“I wish I had been killed with my family” … A girl in rural Idlib recounts the horrific scenes she experienced on the night of the February earthquake.

The 13-year-old Zainab al-Atrash could not even imagine that she would lose all her family members in the devastating earthquake that struck Northwestern Syria at the dawn of February 6, 2023 and that she would remain alone, struggling with her memories which are fraught with pain and wounds that no one could erase from her memory and mind.

“Hours before the earthquake, my infant brother died, and we had a farewell condolence at home and everyone who slept in our house died this night. I wish I was with them, dead, and went with them,” says the child Zainab, who escaped the inevitable death because she was outside of the house on the night of the earthquake. During her conversation with the “Target” Media Platform she recounted that thirteen of her relatives were trapped under the rubble of their three-storey house, including her parents and her five siblings, leaving her the only survivor of a large family whose lives were taken at the moment of the disaster at 4:17 in the morning.

* When the incident occurred

A few hours before the devastating earthquake took place, the mother asked her daughter Zainab to go with her uncle’s wife to sleep with them because she was affected by the death of her infant brother. Zainab further says: „ I arrived at the house of my uncle, adjacent to out home and put my head on the cushion of their daughter, who is only one year older than me so I could sleep next to her. And as soon as I fell asleep, everyone woke up when we felt the ground shaking us and the house began to disintegrate and its things moved left and right, coinciding with the strange and terrifying sounds that were heard from all sides, and out of fear, we pushed my uncle quickly outside and we went away from the house, but I was shocked by the horror of the scene that made me I stand petrified when I did not see our house, which separates me from it only a few meters.”

She added, “I approached the house with my uncle, and it became clear to me that our house had collapsed, and I saw a number of people whispering and asking each other how we will manage to get them out and what are the available methods. I asked them about whom they are talking about, and they did not answer me, but when I again posed my question, they answered me that my entire was trapped under the debris because they could not get out; however, they also told me that they are alive and they will work to save them as quickly as possible, and here dozens of people started moving piles of stones to open a corridor through which they could enter between the roofs, because the civil defense has apologized for participating in the rescue operation at the present time due to the large scale of the disaster in other cities and regions, as he told us.”

A few seconds turned Zainab’s life into hell

A few seconds of Monday, which is called “the black day for the Syrians,” was enough to turn Zainab’s life into hell, after their two-storey house, whose balconies overlook farms and wooded orchards along where the Orontes River passes, turned into huge piles of rubble and debris, suffocating under it. Many of the souls that she loves were under it, and made them a trace of an eye away from that child who was watching with her tears for more than eight hours straight, the operations of extracting her family from among the collapsed walls and ceilings with primitive equipment, refusing to move away from the vicinity of the house whose features and details were hidden, hoping that one of her loved ones would get out of the ruins and life to embrace him or her, but death at that time was closer to them.

 Weddings turned into funerals

About twenty days before the earthquake occurred, Hamza got married, “Zainab’s older brother died with his wife,” in a big and beautiful wedding ceremony, as the girl told us. On the day the earthquake occurred, an engagement party was supposed to take place for her brother Muhammad, but fate wanted her newly born brother to die of an illness, forcing them to postpone the engagement to another time, but the family was not aware that their whole life would stop hours after the death of their newborn, and that they would leave without returning, leaving Zainab, the thirteen-year-old daughter behind. „Zainab, whose bones the cold shattered and made her bedridden for two days while she was waiting for them to get out alive from under the rubble.” She struggles with her memories and the memories she lived with her parents and five siblings, every time she passed by their house, which embraced them all, before she moved to live in a tent made of nylon and plastic, under the care of her uncles.