'The situation is tragic': Displaced in northwest Syria lacking aid and shelter in freezing cold
Lacking even temporary accommodation, thousands of Syrian families have been sleeping outdoors in sub-zero temperatures across the opposition-held northwest of the country ever since the devastating earthquakes that struck last Monday.
"I spent the first three days of the disaster in the open, until I was able to find a tent… without the support of aid organisations," Nidal Mustafa Ibrahim, who had to evacuate a house in the village of Azmarin in western Idlib when it began to crack, told Middle East Eye.
"Thank God, I am with my family, and many people in the area where I live miraculously survived. The situation is tragic and difficult to explain," Ibrahim said.
More than 4,400 people have been reported killed and 8,600 injured by the earthquake in northwest Syria, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), while the death toll reported in government-held parts of Syria stands at 1,414.
There are no reliable statistics on how many have died in the aftermath while trying to survive in sub-zero temperatures with no deliveries of aid.
“For Syria, this is a crisis within a crisis,” Sivanka Dhanapala, Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said on Friday: “We’ve had economic shocks, Covid and are now in the depths of winter, with blizzards raging in the affected areas.”
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