NOSAfraa
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 20:04
Daisy Mohr
Middle East correspondent
Daisy Mohr
Middle East correspondent
It is a miracle that Afraa survived the earthquake in Syria in early February. Now the baby beams to everyone who visits her. “Afraa is so sweet. She smiles all the time. You call her name and she starts laughing,” says her uncle Khalil al Sawadi, looking at the sleeping girl in his arms.
In February, offers poured in from all over the world to adopt the baby from Jinderis, close to the Turkish border. Eventually she ended up with the neighbors, her uncle and aunt. They are now raising her together with their own seven children.
Afraa is a glimmer of hope in the miserable situation in Syrian opposition territory. According to the UN, the earthquake killed at least 4,500 people and injured more than 10,000.
Afraa was named after her mother, whom she will never get to know. She was born under the rubble on February 6 and spent the first hours of her life under concrete debris.
Hypothermic baby
“We heard noises from under the rubble, so we started digging,” says her uncle Sawadi. “In the end we were able to save Afraa.” She was still connected to her deceased mother by the umbilical cord.
It was still exciting whether the severely hypothermic baby would survive the disaster. She had bruises and scratches. “She had a lot of dust in her chest and had to stay in the hospital for four days. But after that it quickly got better. Her condition is now good,” says her uncle.
This video was made by a local team in Syria:
Six months after the quake, baby Afraa is doing well
“She looks very much like her father and her sister Nawara,” says Sawadi, talking about his brother-in-law, sister-in-law and their children. On his phone they show Afraa pictures of her parents, brothers and sisters every day so that she will get to know them a bit and never forget them.
“We will never let her feel lonely, an orphan.” Because for the rest of the family, Afraa is now the only living memory of the family that got trapped under the four floors of their house.
The happy baby gives the family hope in a miserable situation. They lost many more relatives, their house and their car. Hardly anything has been built up in the hard-hit Jindires.
Help is lacking
After twelve years of war and bombing, it was already a humanitarian disaster here and the earthquake added to that.
“The situation here is worse than ever. Hardly anyone could build their house after the earthquake. Only people with money, because they don’t have to wait for aid organizations. But the rest of the people are in tents and still waiting for help. We hardly see anything or anyone,” says Sawadi, who is not originally from this area at all. Due to the years of war in Syria, this family, like many other Syrians, became internally displaced and ended up in Jindires.
Help is lacking on all sides here. About four million people in this area depend on emergency aid. And it is difficult to enter the area. Sawadi: “People want to live in their houses again. Especially now in the summer, it’s way too hot in those tents.”
Not a rosy future
Traumatized by the earthquake, his family is still afraid to sleep in their rented house. They regularly feel aftershocks and fear that houses will collapse again. That’s why they put a tent next to their house.
“It’s still a risk. So we go to the house during the day, it’s cooler there. And when it gets dark we all go to our tents until it gets light in the morning.”
But wherever they are, in the tent or in the house, everyone plays with Afraa. She doesn’t seem to care at all. “She’s still young, she doesn’t realize it all,” smiles her uncle. And that is perhaps for the better, because the near future of this area looks anything but rosy.
2023-08-12 18:04:11
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