They weren’t digging for bodies. Help was needed for that, and little had come, so a Syrian man and two boys in the Idlib town of Harem, in north-west Syria, were using a red car jack to lift concrete and salvage sacks of animal feed that had been swallowed by the earthquake. The man placed a brown blanket over the rubble that was once a parade of homes and shops and slit open the trapped sacks, guiding the flow with dust covered hands. A few pellets fell into the dirt; he picked them up, cleaned them and added them to the pile on the blanket.
In opposition-controlled Syria, people live a hand-to-mouth existence. After 12 years of conflict everyone had been displaced by war more than once. Then the earthquake struck.
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