More than seven million children were affected by the devastating earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6, UNICEF said 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 were affected,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder said. at a press conference in Geneva, quoted by the French agency. AFP.
Elder said many surviving children lost their parents in the disaster, which claimed more than 35,000 lives in Turkey and Syria.
The spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that many children, along with their families, “are sleeping on the streets, in shopping malls, schools, mosques, bus stations and under bridges, out of fear to come home.”
The number of children who were orphaned is unknown, but at least 1,362 were separated from their families in the affected areas of Turkey, Elder said, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
Turkish 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 various hospitals, while another 201 are housed in institutions belonging to his ministry.
“We have identified 1,071 of these children. The identities of 291 have not yet been determined,” he said.
Turkish authorities have asked the public to turn over any unaccompanied minors they find to state officials, not people claiming to be close relatives.
In that appeal, they recalled that in the earthquake that affected Turkey in 1999, children were abducted for various purposes, including organ trafficking.
The Unicef spokesman also said that on the Syrian side, the earthquakes hit a territory where “children under 12 years of age have only known conflict, violence and forced displacement.”
Many of these children had to move house up to six or seven times during the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.
The earthquakes occurred in two different places in the southeast of Turkey, close to the border with Syria, having reached magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, with strong aftershocks, one of them measuring 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 rubble, according to EFE.
Several countries, including Portugal, sent specialized search and rescue teams to Turkey.
Source: TSF
