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Over half of healthcare workers, including qualified mental health professionals, have left the country over the past decade.

Before the earthquake, the education system in Syria was already struggling. According to the UN, more than 7,000 schools had been damaged or destroyed. Some two million children were not attending school and 1.6 million were at risk of dropping out. The earthquake made the situation even worse, especially in northwest Syria, where 54 percent of schools were affected.

The UN humanitarian response plan was only 37.8 percent funded in 2023. Late last year, media reports indicated that the World Food Programme (WFP) will stop much of its main food assistance programme in the country this year due to a lack of funding.

what actually disappeared with the destruction of Antakya could be easily misunderstood if one went by the Turkish media, which took a couple of days to even discover the topic, and then decided to tell the story of a provincial backwater, abandoned by God and destroyed by the forces of nature

this region was the very last pocket of different communities living together, often having escaped religious persecution elsewhere

a tradition of the Turkish state: restoring buildings of extinct communities and depicting this as a successful heritage policy. In Antakya, the synagogue was destroyed, possibly putting an end to Jewish life after 2,500 years, and so was the mosque, the Orthodox church, and the Protestant church.

The team of Nehna, an online platform devoted to the histories of minorities in the region, overnight turned into an activism and self-organizing front, connecting communities with resources. Speaking on the phone from Istanbul with Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, a co-founder of Nehna, she tells me about the idea to turn the platform into an association, because there’s so much work ahead in order to rebuild the lives of communities in Hatay, hoping that people will want to come back one day.

After all the dead are counted — which will take long weeks — we will have to face one of the greatest crises of homelessness in our times, with more than 10 million people affected.

Long years of systemic corruption in the construction sector and a controversial amnesty in 2018 for structures that didn’t meet the regulations created a factory of death. For example, the owners of a building in Antakya removed the columns in the basement in 2016 to make space for a kindergarten. Prosecutors rejected a criminal complaint over the removal; last week, 104 people died when the building collapsed. It’s not an isolated case. In response to the earthquake, the authorities issued arrest warrants for a large number of developers and builders, but unsurprisingly, the state officials who issued permits remain untouched

The inadequacy of the aid is seen by many as an intentional punishment for the local minorities, a means to push them into refuge and exile, so that the region can be completely redesigned and repopulated with a more homogeneous, less potentially volatile demographic.

One of the greatest Hellenistic cities, founded around 300 BCE, Antioch, as it was then known, was rocked by two earlier devastating earthquakes, and changed hands between Muslims and Christians, Europeans and Turks, Mongols and Crusaders, several times, reinventing itself completely on each occasion. What is most interesting about it is that its great fame is not necessarily matched by archeological discoveries, meaning that its identity is deeply buried within itself. If you visited Antakya without knowing about its ancient past, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it has a glorious history.

I only hope that Antioch survives the reconstruction, which is often more damaging to heritage than destruction. Antioch is definitely not finished; let’s say it’s just paused.

this complexity gets in the way of the fabrication of facts necessary for a dictatorship

“Things like climate change, earthquakes, drought — they are of course realities of our lives,” Durusu-Tanrıöver said. “But there are human actions that can be taken to foresee what will happen and behave accordingly.

In the half-century leading up to empire’s collapse, the scientists found, the rings inside the tree trunks gradually start to get narrower — suggesting that water shortages were limiting the junipers’ growth. Chemical analyses of the kind of carbon captured in the wood also showed how drought altered the trees at the cellular level.

cuneiform tablets from that time in which Hittite officials fretted over rising food prices and asked for grain to be sent to their cities. But Manning said the empire — which was known for its elaborate water infrastructure projects and massive grain silos in major cities — should have been able to survive this “low frequency” drought.

“But I think it’s naive to believe that three years of drought would bring down the storerooms of the Hittite empire,” Weiss said. He argues that the longer-term drying trend, which has been documented in other studies, was probably more significant.

“Very few societies ever plan for more than one or two disasters happening consecutively.”

between 1198 and 1196 B.C., the region was struck by three of the driest years in the entire 1,000-year-long tree ring record. The abrupt spurt of intensely dry weather may have been more than the Hittites could bear. Within a generation, the empire had dissolved.

“What’s a crisis for some becomes almost an opportunity for others,” Manning said. “You have adaptation and resilience in the form of new states and new economies emerging.”

Durusu-Tanrıöver blames an unsustainable economy and centralized political system. The intensive agricultural practices required to support the capital city probably exhausted the region’s water resources and weakened surrounding ecosystems

parallels to modern urban areas, which are both major sources of planet-warming pollution and especially vulnerable to climate change impacts like extreme heat.