‘Aleppo is still hell’, says Co Cork priest one year after devastating quake
Cork native, Fr Tony O’Riordan, who is Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Aleppo, Syria, stands dwarfed by the rubble caused by the earthquake that struck the city last year which killed almost 60,000 people between Syria and Turkey. Pictures: Tony O’Riordan/JRS
Dwarfed by a pyramid of rubble in front of him, Fr Tony O’Riordan pauses to think about the men, women, and children who died as they and the block of apartments they were living in suddenly cascaded to the ground like a waterfall of concrete, flesh and bone.
The scars and turmoil left by the earthquake that engulfed Aleppo this time last year, on February 6, killing tens of thousands as it weaved across Syria and Turkey, will never be fully healed.
“This region is a tinderbox,” O’Riordan told the via a crackling phone line from the shattered Syrian city.
“It’s cold and wet, food is extremely scarce, and people are dying everyday,” he added.
For the past 12 months the Co Cork Jesuit, and head of his religious order’s refugee service in Aleppo, has witnessed the horrors of the aftermath of the 7.8 magnitude quake.
Aleppo is situated on a fault line of violence too, a war-torn city where eruptions of gunfire, missile strikes, and drone attacks have become as familiar as the dust and rubble left over by last year’s cataclysmic earthquake.
The Kilmichael native has seen violence, poverty, famine, and conflict in previous parishes — from Moyross, Limerick, where he witnessed the toll drug gangs had on the community, to Maban, in South Sudan, where his compound came under attack by a 2,000 strong mob during civil war clashes in August 2018.
However, O’Riordan says Aleppo has witnessed a whole new level of horror, which has the priest considering his own safety more than he previously did.
“All the big players are here, but I believe the Iranians do not want an all-out war, yet there are groups in the background that can trigger it, and that’s a real risk,” he says as fighting in Gaza bleeds into Syria and Iraq.
The grim scenes of Aleppo’s crumbling neighbourhoods left by the earthquake and 14-year war under the Bashar-al-Assad regime still unsettle him as he travels across the city on his work rounds, but O’Riordan says he is “most concerned” about the “forgetfulness of the international community” to the humanitarian crisis still unfolding there.
Death continues to stalk the Syrian people through starvation, a harsh winter, and “a lack of medicines” which has left many unable to be treated “for even the most basic of primary health issues”.
O’Riordan says the UN’s World Food Programme has announced it is stopping its main assistance in Syria due to a lack of funds as “it requires €1bn, and is 70% underfunded”.
Along with its flattened schools, houses, hospitals and streets, the Syrian pound has collapsed, plunging the economy into free-fall.
“I think people forget Syria is a war zone and people are dying everyday in military activity and conflict,” O’Riordan says.
US airstrikes into Syria against Iranian targets and supporting militias in recent weeks, in retaliation for the deaths of three American troops in Jordan, have intensified the conflict in Gaza.
“It has intensified because Syria is seen as a place where anyone with an airplane or a drone can seemingly, with impunity, bomb any part of Syria, and a few weeks ago we had one (strike) very close to where I was living,” says O’Riordan.
“You never know where the next air strike will be, it’s not carpet bombing, but either the missile is not very precise sometimes or the anti-aircraft defence missiles can go anywhere.”
“I am certainly more cautious than I ever have been. Up to now, I wouldn't have been too concerned about traveling at night, but now more so than before, one could be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Despite it all, O’Riordan continues to offer support to the people of Aleppo who bravely try to recover one year on from when the earth opened up and swallowed their loved ones and their livelihoods.
While the Syrian people “need shelter, food, clothing, heat, everything,” O’Riordan also warns, “education has had to drop off the priority list for so many families, and when many become uneducated, they easily become foot soldiers caught up in the conflict”.
O’Riordan witnessed first-hand the positive transformation education had in his previous parish of Moyross, which now boasts one of the best-performing Deis primary schools in the country with Principal Tiernan O’Neill at the helm.
Much like in Moyross in years past, when drug gangs turned their grip on the community and vulnerable school-age youths, children in Aleppo who are now missing out on their education “end up either in the armies or the militias”.
Aleppo’s streets are also full of “armies of children, pushing trolleys of rubbish” in the hope of selling it for a paltry 50 cent a day.
“It’s the saddest thing I see here, these children, aged as young as five or six, standing in the middle of these big skips sorting through rubbish to pick out plastic to sell it,” O’Riordan says.
“It’s a miserable scene, they’re on the streets at all hours of the day and night, pushing these trolleys with big nylon bags that dwarf them. They have dirty faces and dirty hands because they are doing hard dirty work — there is an army of those children around Syria.”
Other children who are forced to work in clothing factories weaving yarns “are considered to be the lucky ones, they at least, have their health”.
JRS’s safe houses which are dotted around the conflict areas of Aleppo “offer the children a place they can be children, where they can get some nourishing food, where we do some basic literacy with them, and get psychological counseling”. However, O’Riordan says, this too is under threat from funding deficits.
Gripped by daily horrors, he celebrates the little victories: “I met a one-year-old boy with a fantastic smile the other day, he is here because we managed to provide medical assistance to his pregnant mother whose entire family was lost in the earthquake last year.”
O'Riodan copes by taking solace in the “spark of life and humour of the Syrian people even in this horrible situation”.
“It amazes me that that woman whose loved ones were killed in the earthquake has just got on with it, even though all she has lived through.”
“The Syrian people are resilient, but it is a privilege to be part of the all-Syrian JRS team here, where we have 350 volunteers.”
O’Riordan has overseen the JRS team distribute food assistance to over 44,000 people since last year’s earthquake.
However, in an SOS call for more funding, he asks the international community “not to forget” Syria.
“I’m deeply concerned for the present situation and future of Syria, and while we have delivered very important help it has been done on a treadmill of a deteriorating situation,” he warns.
As the phone line from Aleppo fades, O’Riordan concludes: “I want to thank all our donors around the world, especially the Irish people for all they did after last year’s earthquake, but Syria needs help more than ever now, even a small donation will go a long way for us, thank you.”
Financial donations to the humanitarian crisis in Syria can be made through the Irish Jesuits International (IJI) website at www.iji.ie/donate
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