“During the rescue operation, children were screaming under the rubble, begging us to free them before their last breaths were gone quickly. We searched for them with our eyes shedding tears, mourning those small bodies,” a rescuer in the disaster narrates. 

 

A servıouver in times of disaster. 

I am Abdul Ghani Hajj As’ad, a volunteer at Violet organisation for over seven years and the emergency team leader. I witnessed the earthquake that shook cities and wounded the souls of thousands in northwest Syria. Four days before the disaster, I arrived in Zouf village in Jisr Al-Shughur with my team in response to families in camps affected by a snowstorm that hit the area. 

The first moments after the earthquake 

The first moments of the earthquake were terrifying. My team and I woke up, panicked, to loud noises and unimaginable shaking of the ground beneath us. We ran outside without understanding what was happening around us and were met with a shocking scene of buildings collapsing over their inhabitants and screams of terror. We immediately headed to our car to reach a safer area away from the buildings until the earthquake ended. Electricity and internet were cut off, and the only way to check on our families’ safety was through the walkie-talkie we had. 

Prioritizing… the family or response 

Choosing between family and response, the ambulance team started directly responding to and rescuing families trapped under the rubble in Jisr Al-Shughur. I went to Idlib city at 5:30 AM, where the need and damage were greater. Most families had headed to the corniche and gathered there. Upon my arrival, I saw faces of terrified children and women and cries of fear, confusion, and panic. I couldn’t reach my family in the first hours to ease my heart and ensure their safety, nor could they hear any news about me and what had happened to me. When I finally reached my house, I found they were safe, and there was no significant damage. It was then we had to act quickly as the hours were limited for those trapped under the rubble of their homes. 

only a few hours between survival and death 

Between survival and death, there were only a few hours. Calls for help erupted in all areas, and Idlib city witnessed significant damage to its buildings. We started the response from there, especially from the northern neighborhood. We stood in front of a building that had completely collapsed on its residents’ bodies. There were children’s voices pleading for us to save them before it was too late. Those calls made us search for them with all our strength while we cried for their pain. After two hours, we managed to save two children and extracted a woman, a man, and their two children, who had already passed away, not having had the chance to survive. 

“What scared me the most and besieged my thoughts was that with every passing hour, we were losing more lives under the rubble.” 

The cries for help came from the Salqin area, and indeed, we headed there immediately. 30% of the buildings had completely collapsed on their inhabitants, making the disaster greater than the team could respond to. We reached a building that no one had rescued yet, hoping some of its residents were still alive. . After hours of digging in the darkness, we began uncovering them. Most of the families had passed away before we could get to them, as we found them either on the building’s stairs or in front of their homes’ doors. In the first five hours, we were able to extract the bodies of three people from a young family, a mother and a father a father, 35 years old at most, and their young child, who must have been between 5 and 6 years old. The work continued to extract four other bodies, and in the last hours of the night, we reached another family that we could not save: a woman, a man, a little girl about four years old, and an elderly woman in her sixties, making the total number of people the team was able to extract then 11 individuals. 

Resist the tragic situation. 

Resisting the tragic situation was not easy as the conditions and the state of the areas did not help us quickly reach families under the rubble. The destruction was widespread along the roads, making it very difficult to reach the affected areas, in addition to the main roads to the villages being cut off due to the spread of rescue teams. The level of pain felt all around us was inescapable, and our souls were exhausted from what we witnessed. We did not have the chance to reassure our families and see them, even for minutes. Our clothes only smelled of blood and corpses after days of response. 

Moments will not be forgotten. 

Some of those Scenes, sounds, and voices will never leave my memory. The sound of people begging us to dig and search for their missing ones was a motivation for us not to give up in the face of pain. But the moment of finding the bodies, usually embracing each other, was one of the most painful scenes for our souls. I will not forget my mother’s tears streaming down