Most of the 6,000 Syrian victims of the February 6, 2023 earthquakes died in Idlib province. The Haroun family lost everything: their son and their house. For months, she waited for help to find new housing. She never arrived. “Lots of organizations came to see us, but none rebuilt the destroyed houses, no one helped us,” laments Amina, a disaster victim from the village of Azmarin. "We are so desperate that we ended up renting this house temporarily. In the middle of winter, we can't survive in tents with the children."

Idleb is one of the last rebel bastions of the Syrian regime. The region has 4 million inhabitants but is difficult to access. The authorities in Damascus are preventing humanitarian aid from entering there. It arrives in trickles from Turkey, which is far from enough. As for the local authorities, they have not started the promised reconstructions.

“What we are experiencing is tragic”

The local NGO Molham Volunteer Team is one of the actors initiating rehousing projects for the population. This is the case in the city of Harem. “This project consists of 24 residential buildings with 352 apartments. We started it in August 2023, and we are trying to move forward as quickly as possible to be able to deliver the first housing units on the first anniversary of the earthquake,” explains Mohamed Abdel Baqi , engineer.

This project is an exception. In the village of al-Hamziya, Muhammad Jumaa has been living in a tent for a year. This man lost 12 family members and his home in the earthquake. Like many other survivors, he does not have the means to find new accommodation.

"It has been a year since the earthquake, and this is our situation. Even today, we live in tents. The organizations that came to the village helped restore some homes, but they did not nothing done for people like me, whose house was completely destroyed,” he confides. “We are in tents or caravans, we are cornered by the mud and the cold. What we are experiencing is tragic.”

In Idlib, 800,000 displaced people were already living in makeshift camps before the disaster. They have been joined over the past year by around 100,000 more people, according to NGOs.

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