A total of 18 people, including nine children, died today after a five-story building in which about seven families lived in the province of Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, collapsed, various sources reported.
A source from the Syrian Army told EFE on condition of anonymity that the rescue teams completed their tasks and counted a total of 18 corpses among the rubble, while they rescued four injured in the collapse of the building, in which some 35 lived.
The official Syrian news agency SANA said the residential building, where a total of seven families lived in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood, collapsed at around 3:00 a.m. Sunday (0000 GMT).
For its part, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the deaths of 15 people, including a newborn, eight children and five women.
The Organization, Based in UK
The organization, based in the UK but with a wide network of partners on the ground, said the people who lost their lives in the collapse were displaced from the far northwestern Syrian city of Afrin, seized in 2018. Kurdish forces by Turkish troops and their allied militias.
Syrian authorities attributed the collapse to “a water leak in the foundation of the building,” located in Sheikh Maqsoud, an area controlled by the US-backed Kurdish-led Alliance, the Democratic Syrian Forces (SDF).
The commander of the FSD, Mazlum Abdi, lashed out at Damascus for the collapse of the building, since “for years” the Syrian government “has prevented the entry of basic materials to the neighborhood and has avoided any effort to restore life and stability” he said on Twitter.
Last September, eleven people died in another collapse of a residential building in Aleppo, which was violently bombarded with barrel bombs and missiles in late 2016.
According to the Observatory, due to poverty and poor living conditions in the country, thousands of families live in residential buildings left in ruins by bombings and air strikes during the war that has been raging in Syria since 2011.
This article is originally published on elnuevodiario.com.do