CHICAGO — Just hours after he learned about the devastating Feb. 6 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Tarek Kabbany was on social media around 3 a.m. and saw a picture of his younger sister’s apartment building in southern Turkey destroyed.
By 6 a.m., he received word that his sister and her three kids were missing. At 11 a.m., the Chicago-based doctor was on a flight to Turkey.
“I went right away,” Kabbany said. “I got there Tuesday night, and you know, the minute you enter the city, you can see it’s like a city of death. Really, it’s unbelievable. You will not imagine you can see something like this in your whole life.”
Kabbany, his brother-in-law and other friends and relatives spent weeks in Hatay searching for his sister, two nephews and niece. At first, they were hopeful they would find them still alive underneath all of the rubble, just as others had been found amid the aftermath of the earthquakes and aftershocks. But, Kabbany said, “every day, our hopes got less and less.”
Kabbany’s story is one of many of people who still are struggling to cope and survive after the earthquakes and aftershocks that left tens of thousands dead and millions affected when the 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria.
Chicago-based health care workers who rushed to the region have come home sharing stories like a 4-year-old boy who was trapped in the remains of an apartment building for nearly two days and needed to have his left foot amputated because it was “completely crushed,” or a mother who fled her village with what was left of her family because her village “carries the memories of her daughter and her grandkids who were now buried there.”
“I think stories are the most important because when you hear numbers, especially us in the United States, we cannot imagine these numbers and what it means,” said Zaher Sahloul, a doctor at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn and St. Anthony’s Hospital in Chicago who specializes in pulmonary and critical care.
“People who were impacted by the earthquake were about 23 million people. About 200,000 buildings were completely destroyed between Turkey and Syria,” he said. “Two million people are displaced in Turkey, 300,000 people are displaced in Syria. More than 200,000 people are injured. So, these are huge numbers, but unless you go and talk to people and hear the stories, you cannot put things together. You cannot wrap your mind around these numbers.”
Sahloul is the co-founder and president of MedGlobal, a nonprofit started in Chicago in 2017 with teams of health care workers around the world working to improve health care systems, support vulnerable communities and respond in emergencies by providing medical aid and supplies. The MedGlobal team arrived in the region Feb. 21 and split its time between southern Turkey and north and northwest Syria for the roughly 10-day mission.
Sahloul said the goal of MedGlobal and the medical missions is to improve access to health care during disaster situations “because children are dying.”
“There’s no surgeons to operate,” Sahloul said. “There’s no dialysis, no access to antibiotics or IV fluid. Things we take for granted, like oxygen and ventilators, it’s not available in some hospitals there. This health care inequity is, I think, one of the worst pandemics the world suffers from, so we try to do our part in bridging the gap by sending doctors, sending technology, providing medications, providing training for doctors and nurses to build resiliency within the communities so they can weather the storm.”
While in Syria, he met Hasan, the 4-year-old boy, when he was brought to MedGlobal’s hospital in Darkush. He and his family were from Salqin, where the first earthquake hit. All of Hasan’s family members were killed except for his dad, who was outside of their home at the time, Sahloul said. The child was stuck in the rubble for 44 hours.
The broken building was set to be demolished completely, after it was expected that no one would be found alive, Sahloul said. As the building was about to be taken down by heavy machinery, someone saw a small opening in the rubble from where Hasan was waving.
He was rescued, but his left foot was crushed, Sahloul said, and an orthopedic surgeon on the team had to amputate the foot after it became gangrenous.
“Everyone in the medical team who took care of him was traumatized,” Sahloul said. “He was clearly very scared. Every time his dad left the room, he started to scream. Children were especially traumatized. They were unable to speak, unable to sleep. There’s thousands of stories.”
Sahloul met the woman who lost her daughter, son-in-law and grandkids in the city of Idlib, also in Syria, when she came with her husband, who was disabled, her son and his wife. They were struggling to find a tent in one of the temporary camps created for earthquake survivors. Her daughter who was killed was seven months pregnant, Sahloul said. They were all living in another city, Harem, and the woman said she couldn’t go back home because it was too painful.
“If you look at her face and her son’s face, I mean, they clearly have all signs and symptoms of PTSD, depression, anxiety,” Sahloul said.
The response to the earthquake was instant for MedGlobal, which already had teams on the ground in both countries over the past few years providing health care to the communities there through mobile clinics, primary health clinics, mental health programs and more. Sahloul said the staff of about 200 people in Turkey and Syria acted right away, providing surgeries for those who were injured, starting up mobile clinics to aid those who were displaced and distributing supplies.
Sahloul joined the effort as part of the U.S. team of 10 physicians, he said, which included two other Chicago-based doctors, Thaer Ahmad and Imran Akbar.
“When we went to these cities, I mean you have block after block of completely demolished buildings,” Sahloul said. “You see only small pieces of stone, but then you see signs of lives. You see homework, books, pillows, coloring books, toys, blankets, but it’s like you’re going through an apocalyptic scene. It’s completely deserted, but you see the signs of lives that were once there. It’s beyond description. When you see these things on TV and social media, it doesn’t give justice to the amount and the scale of the earthquake and its impact.”
The team initially arrived in southern Turkey at ground zero and met with authorities who had asked for help and training on mental health response. The team was able to take some 50 boxes of medical equipment with them, carrying portable ultrasound machines, medications and more.
