Syrian ‘miracle’ baby marks 1st birthday without family
JINDAYRIS, Syria — A year ago, Afraa al-Sawadi was pulled from the rubble of her family home still attached to her dead mother by the umbilical cord, after a devastating earthquake hit northwestern Syria.
Now in the care of relatives after the quake on Feb 6 last year, she is among the orphaned children toughing it out in the war-ravaged country.
“We named her after her mother, Afraa, to carry on her name and not forget her family,” said her uncle Khalil al-Sawadi, 35, who has taken the infant girl in alongside his seven children.
“My wife breastfed Afraa because we have a baby girl who we called Aataa ... they’ve become like twins.”
The devastating quake ravaged Turkiye and Syria, and killed nearly 60,000 people.
Jindayris, in Aleppo Province near the border with Turkiye, was one of the areas worst hit by the quake, heaping more misery on the war-weary residents, many of them displaced during conflicts from other parts of the country.
From the first moments after Afraa’s rescue, her story captured hearts and made international headlines as the quake’s “miracle baby”.
Now, Sawadi’s daughters sing to Afraa, who is bundled up in winter clothes in their modest home.
The little girl with rosy cheeks and wide eyes turned 1 on Tuesday and has started crawling.
“When she began talking, she started calling me dad and calling her aunt mum,” a visibly emotional Sawadi said.
Making a living through odd jobs after being displaced from eastern Syria, he said he felt a heavy responsibility in raising Afraa.
He expressed hope that she would have a bright future, getting a good education and even “doing better than my own children”.
In Jindayris, quake-stricken buildings sit in ruins, while others remain partially collapsed.
Hundreds of families still live in tents and makeshift shelters, while the luckier ones are in displacement camps made up of small cement buildings constructed with foreign donations.
Hamza al-Ahmed, 15, walks with crutches through the streets of Jindayris, where he lives with his brother, who is married.
The teenager was left orphaned when his family’s building was destroyed in the quake.
“My father and mother and four siblings died. I spent 35 hours under the rubble,” he told Agence FrancePresse. “The building totally collapsed, nothing is left of it. It has become empty land.”
Ahmed’s leg had to be amputated and his arm was left injured because of crush syndrome, which occurs in limbs starved of blood circulation for too long.
“Life without your parents is hard, but it goes on,” said Ahmed, who is also getting used to using a prosthetic leg. “My dream now is to get better and to go back to standing on my feet.”
According to the United Nations, 265,000 people in northwestern Syria had their homes destroyed in the quake, and more than 43,000 people displaced by the disaster have yet to return home.