“More Syrians than ever are facing challenges in putting food on their tables,” she says. “Record-high prices of food and fuel have disproportionately affected the most vulnerable in Syria.

“Tea is really expensive. A bottle of oil is 25,000 Syrian pounds. Don’t even mention cheese; I think the last time I had it in the house was 10 years ago.”

Suhair Zakkout, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Syria, told Al Arabiya English that the earthquake continues to haunt victims across the war-torn country.

“The earthquakes claimed the lives of 5,900 people in Syria, left more than 12,000 injured and over 120 buildings were either partially or totally damaged,” she added.

Syrians remain ‘frozen in time’

One year on, the plight of Syrians, who faced devastation in the aftermath of the earthquakes – and massive aftershocks – remains frozen in time, she said.

“Nothing has changed for many,” said Zakkout, who visited Em Hussein at her home in Aleppo last month.

“We visited her last week, almost a year after the earthquake, and she pointed out that nothing had changed. When the earthquakes happened, they left the house. They lived in a shelter for 40 days, as she struggled to meet the needs of her three children,” Zakkout added.

“She had no option – like thousands of other Syrians – but to go back to her partially damaged house. As she says, the earthquake is far from over. Memory of that black day is still alive in all Syrians, including those who were far away from the devastation.”

Zakkout said the earthquakes have compounded the crisis arising out of the Syrian conflict, which erupted in 2011, killing more than 500,000 people and uprooting around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.

“We know that Syria has also been suffering from a decline in the economy – that the prices of basic commodities are skyrocketing,” said Zakkout. “The currency is also depreciating. There is inflation, and people can hardly put food on the table.”

‘Fear of the next quake’

Many, she says, also live in constant fear of another earthquake striking and hitting already vul-nerable communities that have yet to be rebuilt, said Zakkout.

“Many say for months they have been monitoring water in a bottle,” she said. “If it’s shaking, they feel it is an earthquake, triggering flashbacks in their heads.”

Zakkout says it is hard for many to emotionally move on when infrastructure in large swathes of the country remains destroyed, devastated by more than a decade of civil war, and then com-pounded by the fallout of the earthquakes.

“Recovery and reconstruction in the country – because of the long history of the conflict – has not started yet. Because of the earthquakes – especially in Aleppo – buildings that survived the conflict, didn’t survive the quakes,” she adds.

Zakkout says the devastation means many families have been torn apart as they cannot return to their homes. Given the country’s dire economic situation, Syrians cannot financially recover and rebuild.

‘Syrians have faded from the headlines’

She says that just like what has happened with other regional disasters – including the ongoing Israel-Palestine war – the plight of Syrians has faded from the headlines.

“The humanitarian needs of people in Syria have disappeared from the attention of the media, and it disappeared from the headlines with other emerging conflicts over the past year,” she says. “First came (the war) in Sudan, and then at the end of 2023 came the conflict in Gaza.”

“And we share with the Syrians their fear that they are being increasingly forgotten. That their suffering is no longer in focus of the global community.” According to Zakkout, this means that Syrians are not getting enough humanitarian aid and assistance.

“Most of the humanitarian organizations are struggling to secure funding for their operations in Syria, supporting the most vulnerable communities in this country.”

In the wake of the earthquake, countries across the region and the wider world had pledged hundreds of millions to help Syria and neighboring Turkey. In the months after the catastrophe, Sau-di Arabia was named one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid by the UN Office for Human-itarian Affairs (OCHA). As well as financial aid, Saudi Arabia has provided tents, temporary housing, shelter materials, clothing, blankets, and mattresses.

Even then, there remains a massive shortfall in global aid, Zakout says. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been working as a humanitarian organization in Syria since 1967, and its presence has only become more visible in the country over 13 years of conflict.

‘Millions need help’

Today, Zakkout estimates that some 16 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian aid and face fresh, harrowing challenges after the earthquakes exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation.

According to Syria Earthquake 2023 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, the tremors left physical damage estimated to the tune of $3.7 billion, while other losses are at a further $1.5 billion.

