Qaderoon...the first campaign to re-house those affected by the earthquake in Syria

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Video duration 01 minutes 58 seconds 01:58

Idlib -

Mrs. Khalidiya Al-Shaher dismantles her tent for the last time, and carries some furniture to move it to the residential apartment that she received from the Molham Volunteer Team in the Harem area, as part of the “Qaderoon” project to shelter those affected by the earthquake.

Khalidiya expresses her joy about moving to the new apartment, stressing that it is “an end to the season of misery” and living in the tent for a year, after the collapse of the residential building in which she was living in the city of Harem. She tells Al Jazeera Net that the earthquake caused the destruction of her apartment and the death of her husband and child, and she lived in a camp near Her home was destroyed, and she became afraid to live in buildings, but at the same time she considered them better than tents.

Khalidiya hopes that these buildings are designed to withstand earthquakes, because they can no longer bear other losses, as the situation she went through in the earthquake last February will not be erased from her memories, as she put it.

Those working on the project confirmed that the new buildings were designed to be earthquake-resistant (Al-Jazeera)

Sheltering after homelessness

The Molham volunteer team working in northern Syria opened the “Molham Crescent” project, which is the first project of the Qaderoon campaign that was launched after the devastating earthquake. It collected approximately 20 million US dollars, and dozens of families affected by the earthquake received the key to their homes, after they lost their homes and lived for a year in shelter camps. And random camps.

Muhammad Al-Sheikh, an official in the Molham Volunteer Team, told Al Jazeera Net, "We are in the Qaderoon campaign, which we launched two days after the earthquake. We aim to build everything that the earthquake destroyed, through residential apartments within multi-storey buildings, to compensate those who lost their homes."

He added in his speech, "In the campaign, we relied entirely on donations collected from all countries of the world, to help the affected people. We will work on other projects in other regions, and we are also working on some of them currently and they are under preparation."

The sheikh said, "We handed over the keys to many families, and after the completion of the infrastructure, a full announcement will be made about the opening of the project, so that it will be a shelter for many families in other areas, such as the Armanaz area in the Idlib countryside and the city of Azaz in the Aleppo countryside."

The "Syria Response Coordinators" team said that "45% of the infrastructure in northern Syria was damaged as a result of the earthquake last February, including many schools, medical facilities, and other service facilities."

The team indicated in a statement that “the number of completely destroyed residential buildings reached more than 950 buildings, and about 2,900 buildings were partially destroyed, while more than 11,893 other buildings became uninhabitable, and cracks of various types, dangerous and ordinary, also appeared.” On 7,632 other facilities.

Humanitarian organizations and civil defense teams worked to rehabilitate the infrastructure in northern Syria, by building residential villages whose buildings are earthquake-resistant, with the aim of moving those affected from shelter camps to new residential apartments.

A phobia of residential buildings afflicted some earthquake survivors (Al Jazeera)

Adaptation difficulties

The city of Harem in northern Idlib on the Syrian-Turkish border, which was chosen as a location for the project, is the area most extensively destroyed in northwestern Syria, where hundreds of buildings fell on top of its residents, and hundreds of other buildings collapsed.

After a full year in a shelter camp, Ahmed Saado received a key to a residential apartment within the new project, to live there with his mother, with whom he survived the earthquake, after losing 3 brothers, his father, and his sister. He told Al Jazeera Net that he went for treatment with a psychiatrist, because he was afflicted with a mental illness called “Phobia of residential buildings.” As soon as he enters a residential building, he feels that the ground is shaking and that the building will fall, because he spent many hours under the rubble.

He added in his speech that he initially rejected the matter when the Molham team told him that he had a residential apartment, but he learned that the building was designed in an earthquake-resistant engineering manner, which prompted him to agree, “because living inside tents is very difficult,” he said.

As for Riyad al-Saddam, who lost his home and a number of his family members as a result of the earthquake in the Salqin area in the Idlib countryside in northern Syria, he has not yet received a residential apartment from any humanitarian organization, and no significant promises have been made to him.

Riyad says that he has been living a difficult life in the shelter camps for a year, without the minimum necessities for life in the cold weather, stressing that he was not accustomed to living in tents before his apartment was destroyed.

He added in his interview with Al Jazeera Net that he demands that all those affected by the earthquake have residential apartments to compensate them, because "there were donations of millions of dollars with the aim of building residential apartments for those affected, and this requires real work from organizations to shelter everyone."

It is noteworthy that the earthquake that occurred in February 2023 killed 4,256 civilians from northern Syria, and 11,774 others were injured, including 255 people working in humanitarian institutions, while about 334,821 families were affected, with a total number of individuals exceeding One million 843 thousand and 911 people affected.

Source: Al Jazeera