As people lie trapped under the rubble and families mourn their lost ones, the rest of the world is forced to watch the devastating aftermath of an immense seismic shock. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit the Turkey-Syria border region on Feb. 6 has killed almost 50,000 people, with 1.5 million left homeless during the biting cold of the winter months.
However, after more than a decade of civil war in Syria, the quake’s impacts have been a crisis within a crisis for millions of its citizens. Syrian survivors of the quake have been hit hard, as ReliefWeb explains that there were already more than 4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in northwest Syria before the earthquake. According to The New York Times, one of the main areas that the earthquake struck had millions of already-displaced people who were living in tent camps, facing horrible conditions such as a cholera outbreak.
The devastating impacts of the shocks in Syria have been magnified due to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s history of preventing aid from reaching citizens, as done during the civil war. In order for the U.N. to make aid deliveries within the country, it needs the permission of the Syrian government. Assad either refuses these requests, does not respond to them, or stops the convoys by surrounding rebel territory and preventing aid from coming in. Weaponizing aid against rebels has left millions of citizens displaced and starving.
Even aid that made its way into Syria outside of Assad’s control has stopped. U.N. aid groups based in southern Turkey that were sending desperately needed aid across the border into northern Syria have been severely damaged due to the earthquakes. The Economist writes that Turkey is currently concentrating on its own people, and Syria is abandoned.
Therefore, the U.S. merely sending monetary aid to Syrians is not enough. The solution is conducting diplomacy with Assad so that he may allow aid to be given to those who need it. The Middle East Eye corroborates that there is an urgent need for international humanitarian diplomacy in Syria to unblock obstacles to humanitarian access. “Since the earthquake occurred, numerous blockages have delayed and prevented the timely delivery of life-saving aid to affected communities, particularly in northwestern Syria.”
Such diplomacy is already making headway. Assad has recently decided to allow aid to enter rebel-held northwest Syria through more border crossings from Turkey. Moreover, earlier today, a delegation of Arab parliamentarians from countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, the Emirates, and Egypt met with Syrian President Assad in Damascus in order to thaw ties and provide assistance after more than a decade of isolation from each other over the conflict in Syria. What the U.S. needs to do now is join the negotiation table to ensure that millions more Syrians do not suffer any longer.
Written by Noor Mahmoud of Thomas S. Wootton High School
Graphic courtesy of Tia Daher Seneca Valley High School