“The children of Syria are now more dependent on humanitarian aid to survive than their parents were 20 years ago, and 50 percent of the health facilities are not working properly or even not working at all,” says Zakkout. “On top of that, 70 percent of the water facilities in the country are not working.”

Apart from the destroyed infrastructure, agricultural production in the country – devastated by war and climate change and thereafter by the earthquakes – is compounding the crises for Syrians.

Output is less than 50 percent than what it was a decade ago, says Zakkout, which “poses an-other challenge to provide basic commodities such as wheat, corn and other crops that are essential for the basic needs of the communities.”

In the initial days after the earthquake, ICRC had mobilized hundreds of workers to help find survivors among the rubble. Later, they tried to help those extricated from their damaged homes.

However, these workers and volunteers have faced challenges along the way. Zakkout points out that sanctions have hampered earthquake relief work. The lack of heavy equipment to remove endless rubble across earthquake-hit areas has posed difficulties in aid and rebuilding efforts. And, of course, funding remains a constant battle, she says, adding: “For us, it is beyond a humanitarian organization’s capacity to rebuild what has been destroyed.”

To help Syria rebuild requires an “immediate, coordinated response … that should increase aid and support to the humanitarian organizations working in Syria who are delivering the most urgent requirements to the population in Syria,” she says.

“What is really needed is a political will to help people put this conflict behind them and to start rebuilding. Syria has a young population and they are capable of rebuilding their country and their lives – provided there is a political will to ensure that Syrians are neither forgotten nor abandoned,” Zakkout says.

“We are committed to be next to the people and to help as much as possible with all the capacity in our hands. But humanitarian aid never brings an end to suffering. It’s only a political solution that can ensure that. So, humanitarian aid will keep its nose above the water, but it will never be able to stand tall again in the country in the absence of a political solution,” she further explains.

“With Syria – with the financial crisis all over the globe, because of the consequences of COVID-19 and then after COVID, cholera and then after cholera, the earthquake … these peo-ple have been through a lot. They can’t be forgotten.”

Turkey struggling to rebuild

Neighboring Turkey – which suffered the brunt of the earthquakes, with almost a dozen provinces affected – is also struggling to rebuild.

In Tutkey, the February 6, 2023 earthquake struck shortly after 4 a.m. and lasted for 85 seconds. It was followed by more than 570 aftershocks within 24 hours — including a magnitude 7.5 temblor to the north of the original epicenter in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province.

According to the latest government figures released on Friday by Turkey's Environment and Urbanization Minister Mehmet Ozhaseki, some 680,000 homes either collapsed or were left too damaged to live in, leaving hundreds of thousands in desperate need of shelter.

Almost 51,000 people are estimated to have died in the earthquakes in the country, with thousands more still classified as missing and millions more displaced.

A report published by the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation has put the cost of the earthquake in eastern Turkey at $84 billion, about 10 percent of Turkey’s gross domestic product. About $70.8 billion is from the damage to homes, $10.4 billion is from the loss of national income, and another $2.9 billion is from the loss of working days.

In Turkey, 41-year-old resident Mevlude Aydin lost her daughter, husband, and a dozen other relatives in the catastrophe. “Our Hatay is gone. Completely gone,” Aydin recently told AFP at one of the container homes the government has built for survivors across the devastated Hatay province, the capital of which is Antakya.

“I want to go to the cemetery to visit our children, but I simply can’t. I just don’t want to see the city in that state. I get physically sick. My sugar levels spike,” she said.

The February 6, 2023, disaster erased swathes of entire cities across Turkey’s southeast – with the ancient city Antakya the worst affected. In large parts of the city, skeletal remains of build-ings are the only structures that remain.

Ninety percent of its buildings were lost, and more than 20,000 people died in the city and its surrounding province.

Antakya’s survivors continue to live in fenced-off camps composed of hundreds of identical homes that look like shipping containers. Families have access to running water and power that the government offers for free.

Many survivors still fear entering concrete buildings because so many of them had crumbled, trapping initial survivors under tons of debris.

