Helpless to save his family buried under the ruins of their home in northwestern Syria, nurse Abdel Basset Khalil had no choice but to continue tirelessly caring for hundreds of quake-wounded flooding into Syria. hospital where he works.

The earthquake that struck Turkey and neighboring Syria last Monday, killing more than 35,000 people, put a strain on hospitals in rebel areas of Syria, which were already sorely lacking in personnel, equipment and medicines.

“I was helping people in the hospital while my wife and two daughters were under the rubble, I couldn’t do anything for them,” Khalil, a 50-year-old nurse anesthetist working at the hospital, told AFP. of Harim, near the Turkish border.

When the earthquake struck, he rushed out of the hospital only to realize, horrified, that his nearby house had collapsed.

Unable to help his own family, he returned to the hospital where the wounded arrived in waves, as did the remains of the victims, including those of the administrative director of the hospital and the head of the nursing service.

“The first day was very trying, very hard, it was as if 50 years had passed in the same day”, confides this nurse with the grizzled tuft.

For the next two days, he took advantage of rare moments of respite in the hospital to run to his ruined house and follow the clearing operations.

The lifeless bodies of his wife and two daughters were removed from the rubble 48 hours after the quake.

Today, he says he has little consolation in the possibility of “meditating on their graves”, while hundreds of families are still trapped in the rubble.

He also admits that he is now struggling to find sleep, because of the loss of his loved ones and the “horror of the scenes” he has witnessed, but also that he will continue to work at the hospital in Harim “to help people”, while scrolling through pictures of his wife and daughters on his phone.

From the first hours of the earthquake, this modest field hospital was overwhelmed by a large flow of earthquake victims.

Initially, “the hospital was planned to treat the wounded during the air strikes, and the capacity does not exceed 30 wounded”, says surgeon Mohammad al-Badr.

“The situation was so difficult that patients slept on the floor in the halls and corridors,” he adds.

The hospital received around 2,500 wounded, of whom 390 died, according to orthopedic surgeon Hassan al-Hamdo.

Like other hospitals in the region, the facility is facing shortages of materials and equipment.

“The hospital has received many cases requiring CT scans, which are not available,” across the region, Dr al-Hamdo said.

In a report published on Friday, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) warned of the collapse of the health system in northwestern Syria, which is beyond the control of the central power.

Hospitals “now lack emergency medical supplies such as serums, bandages, painkillers”, but also “fuel and body bags”, underlines the IRC.

“The number of patients will increase,” the IRC said, “as survivors are left to fend for themselves in the face of extremely low temperatures.”

“Unless we urgently get more funding, supplies and unhindered humanitarian access, the results will be catastrophic,” warns this NGO.

At the hospital in the town of Salqin, also close to the Turkish border, Hassan Joulak, a specialist in orthopedic surgery, explains that the hospital is currently treating between 800 and 1,000 injured people, most of whom are suffering from fractures due to the earthquake.

“Fifteen minutes after the earthquake, the wounded began to arrive in large numbers, exceeding the capacity of the hospital,” said the doctor.

Syria’s civil war, which is soon entering its twelfth year, has crippled much of the health infrastructure, especially in rebel areas in the northwest of the country.

According to WHO, almost 50% of health facilities are out of service in the country, while those that are functioning suffer from a lack of equipment, medical personnel and medicines.

In government-controlled areas, hospitals were already suffering before the earthquake from a lack of qualified doctors and equipment in a country under international sanctions since the start of the war in 2011.

The quake-hit coastal city of Jableh lost five doctors to the quake, government hospital director Mohammad al-Khalil said.

Hospital staff, overloaded, work hard, at a time when “many of them have lost their homes”, or risk losing it, according to him.

13/02/2023 15:16:31 –         Harim (Syrie) (AFP)           © 2023 AFP