Using shovels, hammers and even their bare hands to dig through rubble to reach survivors, a group of volunteers has been spearheading earthquake rescue efforts in Syria's rebel-held north-west.
"We don't have the cameras or heat sensors to locate the injured," Ismail al Abdullah told the ABC.
"We don't have much advanced equipment."
Mr Abdullah is the head of the media centre in Sarmada, Idlib, for the Syria Civil Defence volunteer rescue group — more commonly known as the White Helmets.
The group, which was established in 2014, is known for its daring rescues in areas hit by bombing by government and Russian forces in Syria's 12-year civil war.
However, Mr Abdullah said, volunteers had never witnessed the scale of destruction left by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck in Türkiye, near the Syrian border, on February 6.
Nor did they have the equipment needed to respond to such a disaster.
What they did have was "great experience" in how to immediately respond, which they have learned from more than a decade of rescuing civilians after aerial bombardments, Mr Abdullah said
"This made all the difference. We weren't somehow lost in the beginning, we knew what we should do and we immediately responded," he said.
"That's why we saved a big number of people."
Its volunteers — who range from bakers, to pharmacists and engineers — have managed to save more than 2,000 people often just using "primitive tools".
'Step-by-step' rescues
Mr Abdullah said an immediate rescue response starts with rescuers listening out for voices.
Then they speak to neighbours and people who know the buildings well to map out where survivors may be.
"So we know where people should be if they were sleeping or in the kitchen … so we can somehow get close to them without wasting time," Mr Abdullah said.
"Then step-by-step we remove the rubble by our hands slowly and carefully."
The White Helmets have been risking their lives and crawling under debris to reach survivors any way they can.
Mr Abdullah said there was a high chance of losing both the victim and volunteer but that, when they are successful, "that's is the great moment that motivate us".
The group says they have lost hundreds of volunteers over the years — including four in the earthquake — but have rescued thousands of people, earning them praise in the West, which also provides a large part of their funding.
Abdel Qader Abdelrahman, a former school principal, joined the White Helmets in 2022 as a medic.
He was drawn to its humanitarian mission through a civil war that has carved Syria into cantons held by rival armed groups.
However, the deadly earthquake — which has so far killed more than 2,000 people in the rebel-held enclave and more than 5,800 in total across Syria — forced him to take on a more-direct search and rescue role.
Mr Abdelrahman has been working in mountains of rubble for five days, not even returning home to rest nor see his family.
"We are answering all the calls for help," Mr Abdelrahman told Reuters.
"When we remove someone alive, we forget all the pain and the fatigue and everything that is happening to us … Our goal is to save people from this destruction."
Search and rescue training
Ever since they started out, all White Helmets' volunteers have received some level of search and rescue training, Mr Abdullah said.
This can be basic risk assessment or learning rescue skills across various scenarios.
For instance, how to deal with concrete, provide first aid, reach basements, or conduct rescues in buildings without access to stairs.
However, there is a vast difference between the natural disaster faced by the country and bombings in the past.
"The first difference is the large scale of destruction," Mr Abdullah said.
"When we respond to bombings, it's just like five or 10 sites. But here, in one minute there were more than 100 sites with many building collapsed."
The overwhelming scale of the disaster has been met with a trickle of help from the international community, who have donated money but sent little physical aid and none of the heavy equipment required to save lives in the week since the quake.
Raed al-Saleh — the White Helmets' founder, who sold electrical equipment before the war — has accused the UN of failing in its response to the crisis, an allegation to which the United Nations has not responded.
Two regional diplomats said international support to the region was limited by the fact that it was a conflict zone outside of government control, and discomfort with the area's ruling faction, which has links to Al-Qaeda.
Aid organisations have said they face security problems operating in the region, while the European Union's envoy to Syria said it was "absolutely unfair" to accuse the EU of failing to provide enough help.
As rescue operations wind down, the White Helmets' work has shifted to the grim task of recovering the dead and clearing rubble.
"We will keep working until we remove the last person from under the rubble," Mr Abdelrahman, the White Helmets' medic, said.
Mr Abdullah said calls to the group's media centre to report missing people had been reducing and he expected the operations would finish in the coming days.
However, he added, they would continue searching for as long as they were needed.
"Just an hour ago, we received reports of people missing, two kids in a village in one of the worst-hit areas," he said.
"We responded and we retrieved their bodies only half an hour ago."
ABC/Reuters