Business owner Mustafa Kassab told AFP he thinks it will take at least one or two generations for Antakya to start resembling its former self – and for normal business to return. “People have still not been able to overcome the psychological effects of the earthquake,” Kassab said. “And financially, they are strapped.”

‘Earthquakes becoming more deadly’

Seismologists and geologists have told Al Arabiya English that while shocks that cause such devastating damage are not increasing in frequency, they are nonetheless becoming more deadly due to densely packed populations, poor infrastructure, and a lack of earthquake-protected build-ing codes to keep up with rampant population growth.

Speaking to Al Arabiya English, Frederik Simons, Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University in the US, said it is “100 percent” certain that another earthquake will happen in the Middle East in the future - but where, when and with what intensity is impossible to predict.

“Earthquakes don’t happen on human timescales, and a couple of big ones now could very well be followed by nothing equally destructive for several decades,” he said. “There is no ‘planning or ‘forecasting’ to be done. But there is, for sure, early warning, damage prevention, human planning, that can diminish the toll of the unpredictable ones that are inevitably going to happen.”

“We can forecast with 100 percent certainty that the region will have another destructive earth-quake - but we can put no certainty at all on the precise timing, location,
or intensity.”

“Such is earthquake science: we understand them very well as a geological phenomenon, and as a physics phenomenon, but the root causes are due to forces that are so vast and so out of our control that we cannot “measure” those forces, let alone control or influence them - unless there IS an earthquake that happened, and then we know what went on, after the fact. And then we can make some informed guesses that include the likelihood and intensity and distance of after-shocks... but predicting the next big one with any reasonable accuracy will likely be forever out of the reach of science.”

The only way is to mitigate the harmful impact of earthquakes, said Simons, and that is only “through engineering (good buildings) and democracy (strong institutions)’ the two most powerful tools to protect humans from the destructive forces of nature,” he said.

“Scientists measure ever more and we build ever better warning networks, only to see those efforts fail or be to no avail in poorly built densely populated areas with weakly organized or poorly equipped citizenry or state organization.”

“Earthquakes know no political boundaries, scientific diplomacy is vital, and robust investment in technology and research always pay off when coupled to open societies with private and public sectors that put protecting human lives (in the form of good building practices, functioning warning systems, effective disaster responses) over short-term profits and authoritarian control for political gain.”

Judith Hubbard, a Harvard graduate and earthquake scientist in the US, told Al Arabiya English that the Turkey-Syria earthquakes were notable because of their magnitudes and the fact that there were two of them, occurring about nine hours after the first on a different faultline, in addition to the usual aftershocks.

“Shaking intensities were very high along the faults that slipped,” she explained. “In the first earthquake, three-quarters of a million people experienced intense shaking ... We saw wide-spread building damage, including the collapse of a number of tall apartment complexes.”

Suzan van der Lee, a professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern University, US, said each year, worldwide, there are about a dozen earthquakes with magnitudes of at least sev-en on the Richter scale. In the Middle East and Asia, several belts of heightened seismic activity are associated with the present-day Eurasian, Arabian, Somalian, and Nubian tectonic plates.

“If one of these occurs near dense population and infrastructure and is unanticipated, then it can have devastating consequences,” said Van der Lee, who co-developed Earthtunes, which applies data science to millions of records of seismic waves in order to decode seismic signals, which hold vital information about the Earth’s interior dynamics.

The world “should expect more” of the types of earthquakes seen in Turkey and Syria, she adds.

Dr. Brian Baptie, a seismologist with the British Geographical Survey, told Al Arabiya English that the degree of devastation from earthquakes is on the rise because the global population is increasing, with many living in densely built-up areas. These include areas such as Turkey in the Middle East.

Also, in poorly built areas – such as Syria – buildings tend to be more fragile and far more vulnerable to seismic shocks.

The collapsed walls of Em Hussein’s home in Aleppo bear testimony to the extent of damage that earthquakes can cause to a fragile structure.

She says: “Do you think the earthquake is over? It is not, it is still living in my heart.”