Operational assistance from friendly countries softened the consequences of the earthquake in Syria. This was announced on Thursday, February 16, by President Bashar al-Assad.
“Urgent assistance that came from friendly and fraternal states provided strong support to national efforts to mitigate the consequences of the earthquake and rescue the victims,” he said during an address broadcast by Syrian television.
Assad stressed that Syria was not considered a seismic zone for centuries, therefore it was not prepared for such an elemental strike.
A day earlier, the Russian military in Syria distributed 2.7 tons of humanitarian aid to the population of Aleppo during two humanitarian actions.
On February 14, employees of the Russian Emergencies Ministry arrived from Syria after completing work in the earthquake relief zone. Rescuers during the week assisted in the search for the living people who remained under the rubble. The returned airmobile group consists of more than 50 people, including three cynological crews.
On the same day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted that the Russian rescuers who arrived to remove the rubble worked professionally and heroically.
On February 8, the Syrian Minister of Local Self-Government and the Environment, Hussein Makhlouf, expressed gratitude to the states that provided assistance to Syria, including Russia.
Earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 occurred on February 6 in the province of Kahramanmarash in southeastern Turkey near the border with Syria. Syrian Health Minister Hassan Mohammed al-Ghabash said on February 14 that the final death toll from the earthquake in the country was 1414 people, 2357 were injured. However, these statistics do not contain information about territories not controlled by official Damascus.
In turn, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on February 12 that about 8.5 thousand people died in Syria after the earthquake.
