Building collapse in Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city: at least 13 fatalities

Authorities and the media claimed that a building collapsed on Sunday in Aleppo, the second-largest city in Syria, killing 13 people, including children. The ministry noted that the five-story structure had collapsed in the morning while locals said that about 35 people lived in the structure.

Initially, ten fatalities were reported, but the state news agency SANA revised its initial dead toll of 10 to 13 and predicted that it will further increase.

A war monitor stated they were all Syrians who had been displaced over the more than ten years of warfare in the nation, while a Kurdish news agency reported that five children were among the dead.

The interior ministry reported that only one person had been pulled from the wreckage and that rescue and search operations were still ongoing. As bulldozers worked to clear the wreckage, dozens of rescuers were seen laboring to extract individuals from the rubble in video carried on official television.

The building in Aleppo's Sheikh Maksoud district collapsed "due to a water leak" in the foundations, a police source was quoted by SANA as saying earlier.

During Syria's almost 12-year conflict, much of Aleppo was destroyed, leaving many of the remaining structures in a decrepit condition. The dead were all displaced residents of the northern Afrin district, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, located in Britain. Many of the displaced people were forced to move into weakly constructed buildings, which frequently collapse.

In the Ferdaws area of Aleppo, a building collapse in September of last year claimed the lives of 10 individuals, three of them were children. Furthermore, a second collapse in the city in February 2019 claimed the lives of 11 individuals, including four children.