Wednesday, February 8, 2023 | 9:15 a.m.
The death toll from the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria on Monday exceeds 11,200 deaths, according to the new balance released this Wednesday.
The death toll in Turkey reached 8,574, announced Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited the city of Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the earthquake, and in Syria 2,662 bodies were recovered from the rubble.
Likewise, it has specified that “after the first earthquake another 648 have been registered, the largest being a magnitude 7.6 with an epicenter in Elbistan”, before confirming that more than 96,600 agents, workers of non-governmental organizations, search and rescue teams and volunteers. Turkey has also created an air bridge for the transfer of personnel and materials from Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.
In this context, the Government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has created a Crisis Management Center in the Ministry of Defense to “confront this great disaster”, in order to transport personnel and the rescue team through an aid bridge aerial.
Erdogan himself will travel to the area during the day to supervise the search and rescue work, according to the Turkish Communications Directorate. “President Erdogan will go to the area affected by the earthquakes to closely follow the work,” he stated in a brief message on his official account on the social network Twitter.
The Turkish president declared on Tuesday a state of emergency for three months in the ten provinces affected by the earthquakes. “We are facing one of the biggest disasters not only in the history of the Republic, but also of the region and the world,” he said.
For its part, the earthquake has left 1,250 dead and 2,054 injured in areas of Syria controlled by the authorities, according to data from the Syrian Ministry of Health published on its Facebook social network profile. These data correspond to the provinces of Aleppo, Hama, Latakia, Tartus and the areas of Idlib in the hands of government forces.
“We are in a race against time and working with the maximum energy available and with the cooperation of all parties,” reads a statement from the Syrian Health Ministry, which indicates that the country’s Executive has reviewed the emergency measures that govern the situation.
The Syrian Prime Minister, Husein Arnus, has moved this Wednesday to the province of Latakia (west) to supervise the search and rescue work in the provincial capital, the homonymous Latakia. There he has received information from the local authorities about the work in progress and has met with several residents in the Raml al-Shamali neighborhood, according to the Syrian state news agency, SANA.
To the Syrian government figures we must add more than 1,280 deaths and 2,600 wounded in the areas controlled by the rebels in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo (northwest), according to what the Syrian Civil Defense, known as the ‘white helmets’, has said. Through his Twitter account, where he insisted that “the balance is expected to increase significantly, since hundreds of families remain trapped under the rubble more than 50 hours after the earthquake.” Finally, they have indicated that more than 360 buildings have been completely destroyed, while more than a thousand are “severely destroyed.”
