8-year-old boy Ridvan Cakiroglu is rescued by an Israeli search and rescue team from the rubble of a collapsed building 116 hours after the earthquake, on February 10, 2023 in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras.
Anadolu agent | beautiful pictures
As the death toll tops 28,000, despair grows with each passing hour for those hoping to find their loved ones alive in the rubble after two earthquakes devastated Turkey and Syria.
But as rescuers continued to search around the clock in the freezing temperatures on Saturday, the chances of finding survivors were among those trapped in the concrete piles of homes and apartments. The collapse is increasingly fragile, and the United Nations emergency coordinator has warned that the death toll could double.
In Turkey, 67 people had been pulled from the rubble in the previous 24 hours, Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters late Friday, as reported by the Associated Press. He added that about 80,000 people are being treated in hospitals and more than 1 million have lost their homes and are in temporary shelters.
His comments came after NBC News witnessed 33-year-old Ozlem Yilmaz and his 6-year-old daughter Zeliha being pulled by Turkish miners from the rubble of a building in the city of Adiyaman. southeastern Turkey with the help of the American rescue team.
“This is a miracle,” their relative Ilkay Yavuz said after speaking to them in the ambulance. “How can one live in ruins for five days?”
However, Yavuz’s joy is quickly extinguished by the fact that Ozlem’s 11-year-old daughter, Zeynep, has passed away. Her husband, his cousin Oguzhan Yilmaz, 43, was confirmed dead on Saturday.
While local media reported many people were pulled from the rubble on Saturday, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations emergency coordinator, warned that the death toll was likely to rise.
“I think it’s very difficult to give an exact estimate, as we need to dig into the wreckage, but I’m sure it will double or more,” he told Britain’s Sky News on Saturday. “It’s scary. This is nature fighting back really hard.” (Sky News is owned by Comcast, the parent company of NBC News.)
Monday’s first devastating earthquake hit Turkey and neighboring Syria in the early hours and was recorded at a magnitude of 7.8. It qualifies as “major” on the official intensity scale. A few hours later, a second earthquake, magnitude 7.6, struck nearby.
Faced with questions about earthquake response planning and timing, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayip Erdogan, promised this week to begin work on rebuilding cities “within weeks”, says hundreds of thousands of buildings are now uninhabitable, and issued a stern warning to anyone engaged in looting in the quake zone.
The disaster comes as the president prepares for national elections scheduled to be held in June. Even before the quake struck, Mr. Erdogan’s popularity was eroding amid soaring costs of living and a devaluation of the Turkish currency. Some analysts say the vote will be the toughest challenge of his two decades in power.
“There was clearly a lot of anger about both the immediate response,” said Howard Eissenstat, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington DC think tank. He added that Mr Erdogan’s government would need to work hard ahead of the election to have any chance of winning.
“In Turkey, they actually have pretty strict building codes, and what’s clear is that if they followed those rules very few people would die,” he said. But “everyone in Turkey knows – and I really want to tell everyone – that earthquake resistance is a farce, that it hasn’t been done.”
As a result, he said, “the government will certainly initiate a lot of prosecutions soon after this incident, so they will do their best to show that they take the matter seriously, After university.”
In neighboring Syria, the UN refugee agency estimates up to 5.3 million people have been displaced. More than 3,500 people have died in Syria, where the death toll has not been updated since Friday.
The disaster added suffering to an area besieged by Syria’s 12-year civil war, isolated parts of the country and hampered efforts to receive aid.
The United Nations said the first quake-related aid convoy traveled from Turkey to northwestern Syria on Friday, a day after the aid shipment was planned before the disaster.
