More than seven million children were affected by the devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on February 6, UNICEF said on Tuesday, fearing thousands of them may have died.
“In Turkey, the total number of children living in the ten provinces affected by the two earthquakes is 4.6 million. In Syria, 2.5 million children are affected,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder said at a press conference in Geneva, quoted by the UN. French agency AFP.
Elder said many surviving children lost their parents in the catastrophe, which claimed more than 35,000 lives in Turkey and Syria.
The spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said many children, along with their families, “sleep on the streets, in malls, schools, mosques, bus stations and under bridges because they are afraid to go home”.
The number of orphans is unknown, but at least 1,362 were separated from their families in the affected areas of Turkey, Elder said, according to the Spanish agency EFE.
Turkey’s Family and Social Services Minister Derya Yanik said today that “369 children have been identified by their families and handed over to them”.
He also said that 792 minors are being treated in different hospitals, while another 201 are being housed in his ministry’s institutions.
“We have identified 1,071 of these children. 291 have yet to be identified,” he said.
Turkish authorities have appealed to the public to turn over any unaccompanied minors they find to government officials, not to people claiming to be close relatives.
In that call, they recalled that in the earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999, children were abducted for various purposes, including organ trafficking.
The UNICEF spokesman also said that the earthquakes on the Syrian side have hit an area where “children under 12 have only known conflict, violence and forced displacement”.
Many of these children had to move as many as six or seven times during the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.
The earthquakes occurred in two different places in southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border, measuring 7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, with strong aftershocks, one of which measured 6.0.
More than a week later, rescue teams managed to pull four people alive from the rubble of buildings in the Turkish cities of Kahramanmarash and Adiyaman.
Turkish television channels broadcast live the rescue of two brothers, aged 17 and 20, in Kahramanmarash, who were sent to hospitals with varying degrees of injuries.
Moments later, an 18-year-old was pulled from the rubble in Adiyaman.
The Turkish agency Anadolu reported the rescue of a 26-year-old teacher 201 hours after the first earthquake.
Despite today’s successes, rescue work has stopped in most places and foreign rescue teams have started to return home, while cranes and other work machines have started to remove the rubble, EFE said.
Several countries, including Portugal, sent specialized search and rescue teams to Turkey.
Source: DN
