ALEPPO (AFP) – A building collapsed Sunday in Syria’s second city of Aleppo, killing 16 people including children, authorities and media reported.
Much of Aleppo was destroyed during the foreign-backed war in Syria that began nearly 12 years ago and left many of the remaining structures in a decrepit state.
“The number of victims of the residential building collapse... has risen to 16 dead”, said state news agency SANA.
Only one person had been rescued alive from the rubble of the five-storey building which was home to seven families, Syria’s interior ministry said.
It was not immediately clear if anyone else had survived the tragedy in the city which was Syria’s pre-war commercial hub.
Earlier Sunday SANA gave an initial death toll of 10, which rose throughout the day as search operations continued.
A Kurdish news agency said five children were among the dead.
The victims included Syrians who had been displaced during the country’s years of fighting, a war monitor said.
Locals told AFP that about 35 people lived in the building.
Video footage shared on state television showed dozens of rescue workers at the site. Earth movers scooped up the pieces of building material, sending dust into the air.
SANA quoted a police source as saying earlier that the building, in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maksoud neighborhood, had collapsed “due to a water leak” in the foundations.
The neighborhood is predominantly inhabited by Syrian Kurds who are under the authority of the so-called People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia.
Aleppo itself is, however, under control of the government which took it back from militants during devastating urban combat.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that among the victims were displaced people from Afrin, further north, where neighbouring Turkey carried out an offensive in 2018.
Nearly half a million people have been killed in the war in Syria which began in 2011 and displaced about half of the country’s pre-war population.
Many of those forced from their homes had to move into buildings that are structurally unsound, resulting in relatively frequent collapses.
Last September, a building collapse in the Ferdaws neighborhood of Aleppo killed 10 people, including three children.
A war-damaged block of flats also crumbled in the city in February 2019, leaving 11 people dead with four children among them.