Antakya: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday acknowledged “shortcomings” after criticism of his government’s response to a massive earthquake that killed more than 15,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
The scale of the disaster, which destroyed thousands of buildings and trapped an unknown number of people, has already hampered relief efforts due to freezing weather.
Survivors are left to scramble for food and shelter – and in some cases watch helplessly as their relatives cry out for rescue, and are eventually silenced under the rubble.
“My nephew, my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law are in the ruins. They are trapped under the rubble and there is no sign of life,” said Semir Koban, a kindergarten teacher in Hatay, Turkey.
“We cannot reach them. We are trying to talk to them, but they are not responding… We are waiting for help. It has been 48 hours now,” he said.
Still, searchers continued to pull survivors from the rubble three days after the 7.8-magnitude quake, one of the deadliest this century, even as the death toll continues to rise. .
As online criticism mounted, Erdogan visited Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the earthquake, one of the worst-hit areas, and acknowledged the difficulties in the response.
“Of course, there are shortcomings, the situation is clear,” he said.
Twitter was also not working on Turkish mobile networks, according to JEE News journalists and the NetBlocks web monitoring group.
Children survived.
The window for rescuers to search for survivors is narrowing as the effort nears the 72-hour mark, which disaster experts consider the longest possible period to save lives.
Yet on Wednesday, aid workers pulled children from under a collapsed building in the hard-hit Turkish province of Hata, where entire parts of the city have been leveled.
“Suddenly we heard voices and thanks to the digger… immediately we heard the voices of three people at the same time,” said rescuer Alparin Setinkaya.
“We are expecting more from them… the chances of getting people out of here alive are very high,” he added.
Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed 12,391 people in Turkey and at least 2,992 in Syria, officials and medical experts said, bringing the total to 15,383 — and experts fear the toll will rise rapidly.
In Brussels, the European Union (EU) is planning a donor conference in March to mobilize international aid for Syria and Turkey.
“Together we are now racing against the clock to save lives,” EU chief Ursula van der Leyen said on Twitter.
“No one should be left alone when a tragedy like this affects people,” van der Leyen said.
We are now racing against the clock to save lives together.
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) February 8, 2023
Soon we will provide relief aid, together.
Türkiye and Syria can count on the EU.
@SwedishPM and I will host a Donors' Conference early March in Brussels.
Let’s mobilise funds globally for the affected communities.
People are dying every second.
Because of the scale of the damage and the lack of support in some areas, survivors said they felt alone in responding to the disaster.
“Even the buildings that didn’t collapse were badly damaged. Now the ones above are under the rubble,” said Hassan, a resident of the rebel-held Syrian town of Jandirs, who did not give his full name. There are more people than.” .
“About 400-500 people are trapped under each collapsed building, of which only 10 people are trying to get them out. And there is no machinery,” he added.
White Helmets leading efforts to rescue people buried under rubble in rebel-held areas of Syria have appealed for international help in their “race against time”.
They have been working since the earthquake to rescue survivors from the rubble of dozens of flattened buildings in war-torn northwestern Syria beyond government control.
A top UN official has urged aid to facilitate access to rebel-held areas in the northwest, warning that aid stocks will soon run out.
“Put politics aside and let us do our humanitarian work,” UN Syria coordinator al-Mustafa Benalmileh told JEE News in an interview.
Syria appeals for EU help
The bloc’s commissioner for crisis management, Jens Lenarcisk, said the issue of aid to Syria was a critical one, and that the approved government in Damascus had made a formal request for help from the European Union.
A decade of civil war and Syrian-Russian aerial bombardment had already destroyed hospitals, destroyed the economy and created shortages of electricity, fuel and water.
Lennarsk noted that the European Commission is “encouraging” EU member states to respond to Syria’s request for medical supplies and food, while monitoring to ensure that the president Any aid should not be “diverted” by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Dozens of countries, including the US, China and the Gulf states, have pledged help and aid has arrived, along with search teams.
The European Union moved quickly to send aid teams to Turkey after a powerful earthquake hit the country near the Syrian border on Monday.
But it initially offered only minimal aid to Syria because of EU sanctions imposed on Assad’s government since 2011 over its brutal crackdown on protesters that spiraled into civil war. was
The border between Turkey and Syria is one of the most active seismic zones in the world.
Monday’s quake was the biggest to hit Turkey since 1939, when 33,000 people were killed in the eastern province of Erzincan.
In 1999, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake killed more than 17,000 people.
