A convoy of 11 trucks from a United Nations agency crossed into northern Syria from Turkey on Tuesday, just hours after the U.N. and Syrian government reached an agreement to temporarily authorize two new border crossings into the rebel enclave, devastated by the region's deadly earthquake. Syrian officials in Damascus said the decision, seven days after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed thousands, shows their commitment to supporting victims on both sides of the front line. The increased flow of help was desperately needed. But some critics say the deal is also a political victory for embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad, who permitted the U.N. to open new crossings and gave the impression that he ultimately called the shots on territory under opposition forces. The U.N. is normally authorized to deliver aid from Turkey to northwest Syria — an area already devastated by 12 years of conflict — through only one border crossing, Bab al-Hawa. Renewing that authorization is a regular battle at the Security Council, where Assad’s ally, Russia, has advocated for all aid to be routed through Damascus. The delay in opening new crossings stalled immediate relief and search and rescue efforts when the “time for effective search and rescue is tragically running out,” the International Rescue Committee said in statement. Asked why it took so long to increase aid access to the northwest, Syria’s U.N. ambassador Bassam Sabbagh told reporters, “Why are you asking me? We don’t control these borders.” The move by Damascus to open additional border crossings a week after the quake was more political than humanitarian, said Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. “It’s a way for the regime to reaffirm its sovereignty, its centrality, and to instrumentalize this tragedy for its own political purposes,” he said. Before the deal with Damascus, advocates had been pushing for the Security Council to vote to permanently open more border crossings to aid deliveries — a move almost certain to be vetoed by Russia. Others argue that no Security Council resolution is needed for the U.N. to send aid across borders in an emergency. Daher pointed out that the U.N. had airdropped aid into the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor when it was besieged by Islamic State militants. Russia's foreign ministry Tuesday issued a statement condemning attempts to “push through” a permanent expansion of the authorized crossings. It said Western nations “continue to strangle" Syria with sanctions that it said have caused a fuel crisis and "prohibited the import of vital goods and equipment.” The United States, United Kingdom and European Union have imposed sanctions on Assad and oppose funneling aid to the northwest through his government, believing it would divert aid to its supporters. A State Department spokesperson told the AP Tuesday that Washington will push for a U.N. resolution authorizing additional crossings as soon as possible. The U.S. last week issued a license to allow earthquake-related relief to bypass sanctions. Read more: Rising toll makes quake deadliest in Turkey's modern history The U.K. welcomed the temporary opening of new crossings, but said “sufficient access needs to be secured in the longer term.” When the earthquake hit, the U.N. could not immediately access Bab al-Hawa because of infrastructure damage, leaving the shattered enclave without significant aid for 72 hours. Northwest Syria’s civil defense organization, the White Helmets, said the delay in aid and the U.N.’s failure to take unorthodox measures those first few days cost lives, as they struggled with limited equipment and manpower to rescue thousands of people trapped under the rubble. The U.N. tried to send a delivery of aid to rebel-held Idlib through government-held territory on Sunday, but the shipment was halted after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the al-Qaida-linked organization that controls the area, refused to accept aid coming from Assad-controlled areas. That standoff was “good politically ... for both sides,” Daher said, allowing the rebels “to say, ‘I’m not collaborating with the regime’ and for the regime to say, ’Look, we tried to send assistance.” Meanwhile, cargo planes loaded with aid have reached government-held territory, including from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt — countries that once shunned Assad and have slowly been reviving ties in recent years. Agreeing to the temporary additional crossings is to Assad’s political advantage,says Charles Lister, Director of the Syria program at Washington-based think thank Middle East Institute. The decision "goes against everything that the regime has publicly stood by for the past 10-plus years when it comes to cross border aid delivery,” Lister said, referring to Syria and Russia’s attempts at ending the U.N. cross-border aid mechanism. But with the deal, the Syrian government "knows it has proved to the world that the United Nations is unwilling to do anything in Syria without the regime’s permission.” Saria Akkad, partnerships and advocacy manager with the Ataa Humanitarian Relief Association, which works in Turkey and northwest Syria, said that Syrians like him now feel that their advocacy to the U.N. was pointless. “We should maybe go back to Assad, we should discuss with the person who killed his people, how he can support the people in northwest Syria," he said. Lister said the current crisis has allowed Assad to “bait the international community into normalization", though he doesn't expect a total end of his political isolation without major shifts form Washington and London. Syrian officials have urged the U.N. to fund reconstruction, and Lister believes that this, in addition to the lifting of Western sanctions, is what Damascus hopes to get. The temporary authorization ends in three months, around the time negotiations take place before the U.N. Security Council meets in July to review the cross-border resolution. Lister believes that Assad’s agreement with the U.N. could allow him to ask for more in return in exchange for allowing the resolution to continue without a Russian veto. “I think what we frankly saw yesterday was the U.N. politicizing aid delivery by going to the regime to secure access to a border crossing they don’t have control over,” he said. “It put all its eggs into the regime’s basket.”

