, Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which is very close to the regime, has already demanded that sanctions against the Assad government be lifted so it’s easier to help [after the earthquake],” Bank noted.