Quake kills 4 people, injures 11 in Kurdish-majority neighborhoods in Aleppo
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – An earthquake killed four people and injured 11 others in the neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh in Aleppo, Kurdish Red Crescent announced on Monday.
The health condition of the injured people is stable, according to the announcement.
Syria witnessed at 4:17 am an earthquake affected by another stronger one that hit Turkey’s Gaziantep.
The earthquake killed 237 people and the injured 539 others in the governorates of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama and Tartus.
Both Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh neighborhoods, northern Aleppo, are semi-autonomous and run by a civil administration.
The two neighborhoods, in addition to the IDPs camps and villages in the northern countryside of Aleppo are housing the IDPs of Afrin who fled the violations and the invasion of the Turkish army and the Turkish-backed armed opposition factions since their control of Afrin in 2018.
The two neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh have become a safe haven for many people from both inside and outside the city of Aleppo. This has led to the activation of trade and industrial movement, but the Syrian government besieges them frequently.
Also, both Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh enjoy security and stability better than that of the other neighborhoods in Aleppo, which made them to be a target of the armed opposition factions several times.
The neighborhoods are separated from the other neighborhoods in Aleppo by three government security checkpoints; Ashrafiyeh, Awared, and Maghsalat al-Jazira.
Thirty-six buildings collapsed in Aleppo, according to Documentation and Monitoring Department of North Press.