Thursday, February 9, 2023 | 8:45 a.m.
The death toll from the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria rose to more than 17,100 on Thursday as hopes of finding survivors trapped under rubble in freezing weather faded.
Officials and doctors said 14,014 people had been killed in Turkey and 3,162 in Syria by Monday’s magnitude 7.8 tremor, bringing the confirmed total to 17,176.
Rescue teams from Turkey found six people, including three children, about 68 hours after they were buried under the rubble of a destroyed building in the city of Kirijan after the earthquakes registered during the early hours of Thursday morning. on Monday in the south of the country, near the border with Syria.
This Thursday the rescuers also managed to get a 16-year-old boy out of the rubble alive, however, as the hours pass, hopes of other miracles diminish.
For this reason, many people now worry about reaching the lifeless bodies of their loved ones and burying them properly.
Speaking to the Anka news agency, Ovgun Ahmet Ercan, one of the country’s leading geophysical engineers and earthquake experts, estimated the number of people still under the collapsed buildings at “some 200,000.”
“The number of people who were rescued alive from the collapse is about 8,000. There is no guarantee of this, but if the calculation is correct, there are another 192,000 people under the buildings”, warned the professor.
After the initial shock, discontent is becoming more and more palpable among the population over the authorities’ response to the fatal earthquake, which, according to what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself admitted, had “deficiencies”.
Many survivors had to search for food and shelter on their own. With no rescue teams in several areas, some watched helplessly as their trapped relatives called for help until their voices trailed off.
“My nephew, my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister are under the rubble. They are trapped in the ruins and there are no signs of life,” said Semire Coban, a kindergarten teacher in the Turkish city of Hatay.
“We can’t get to them. We try to talk to them, but they don’t respond,” she added.
Erdogan visited two of the hardest hit areas, the city of Kahramanmaras at the epicenter of the quake and the Hatay region on the Syrian border.
“Of course, there are shortcomings, it is impossible to be prepared for such a catastrophe,” he said.
Coinciding with his visit, the Twitter social network was inaccessible from Turkey for about 12 hours, according to journalists from the AFP news agency and the NetBlocks watchdog group.
In addition, the country’s police detained 18 people for “provocative” posts on social media criticizing the government response.
The cold aggravates the situation. Although with temperatures of -5ºC, thousands of families in Gaziantep spent the night in cars or tents, unable to return to their homes or too afraid to do so.
Parents walked through the streets of this city in southeastern Turkey carrying their children, wrapped in blankets, because they were less cold than in stores.
In Brussels, the European Union is preparing a donor conference in March to mobilize international aid for Syria and Turkey.
“We are racing against time to save lives together,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. “No one should be left alone when a tragedy like this hits a town,” she added.
According to official data, the Eurasian country suffered a total of 1,117 aftershocks after the magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes last Monday.
