More than twenty-four hours after the tragedy, the death toll continues to rise. More than 4,890 people were killed Monday in southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria by a powerful 7.8 magnitude quake, followed hours later by a strong aftershock, and international aid was mobilizing after the tremors as that the rescue operations were hampered by the cold and the night. In Turkey, the provisional toll rose Tuesday morning to 3,381 dead according to the public body for disaster management (Afad) and more than 1,509 in Syria, according to the Ministry of Health and rescuers. In Turkey, 7,340 people had been extracted alive from the rubble on Monday evening, according to Afad.
Large numbers of people remain trapped under the collapsed buildings which number in the thousands. Their relatives are waiting for help to come and free them. “Poor construction quality and lack of enforcement of quality standards in an earthquake-prone country are the factors behind the high death toll and scale of destruction. Rescue operations are also more difficult when you have so many collapsed multi-story buildings,” journalist Bermet Talant wrote on Twitter.
The rain and snow, which fell in some places in abundance, and the expected drop in temperatures with nightfall made Monday evening even more difficult the work of the relief workers. Under these conditions, the World Health Organization said it expected a much higher final toll. “We often see numbers eight times higher than the initial numbers,” an emergency manager at the WHO’s European office, Catherine Smallwood, told AFP.
The first tremor occurred at 4:17 a.m. local time (1:17 a.m. GMT), in the district of Pazarcik, in the province of Kahramanmaras (southeast), about 60 km as the crow flies from the Syrian border. Dozens of aftershocks followed, before a new earthquake of magnitude 7.5, at 10:24 GMT, still in southeastern Turkey, 4 km southeast of the town of Ekinozu.
“With my wife and children, we ran to the door of our apartment on the third floor. As soon as we opened it, the whole building collapsed,” said Oussama Abdelhamid, a resident of a village Syrian bordering Turkey, treated at Al-Rahma hospital in the city of Darkouch. He “miraculously” survived with his family. In these areas held by the rebels fighting the Damascus regime, there are at least 700 dead.
In Sanliurfa, a city in southeastern Turkey, on the edge of a large boulevard, dozens of rescuers were trying in the evening to extract survivors from a seven-storey building reduced to nothing. “There is a family that I know under the rubble,” Ömer El Cüneyd, a 20-year-old Syrian student who lives nearby, told AFP. Monday evening, residents were preparing to spend the night outside, despite temperatures felt below zero degrees, AFP noted. “We have nowhere to go, we are afraid,” said Mehmet Emin Kiliç, gathered around a fire at the foot of a building in his neighborhood with his wife, four children and other members of his family. family. The same scenes were visible during the day in Diyarbakir, the large Kurdish-majority city in southeastern Turkey.
The balance sheet is still likely to evolve in the affected cities, Adana, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir in particular. In Iskenderun and Adiyaman, it was the public hospitals that collapsed under the effect of the earthquake, which occurred at a depth of about 17.9 kilometers. This earthquake is the largest in Turkey since the earthquake of August 17, 1999, which caused the death of 17,000 people, including a thousand in Istanbul. The bad weather in this mountainous region paralyzes the main airports around Diyarbakir and Malatya, where it continues to snow very heavily, leaving the survivors haggard in the cold. As of 6 a.m., 13,000 first responders, many of them volunteers, had left Istanbul in the past 12 hours, according to the Sabah news agency, citing Istanbul’s governor. Many are heading to Hatay, where, according to reports, anger is growing over the lack of assistance for those trapped under the rubble.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for national unity, saying Turkey had received offers of aid from 45 countries. He decreed a seven-day national mourning. As for the Syrian government, it appealed to the international community for help. Messages of support poured in from around the world, from US President Joe Biden to his Russian counterparts Vladimir Putin and Chinese Xi Jinping, to Pope Francis who said he was “deeply saddened”, as well as offers of humanitarian aid. and medical. “Our teams are on the ground assessing needs and providing assistance,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement, appealing to the international community as a minute’s silence was observed at the United Nations General Assembly.
Two American detachments of 79 rescue workers each were preparing to leave for Turkey on Monday, the White House said. The Kremlin, an ally of Syria, has indicated that rescue teams will leave for this country “in the next few hours”, while according to the army, more than 300 Russian soldiers are already on the scene to help with the relief. The Kremlin also indicated that the Turkish president had accepted, after a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, “the help of Russian rescuers”. Greece, despite its stormy relations with its neighbour, promised “to make available […] all his strength to come to Turkey’s aid” and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called Recep Tayyip Erdogan to offer him “immediate help”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that he has satisfied a request for help from Syria, with which the Jewish state does not have diplomatic relations. Damascus denied. The European Union has activated its “civil protection mechanism” and “teams from the Netherlands and Romania are already on the way” as well as in particular 139 French rescuers who must leave in the evening and 76 Polish firefighters. Azerbaijan, an ally and neighbor of Turkey, announced the immediate dispatch of 370 rescuers, Qatar and the Emirates as well as India that of rescue and medical teams and relief equipment. Even Ukraine at war offered “a large group of rescuers”.
In Aleppo, Syria’s second city, dozens of families have remained since the earthquake at dawn in public gardens despite the torrential rains, fearing aftershocks, noted an AFP photographer. Many buildings in the city collapsed and the famous citadel which surmounts the city was damaged. In the neighborhood of al-Shaar, Mohammad al-Bouchi, a 30-year-old with a rain-soaked hat and leather jacket, anxiously watches the rescuers at work. “I have six relatives in this building, and no way to communicate with them. I call them on the phone and no one answers,” he said. Associated Press journalist Sarah El Deeb reports that 244 buildings have been destroyed in Syria and 325 others damaged:
Time is running out to save hundreds of families still trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings after this week’s devastating earthquake, the head of Syria’s opposition-run civil defense service said on Tuesday.
In Turkey, the heaviest damage was recorded near the epicenter of the night’s quake, between Kahramanmaras and Gaziantep, where entire city blocks lay in ruins under snow. The tremors, felt throughout the south-east of the country, were also felt in Lebanon and Cyprus, according to AFP correspondents, as well as in Iraqi Kurdistan in the north of the country in Erbil and Douk, but none victim has not been reported. According to the Danish Geological Institute, the tremors were felt as far away as Greenland. Turkey is located on one of the most active seismic zones in the world.
