International aid faces obstacles in Syria

Four days have passed since the massive earthquake that struck a very vulnerable, and no less conflictive, area of the Middle East and the death toll - and the number of seriously injured - continues to rise. As I write this article it already exceeds 20,000 and I am sure that by the time it reaches readers it will be considerably higher. The figures for Turkey, a country with greater resources and fewer problems for international aid, are more stable, though not closed, but the figures for Syria remain an unknown quantity that makes counting and forecasting more difficult. 

Syria has been in an endless war for twelve years that still has regions in conflict with the involvement of different contenders: political opponents of the Damascus government and Kurdish organisations backed by the United States and jihadists linked to al-Qaeda, each with unclear external support and at odds with each other. Control of the territory is divided: the largest part, in the south, is in the hands of the government, headed by Bashar al-Assad, and the rest is divided into three provinces that are bombed daily by the air force, but the army has not yet managed to control them. 

One of them is Idlib, close to the Turkish border to the north and the city of Aleppo to the south, with a population of four million inhabitants - many of them refugees from other places living in overcrowded conditions. It was the region worst hit by the quake and is where perhaps thousands of victims are believed to be buried in the rubble and where no one has come to their rescue. It is a poor, devastated region and, what is worse in the circumstances, blocked both from the outside by Syrian forces and from the inside by the political and religious rebels themselves, who refuse to be defeated. 

This situation is preventing the entry of aid for the rescue of the victims and for their most urgent care, both from the relief services mobilised by the government and from other countries, as well as international aid, which has begun to arrive in dribs and drabs. In fact, the reality is more complex: the whole country is subject to external sanctions under accusations of human rights violations that prevent shipments, hinder entry and complicate an even more dramatic situation. As a result of the protracted war, the most accessible normal communication routes by land are closed.  

In Idlib, only the Bab al-Hawa road remains accessible, which connects to the Turkish city of Gaziantep, precisely where the epicentre of the two earthquakes is located. There were two earthquakes of great intensity, but they were much more damaging in overpopulated places, with poor resources and very vulnerable buildings which, as if that were not enough, were already destroyed by a war in which the bombing caused damage to homes, electricity grids and access to food supplies, medicines and other consumer goods.