‘Too Huge for Us to Deal With’: Health Workers in Turkey, Syria Respond to Crisis

Healthcare professionals in Turkey and Syria have sacrificed their own safety to try to help as the death count from a 7.8-magnitude earthquake has topped 36,000.

A doctor in Idlib, Syria told NPR that what he’s dealing with is different from what he’s faced as a result of an ongoing civil war.

“The injury is different type because it is because of the rubble,” Mohamed Al-Abrash, MD, a surgeon at Idlib Central Hospital, told NPR. “They have different types of injury, which is not used to be seen like the injury of the war,” he said, citing head fractures and brain hemorrhage, where immediate intervention is needed, but not always possible.

“Really, it is too huge for us to deal with these patients,” he added.

Often, healthcare professionals are working even as they grieve for family and friends who could not be saved. Al-Abrash said he lost a colleague and the colleague’s wife and two children in the aftermath of the quakes. The surgeon’s own home had been destroyed and his three children and wife were displaced, now living in three different cities.

He stressed that even those who had been spared are now homeless, with cold weather leaving them vulnerable to serious health concerns.

Ibrahim Ulas Ozturan, MD, PhD, an emergency medicine physician in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, described a similar sense of desperation with the magnitude of the disaster. He told WMTV that some villages hadn’t yet been reached by aid workers a full week after the initial earthquake, and an estimated 100,000 people are still trapped in the rubble.

Even ambulances that were bringing in patients were halted for a time, because they were gathering bodies left on the streets that were beginning to attract wild animals, Ozturan said.

Two viral videos captured during the tremors on February 6 showed nurses running to protect infants and children in İnayet Topçuoğlu hospital in Gaziantep, the epicenter of the earthquake. Two nurses captured by CCTV in a video posted by the mayor of Gaziantep, Fatma Şahin, rushed to hold incubators in the neonatal intensive care unit still as the ground trembled, shielding them with their bodies. Several sites have identified the nurses as Devlet Nizam and Gazel Çalışkan.

In the same hospital, a video shared by TRT World, a Turkish public broadcasting service, showed a nurse named Şeyma Alakuş sprinting into two hospital rooms and carrying two children out to safety, even as debris started to float around the camera.

In a recent interview with A Spor, a Turkish sports news site, Alakuş, speaking from the hospital, said [translated from Turkish], “at that moment, I only thought about my patients.” She continued, “If I had walked out of the emergency door, I wouldn’t have been able to live with the remorse for the rest of my life.”

In a media briefing Sunday from Damascus, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, described a girl he’d met named Nour who had lost both parents and broken an arm when their building collapsed, just one of millions affected by tragedy.

“The compounding crises of conflict, COVID, cholera, economic decline, and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll,” he said. “I also offer my deep respect and admiration to the survivors and responders, including our own WHO staff.”

Ghebreyesus stressed the commitment of the WHO to support the Syrian people, and said the agency “welcome[s] the easing of U.S. sanctions” against the country and the approval by Syria of “U.N. cross-line conveys” in a region where conflict has created obstacles for delivering humanitarian aid.