Syrians have begun digging mass burial sites in the north of the country for the victims of powerful earthquakes that struck the region on Monday.
No strangers to mass graves due to the horrors of nearly 12 years of civil war in the country, families now face fresh grief after twin earthquakes — the first a magnitude 7.8 and the second a 7.5 — hit Turkey and neighbouring Syria.
Footage posted by the White Helmets, a civil defence and rescue organisation operating in areas of Syria outside of government control, shows grave sites being dug in the Afrin District in the northeast for victims from the town of Jindires, according to details in the post.
Jindires was the town where a baby girl was born under the rubble and rescued, alive, hours later. Tragically, she was left orphaned just minutes after birth.
"We heard a voice while we were digging," Khalil al-Suwadi, the father's cousin, told AFP.
He continued: "We cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord (intact) so we cut it and my cousin took her to hospital."
The baby was taken for treatment, while family members spent the next several hours recovering the bodies of her father Abdullah, mother Afraa, four siblings and an aunt.
A joint funeral was then held on Tuesday funeral that was held on Tuesday, where Mr al-Suwadi shared his heartbreak that the family had already been displaced multiple times from the war.
They managed to survive a Russian bombing campaign, but not this.
Paediatrician Hani Maarouf said the newborn is now stable but that she had arrived in bad condition: "She had several bruises and lacerations over all her body," he told AFP.
He continued: "She also arrived with hypothermia because of the harsh cold. We had to warm her up and administer calcium."
After posting the footage of the mass graves, the White Helmets said rescue operations were becoming increasingly difficult, with “hundreds of families” still buried underneath rubble and a “great shortage of search and rescue equipment.”
Salah Abulgasem, an aid worker with Islamic Relief, said to the i Newspaper: "I'm seeing images from my colleagues of mass graves. The amount of bodies that they’re recovering, there isn’t enough space in order to bury them so they’re burying families as complete families."
The combined death toll from Monday’s quakes has risen to 17,206 after the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the tally in Turkey had climbed to 14,014.
Syria’s civil defence has raised the death toll in the opposition-held northwest of the country to at least 1,930, with more than 2,950 injured. The government-held areas are reporting 1,262 people dead
