International aid slowly arrived on Saturday in parts of Turkey and Syria devastated by the powerful earthquake, which left more than 24,000 dead and hundreds of thousands in need.
The cold in the region is making rescues difficult and exacerbating the tragedy of a desperate population. According to the UN, at least 870,000 people are in urgent need of food and 5.3 million people have become homeless in Syria alone.
Afraid to return to their homes, or because they no longer exist, thousands of people sleep in tents or in their cars, and gather around bonfires to keep warm.
“When I see the destroyed buildings, the corpses, it’s not that I can’t see where I’ll be in two or three years, it’s that I can’t imagine where I’ll be tomorrow,” says retired Fidan Turan, with watery eyes, in the city of Turk from Antakya (south). “We have lost 60 members of our extended family,” he explained. ‘Sixty! What can I say? It’s God’s will,’ he resigned himself.
The UN’s World Food Program has requested about €72 million to provide food rations for at least 590,000 people displaced by the earthquake in Turkey and 284,000 in Syria.
humanitarian access
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Friday called on all parties in the stricken area, where Kurdish militants and Syrian rebels operate, to allow humanitarian access.
Deemed a terrorist group by Ankara and its Western allies, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party announced it would suspend armed struggle to help with recovery efforts.
And in Syria, the government has announced it will authorize the delivery of international aid to rebel-held areas in the northwest of the country hit by the quake.
So far this week, only two humanitarian convoys have passed through Turkey into this rebel-held territory, home to four million people.
The UN called for an immediate ceasefire in the country and the opening of more border crossings for humanitarian aid, such as Bab al-Hawa.
For the first time in 35 years, a border crossing has been opened on the border between Turkey and Armenia, the official Turkish news agency Anadolu reported on Saturday. Five trucks carrying relief supplies for earthquake victims crossed the Alican post in Igdir province this Saturday, Anadolu reported.
Turkish diplomacy said it is working to open more border crossings into regions controlled by the Syrian government, “for humanitarian reasons”.
The UN Security Council may meet early next week to discuss the situation in Syria.
“The Floors Are Stacked”
Although rescuers continued to pull people alive from the rubble, including several children and a six-month pregnant woman on Friday, the death toll has continued to rise. The latest advanced data from this Saturday morning points to 24,218 deaths, of which 20,665 were in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria.
Five days after five earthquakes, the deadliest in the region since 1939, the initial commotion has given way to anger and revolt in Turkey over the government’s response and poor construction quality. Authorities estimate that 12,141 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged.
“The floors are piling up on each other,” reports the professor at Istanbul’s Bogazici University, who attributes this to low-quality cement and steel columns.
On Friday, police arrested a contractor at Istanbul’s airport as he attempted to flee the country after one of the luxury homes he had built collapsed.
Facing criticism of government management, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a sort of my mistake on Friday. “There were so many damaged buildings that unfortunately we were unable to accelerate our interventions as we would have liked,” he said during a visit to Adiyaman.
One of the many earthquake tragedies concerns a group of 24 Cypriot children and adolescents aged between 11 and 14, who were in Turkey for a volleyball tournament, when the earthquake engulfed the hotel where they were staying.
Turkish media say 19 people from the group, including 15 adults, have been pronounced dead. Ten of the bodies have already been repatriated to their homes in Northern Cyprus.
Source: DN
