For many of the Syrian victims of the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria on Monday, this is just the latest in a decade-long series of tragedies.
The magnitude 7.8 quake struck in the early hours, killing more than 5,000 people in the two countries and leaving thousands more injured. It was the strongest earthquake recorded in Turkey in 84 years.
In Syria, most of the casualties were in the northwest of the country, predominantly in the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Latakia and Tartus, according to the state news agency, SANA.
This region was already struggling to rebuild vital infrastructure heavily damaged by continual aerial bombardment during the country’s civil war, which the United Nations estimates to have claimed 300,000 lives since 2011.
It’s a “crisis in the crisis,” El-Mostafa Benlamlih, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Syria, told CNN’s Christina Macfarlane on Monday.
“The infrastructure has been crippled by the situation, the war and so on,” he said. “Those cities are ghost cities… Many people are very scared. They don’t want to go back to their houses. If we can call them houses in these cases. They are ruins sometimes.”
Volunteer rescue group Syria Civil Defense, commonly known as the White Helmets, tweeted that hundreds of families were under the rubble of collapsed buildings in the northwest of the country.
More than 900 people have died in the area, it said, adding that the number is expected to rise.
Khalil Ashawi, a photojournalist based in the town of Jindiris in Syria’s northwestern Allepo governorate, told CNN that he hadn’t witnessed scenes as “disastrous” as Monday’s in the ten years he spent covering the war there.
“In all the years I’ve covered war here, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s a disaster. Paramedics and fire fighters are trying to help but unfortunately there is too much for them to deal with. They can’t handle it all.”
His parents, who live in the Turkish city of Antakya, are missing, he said. That city too suffered significant damage.
The United Nations said on Tuesday that its cross-border aid into Syria had been temporarily disrupted due to damage caused by the earthquake.
