On Saturday, a small amount of foreign help was making its way into sections of Turkey and Syria as rescuers labored to extricate kids from the wreckage in regions ravaged by a powerful earthquake that has killed over 24,000 people.
The afflicted areas saw a winter freeze, which hindered rescue attempts and added to the misery of millions of people, many of whom were in urgent need of assistance. The UN cautioned that following the earthquake, which has left up to 5.3 million people homeless in Syria alone, at least 870,000 people in the two nations urgently required food.
Aftershocks from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Monday have increased the dead toll and significantly disrupted the lives of survivors.
“When I see the destroyed buildings, the bodies, it’s not that I can’t see where I will be in two or three years — I can’t imagine where I’ll be tomorrow,” said Fidan Turan, a pensioner in Turkey’s southern city of Antakya, her eyes filling with tears.
“We’ve lost 60 of our extended family members,” she said. “Sixty! What can I say? It’s God’s will.”
In order to supply food rations to at least 590,000 newly displaced persons in Turkey and 284,000 in Syria, the United Nations World Food Programme made an appeal for $77 million.
It added that out of those, 45,000 were refugees and 545,000 were internally displaced individuals. The affected region is home to Syrian rebels and Kurdish terrorists, and the UN rights office on Friday pleaded with all parties to provide humanitarian access.
The banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara and its Western allies see as a terrorist organization, declared a temporary cessation of hostilities to facilitate relief efforts.
Four million people in rebel-held northwest Syria depend on humanitarian supplies, but there haven’t been any deliveries in three weeks from government-controlled regions.
The Syrian government claimed to have given the go-ahead for the distribution of relief to earthquake-stricken regions outside of its jurisdiction.
Only two assistance convoys from Turkey, where officials are conducting their own larger earthquake recovery mission, have entered the border this week. Hospitals had previously been damaged, and there had been energy and water shortages due to a decade of civil conflict and aerial bombing by Syria and Russia.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the Security Council to authorise the opening of new cross-border humanitarian aid points between Turkey and Syria. The council will meet to discuss Syria, possibly early next week. The winter freeze has left thousands of people either spending nights in their cars or huddling around makeshift fires that have become ubiquitous across the quake-hit region.
Five days of grief and anguish have been slowly building into rage at the poor quality of buildings as well as the Turkish government’s response to the country’s most dire disaster in nearly a century. Officials in the country say 12,141 buildings were either destroyed or seriously damaged in the earthquake.
“The floors are piling on top of each other,” said Mustafa Erdik, a professor at Istanbul-based Bogazici University, which means the chances of being found alive are slim.
Police on Friday detained a contractor trying to flee the country after his building collapsed in the catastrophic quake.
The tremor was the most powerful and deadliest since 33,000 people died in a 7.8-magnitude tremor in 1939.
Officials and medics said 20,665 people had died in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria. The confirmed total now stands at 24,218.
Anger has mounted over the Turkish government’s handling of the disaster, changing the tenor of the country’s presidential election campaign ahead of polls due in June.
“People who didn’t die from the earthquake were left to die in the cold,” Hakan Tanriverdi told AFP in Adiyaman province.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded for the first time on Friday that his government was not able to reach and help the victims “as quickly as we had desired”.
One of the single biggest tragedies involved 24 Cypriot children between the ages of 11 and 14 who were in Turkey for a volleyball tournament when the quake swallowed their hotel. Ten of their bodies were repatriated to their homeland in northern Cyprus.
