Dozens of the earthquake’s victims’ bodies are still unidentified in the town of Jindires in the northern countryside of Aleppo, amid continuing search and rescue operations and the increasing number of victims in the town, a local official told Enab Baladi.

The commander of the military police in Jindires, Ibrahim al-Jassem, said that the number of unidentified bodies in the town exceeded 90 as of Thursday.

Al-Jassem pointed out that the statistic does not include dozens of corpses that were transported to Idlib to be buried there.

The catastrophic earthquake has killed more than 20,000 people in Turkey and Syria, as the possibility of finding more survivors is rapidly shrinking.

Regarding the mechanism of dealing with the earthquake victims, al-Jassem says that the bodies are placed for hours near the demolished buildings from which they were taken out, waiting for their families to identify their victims so that they can be handed over to them directly.

The bodies of the unknown victims’ bodies will be transferred to the military hospital in Afrin or in Jindires.

The commander of the military police in the border town with Turkey added that the unidentified bodies remain in the mortuary refrigerators after publishing their photos on social media in search of their relatives.

After 48 hours, the forensic medicine department takes over the burial process after giving each body a special number that is kept with pictures of it from several sides, to be buried later in the available cemeteries.

The burial office in the town told Enab Baladi that it worked on washing and shrouding the corpses (according to the Islamic Shariah) so that the people would be able to identify them, pointing out that dozens of corpses are still unidentified.

The burial office works to document the bodies by taking pictures of them so that the people can identify them and receive them for burial directly.

In his turn, Yazan al-Nasser, deputy head of the local council in Jendires, said that the police command is the official body responsible for organizing burials and documenting information about the victims.

Pointing out that the council directed a specialized team to supervise burial and documentation operations.

Enab Baladi’s correspondent in Aleppo countryside reported that the bodies of the victims were initially transferred to the mortuary refrigerators, and after the refrigerators were full, the bodies were transferred to the vicinity of the Afrin Military Hospital, where dozens of corpses accumulated.

The bodies of the quake victims in the northern Jindires region- February 7, 2023 (Enab Baladi/Dayan Junpaz)

Jindires is “stricken”

According to the statistics of the rescue Syria Civil Defense (SCD) agency and the footage and images that monitored the extent of the destruction in the town, Jindires is one of the towns most hit by the earthquake in northern Syria.

The death toll of the earthquake in Jindires rose to more than 486, and more than 850 have been injured, according to the latest statistics that Enab Baladi obtained from the Civil Defense.

The rescue operation is still underway in the town in search for survivors.

On Thursday, one of the Molham Volunteering Team, which works alongside the Civil Defense, said that many of the missing persons are still under the rubble in the town, calling on the missing families to provide the team with the places of the missing persons to direct the Civil Defense rescue teams to them.

On Wednesday, the Civil Defense published pictures of a mass grave in the town of Jindires as well as Enab Baladi reported about the piled-up corpses due to the lack of equipment needed for burial operations.

In the latest statistics issued by the Civil Defense teams, the death toll from the earthquake in northwestern Syria has risen to more than 2030 deaths and more than 2,950 injured, with the number expected to increase “significantly” due to the presence of hundreds of families under the rubble and the lack of humanitarian support for ongoing relief work in the region.

In regime-held areas, the latest statistics of the regime’s health ministry showed that the death toll reached a total of 1,347 while 2,295 people have been injured.