They arrived in the back of a van, wrapped in body bags or family blankets. Their names were scrawled on slips of paper for relatives who waited to receive them in the bitter cold across the Turkish-Syrian border.
In the days after Monday’s earthquake no humanitarian aid came northwestern Syria. Just the bodies of the victims.
On Tuesday, the bodies of 85 Syrian refugees who fled airstrikes and collapsed buildings during a civil war in Turkey to live safely in Turkey were dragged from the rubble of their new homes and across the Bab al-Hawa border crossing returned between Turkey two countries. More followed on Wednesday.
“Right now we are only accepting the bodies of our people who died in Turkey to be buried in their home country,” Mazen Alloush, the head of Bab al-Hawa’s media office, said on Wednesday.
The crossing is the only one approved by the United Nations for the transport of international relief supplies to Syria. It is also being used by other aid groups to meet overwhelming humanitarian needs in opposition-held areas of northwestern Syria, although there were mixed reports on Tuesday about whether the crossing was working, as roads on both sides were damaged by the earthquake became.
A spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in Damascus on Wednesday that the roads to the border crossing are open and the first aid convoy from Turkey to Syria is expected in the coming hours. After Monday’s earthquake, no humanitarian aid got through to Syria from Turkey because the surrounding roads were damaged and aid groups in Turkey were also affected by the earthquake.
On Tuesday evening, Ahmad Yousef, who lives in the Syrian border town of Sarmada, was waiting with his aunt at the border crossing to receive the body of a cousin’s 13-year-old daughter. Her body had been dug up from the rubble of her home in Turkey that day. Both her parents and a brother were still under the rubble.
The family fled their small village in Syria’s Hama province in 2013 when shelling and airstrikes increased. Now the girl returned who most likely hadn’t even remembered the Syria she fled from.
“Those who have died, we want them to come back,” Mr Yousef said. “We want them to be buried with their families.”