For years, the people of Aleppo bore the brunt of bombardment and fighting when their city, once Syria’s largest and most cosmopolitan, was among the civil war’s fiercest battle zones. Even that didn’t prepare them for the new devastation and terror wreaked by this week’s earthquake. The natural disaster piled on many human-made ones, multiplying the suffering in Aleppo and Syria more broadly. Fighting largely halted in Aleppo in 2016, but only a small number of the numerous damaged and destroyed buildings had been rebuilt. The population has also more recently struggled with Syria's economic downslide, which has sent food prices soaring and residents thrown into poverty. The shock of the quake is all too much. Hovig Shehrian said that during the worst of the war in Aleppo, in 2014, he and his parents fled their home in a front-line area because of the shelling and sniper fire. For years, they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to avoid the fighting. “It was part of our daily routine. Whenever we heard a sound, we left, we knew who to call and what to do,” the 24-year-old said. “But … we didn’t know what to do with the earthquake. I was worried we were going to die.” Monday’s pre-dawn 7.8-magnitude quake, centered about 70 miles (112 kilometers) away in Turkey, jolted Aleppans awake and sent them fleeing into the street under a cold winter rain. Dozens of buildings across the city collapsed. More than 360 people were killed in the city and hundreds of others were injured. Workers were still digging three days later through the rubble, looking for the dead and the survivors. Across southern Turkey and northern Syria, more than 11,000 were killed. Even those whose buildings still stood remain afraid to return. Many are sheltering in schools. A Maronite Christian monastery took in more than 800 people, particularly women, children and the elderly, crammed into every room. “Until now we are not sleeping in our homes. Some people are sleeping in their cars,” said Imad al-Khal, the secretary-general of Christian denominations in Aleppo, who was helping organize shelters. For many, the earthquake was a new sort of terror — a shock even after what they endured during the war. For Aleppo, the war was a long and brutal siege. Rebels captured the eastern part of the city in 2012, soon after Syria’s civil war began. For the next years, Russian-backed government forces battled to uproot them. Syrian and Russian airstrikes and shelling flattened entire blocks. Bodies were found in the river dividing the two parts of the city. On the government-held western side, residents faced regular mortar and rocket fire from opposition fighters. A final offensive led to months of urban fighting, finally ending in December 2016 with government victory. Opposition fighters and supporters were evacuated, and government control imposed over the entire city. Activist groups estimate some 31,000 people were killed in the four years of fighting, and almost the entire population of the eastern sector was displaced. Aleppo became a symbol of how President Bashar Assad succeeded in clawing back most opposition-held territory around Syria’s heartland with backing from Russia and Iran at the cost of horrific destruction. The opposition holds a last, small enclave in the northwest, centered on Idlib province and parts of Aleppo province, which was also devastated by Monday’s quake. But Aleppo never recovered. Any reconstruction has been by individuals. The city’s current population remains well below its pre-2011 population of 4.5 million. Much of the eastern sector remains in ruins and empty. Buildings damaged during the war or built shoddily during the fighting regularly collapse. One collapse, on Jan. 22, left 16 people dead. Another in September killed 11 people, including three children. Aleppo was once the industrial powerhouse of Syria, said Armenak Tokmajyan, a non-resident fellow at Carnegie Middle East who is originally from the city. Now, he said, it’s economically marginalized, basic infrastructure in gas and electricity is lacking, and its population – which had hoped for improvements after fighting ended – only saw things get worse. They have also now experienced the physical — and psychological — blow of the earthquake, Tokmajyan said. “It left them wondering, do they really deserve this fate or not? I think the trauma is big and it will take some time until they swallow this really bitter pill after (more than) 10 years of war.” Rodin Allouch, an Aleppo native, covered the war for a Syrian TV station. “I used to be on the front line, getting video shots, getting scoops. I was never scared. Rockets and shells were falling and everything, but my morale was high,” he recalled. The earthquake was different. “I don’t know what the earthquake did to us exactly. We felt we were going to join God. It was the first time in my life I got scared.” During the war, he had to leave his neighborhood in the eastern sector and rent an apartment on the western side. But the quake has displaced him yet again. As their building shook, he, his wife and four children fled to a nearby garden. Allouch said he won't return until the building is inspected and repaired. It still stands, but has many cracks. The family will instead stay in a ground-floor store front nearby that he rented. “It is safer to be down (on ground floor) if there is an earthquake,” he said, but complained that there is no fuel for heating. “Life is so miserable." Many others in Aleppo have been displaced more than once. Farouk al-Abdullah fled his farm south of Aleppo city during the war. Since then, he has been living with his two wives, 11 children and 70-year-old mother in Jenderis, an opposition-held town in Aleppo province. Their building there collapsed completely in the earthquake, though the entire family was able to escape. He said the earthquake, with its destruction everywhere and its aftermath — watching rescue crews pull bodies out of the rubble — “are much more horrible than during the war." And while war may be senseless, those in it often have a cause they are sacrificing for and wrest some meaning out of the death and destruction. The war’s devastation in Aleppo at least “is somehow a proof that we weren’t defeated easily,” said Wissam Zarqa, an opposition supporter from the city who was there throughout the siege and now lives in the Turkish capital Ankara. “But the destruction of natural disasters is all pain and nothing else but pain.”