Sahloul said the process of crossing the border into Syria was “not very easy,” and it “required certain bureaucratic interventions.” The team’s trip to Syria had to be facilitated by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said. In Syria, the team performed several surgeries, took care of patients in the mobile clinics and hospital emergency rooms. Sahloul said he was doing rounds in the intensive care units at a couple of area hospitals. The medical supplies brought from the U.S. were also able to be donated to different hospitals and mobile clinics in Syria.
MedGlobal has teams on the ground in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia and Europe, in places such as Ukraine, where Sahloul traveled last year on another medical mission in response to the nation’s invasion by Russia. The nonprofit served about 12 million people in 2022.
Sahloul is originally from Syria and came to Chicago to further his medical training in 1989. He still has family living in Syria. His parents live in Homs, a little over 150 miles from the Turkish border. Sahloul said he was on call at Advocate Christ when he started hearing about the first earthquake and then called his mom, who told him she felt the whole room shaking for about 90 seconds and didn’t know what to do.
He then had his own shaking experience while he was on the medical mission in Syria. He said there were “several aftershocks,” but one in particular was “quite strong.” He was in a home on the fourth floor of a building when the “whole floor started to shake.”
“It lasted for five seconds,” he said. “That was my first experience with an earthquake. The owner of that home works with us through MedGlobal, and he was very scared. His wife was very scared. The kids started crying because they saw what happened in the first earthquake.”
Ahmad, an emergency medicine doctor who was born and raised in Chicago, said that after speaking to people during the medical mission, it was clear that “this tragedy did not leave anybody unscathed.”
“You’re just seeing people talk about how they were away, for example, from the center of the earthquakes but came back to find that they had lost all of their family members, including extended family,” Ahmad said. “I think in Turkey and Syria, they place a considerable amount of value in moving as a family unit and kind of maintaining that community of family, and this was a really significant blow to that. It was hard to see. Then you have some of the people who survived dealing with traumatic injuries and watching hospitals overflowed, even with people looking to take care of their chronic diseases, so you just watched the system totally get burdened and stressed and you see that something needs to change.”
Kabbany was born and raised in Idlib, Syria, and came to the U.S. in 2011, training in medicine in Washington, D.C., for several years before moving to Chicago nearly three years ago for a fellowship at Northwestern Hospital. He now works as an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist, also at Advocate Christ.
He said he met Sahloul when he started the job at the same hospital. After their trips, the two happened to run into each other at Istanbul Airport and returned to Chicago on the same flight in March. At the airport, they spoke about their respective traumatic experiences with each other.
“I got emotional talking about it,” Kabbany said. “Even now almost two months later, I still get emotional thinking about everything.”
Kabbany’s two nephews were 10 and 1, and his niece was 9. Kabbany said the identities of two bodies found in the rubble were confirmed at the end of March to be the 9-year-old girl and 1-year-old boy.
Kabbany said his parents also lived in Hatay, and he stayed with them for about two weeks when they were searching for his sister and her kids. But after a new 6.4 magnitude earthquake centered in Hatay hit on Feb. 20, Kabbany said he had his parents move to another city and got them settled there before he returned to the U.S. He said he and his brother are ultimately planning to try and get his parents to come to the U.S. permanently.
Kabbany said his father was at home in Hatay at the time of the first earthquake and woke up from the shaking, and although many of the interior walls in their building had collapsed, the building itself stayed up, and he was unharmed.
Kabbany’s father immediately thought of his daughter and her family, who were living in one of the city’s bigger and newer apartment buildings, Kabbany said. His father thought that if his building was OK, his daughter’s must be too. When he arrived, however, he saw it had completely collapsed.
At the time, Kabbany’s brother-in-law was across the border in Syria for work. Both he and Kabbany’s sister were pharmacists. Kabbany said he is “one of the strongest people” he has ever met and prays he can keep that spirit.
“He built this family with my sister, and now all of a sudden he lost everything,” Kabbany said. “It’s a big tragedy in my family. We are trying to overcome this, my parents, all of us. But we are really, really worried about him.”
Kabbany said he last saw his sister in the summer. He would visit once or twice a year, and when he wasn’t visiting, they would talk on the phone constantly. His sister was the youngest in the family. He also has an older brother who lives in Ohio. Kabbany said the siblings have always been “very close,” but his sister was the one to “always call.”
“She’s very caring,” he said. “Unbelievably caring. She’s been working hard her whole life. She has always been a very strong woman. My sister raised her kids in the middle of a war, and it wasn’t easy, and they had to move from Syria to Turkey, but the kids and the family still came out amazing because my sister is very determined and very strong and very smart. And she’s not just caring about her family, she’s caring about everyone. She used to help everyone.”
He said his older nephew “was the smartest boy” and would always ask for books as gifts when Kabbany would be coming to visit. His niece was “very energetic,” he said, and the family knew she would create her own path. The 1-year-old boy had just “started to have his first steps,” Kabbany said, which he was able to see via FaceTime the week before the earthquake. The 1-year-old boy’s birthday was Feb. 7, the day after the first earthquake.
“It’s a tragedy for everyone,” Kabbany said. “Not just my family. But what adds on to it is the ongoing tragedy. Emotionally, people will be suffering for a long time, even if they are OK physically, but emotionally, it’s so difficult. I don’t know how much we all will recover.”
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