Turkey-Syria Quake: Death toll climbs above 41,000

GBNEWS24DESK//

Turkey said it would demolish buildings heavily damaged by a huge earthquake last week and swiftly start a mammoth reconstruction effort, with thousands of families struggling to survive amid the rubble and freezing conditions.

The combined death toll in the two countries has climbed over 41,000, and millions are in need over humanitarian aid, with many survivors having been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures.

Rescuers, who flew in to save Turkish people trapped in the debris, were starting to pack, although one woman was pulled out of a collapsed building yesterday after being buried for 222 hours.

In neighbouring Syria’s opposition-held northwest, already suffering from more than a decade of bombardment, the earthquake left many fending for themselves amid the rubble, with aid slowed by the complex politics of humanitarian assistance there.

At a Turkish field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, Indian Army Major Beena Tiwari said patients had initially arrived with physical injuries but that was changing.

“Now more of the patients are coming with post-traumatic stress disorder, following all the shock that they’ve gone through during the earthquake,” she said.

Families in both Turkey and Syria said they and their children were dealing with the psychological aftermath of the quake.

In Turkey’s southern Hatay province, half of the buildings have either collapsed, been heavily damaged, or need to be demolished quickly, the government said.

“We will quickly demolish what needs to be demolished and build safe houses,” Turkey’s Environment and Urbanisation Minister Murat Kurum tweeted.

The government encouraged people to go back home, if and when authorities have deemed their building safe, “in order to start getting back to normal,” Tourism Minister Nuri Ersoy told a news conference in Malatya, some 160 km from the epicentre of the earthquake.

Across the border, in Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a civil war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers.

Though a single border crossing from Turkey to Syria was open after the quake, the UN did not send aid through for days, citing logistical issues.

“The situation is really tragic,” Abdulrahman Mohammad, a displaced Syrian originally from the neighbouring province of Aleppo, said in Idlib, in the country’s northwest, where many had found refuge in the past decade from other war-torn provinces.