Turkey.- The director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, arrived this Saturday in the city of Aleppo to visit hospitals and shelters in the area devastated by the earthquakes that have killed more than 24,500 people in Turkey and Syria.
Upon his arrival, the official said he traveled with about 37 tons of emergency medical supplies, adding that another round of more than 30 tons of aid will arrive on Sunday.
International support is slowly reaching disaster-stricken areas, where rescuers continue to find survivors who miraculously managed to hold out among the rubble.
However, the balance of fatalities continues to increase. The latest records on Saturday recorded 24,596 deaths, 21,43 fatalities in Turkey and 3,553 more in Syria.
The icy cold in the area makes rescues difficult and doubles the punishment on a desperate population. According to the UN, at least 870,000 people urgently need food and, in Syria alone, 5.3 million people are left homeless.
But amid death and destruction, rescuers continue to find survivors.
“Is the world there?” Menekse Tabak, 70, asked as she was pulled out of the rubble in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras – the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the region – to applause, according to a video released by the state chain TRT Haber.
In Hatay city, also in the south, a two-year-old girl was found alive 123 hours after the quake, the Hurriyet daily reported, but her family could not be found.
The World Food Program requested 77 million dollars to provide food rations to at least 590,000 people displaced by the earthquake in Turkey and 284,000 in Syria.
Red Cross supervision
The WHO estimates that the quake could affect 23 million people in the two countries “including five million vulnerable people.”
Humanitarian organizations especially fear the spread of cholera, which has resurfaced in Syria.
The Syrian government announced that it will authorize the supply of international aid to the areas controlled by the rebels in the northwest of the country, hit by the earthquake.
Damascus specified that the distribution of aid would have to be “supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent”, with the support of the UN.
Until now, practically all the aid supplied to the rebel areas transits slowly from Turkey through the border post of Bab al Hawa, the only one guaranteed by the UN.
For the shipment of aid to Turkey, this Saturday a border crossing with Armenia was opened for the first time in 35 years, reported the official Turkish agency Anadolu, and five trucks with aid for earthquake victims were able to cross this post in Alican, in Igdir province.
The two countries, divided by the memory of the Armenian genocide in 1915 and by the Nargono Karakaj conflict, began to get closer in December 2021 with the appointment of special envoys to normalize their relations.
According to the Turkish Agency for Emergency Situations and Natural Disasters, about 32,000 people are mobilized in the rescue operations, as well as more than 8,000 foreign rescuers.
Anger of the population
Among the foreign support sent, Austrian and German units announced on Saturday that they were suspending operations in Hatay due to the worsening “security situation” in the area, after having registered “clashes” between different factions.
After five days of the quake, the deadliest since 1939 in the region, the initial shock gives way in Turkey to indignation and anger over the government’s response and the poor quality of construction.
Authorities estimate 12,141 buildings destroyed or seriously damaged.
“The floors are stacked on top of each other,” said the Istanbul Bogazici University professor, who attributes this to poor-quality concrete and steel columns.
Police detained a property developer at Istanbul Airport on Friday who was trying to flee the country after one of his luxury residences he built collapsed.
Faced with criticism of the government’s management, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, intoned a kind of mea culpa.
“There were so many damaged buildings that unfortunately we were unable to speed up our interventions as we would have liked,” he said during a visit to Adiyaman.
