ANTAKYA, Turkey/JANDARIS, Syria, Feb 10, (Reuters) – Rescue crews rescued a 10-day-old baby and his mother trapped in the rubble of a building in Turkey on Friday and dug out several people from other sites as President Tayyip Erdogan said that the authorities should react faster to the big earthquake this week.
The confirmed death toll from the region’s deadliest earthquake in two decades has reached more than 23,700 across southern Turkey and northwestern Syria four days after it struck.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless and without food in the bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries are facing questions about their response.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to the affected areas since the earthquake, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma, state media reported.
His government also approved the delivery of humanitarian aid to the frontlines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed up the arrival of aid for millions of desperate people. The World Food Program said earlier it was running out of stocks held by rebels in northwest Syria as the war situation complicated aid efforts.
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The earthquake, which struck in the early hours of Monday, ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster this century, ahead of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and nearly 31,000 people who died in the earthquake in neighboring Iran in 2003.
Erdogan on Friday visited Turkey’s Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged that the government’s response was not as quick as it could have been.
“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world today, it is a fact that search efforts are not as fast as we would like,” he said.
He also said that shoplifting occurred in some areas.
Erdogan is standing for re-election in a vote scheduled for May 14 and his opponents have seized the issue to attack him. The election may be postponed due to the disaster.
With anger simmering over delays in the delivery of aid and the continuation of the rescue effort, the disaster is likely to play out in the election, if it goes ahead.
Erdogan, for whom the vote was seen as his toughest challenge in two decades in power even before the earthquake, called for unity and condemned what he described as “negative campaigns for political interests “.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticized the government’s response.
“There are many earthquakes, but the biggest earthquake is the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.
The death toll from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and several powerful aftershocks in the two countries surpassed the more than 17,000 deaths in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake struck northwestern Turkey.
[1/13] Turkish boy Poyraz is carried in an ambulance after being rescued alive from the rubble following a deadly earthquake in Kahramanmaras, Turkey February 10, 2023. REUTERS/Berkcan Zengin
Turkey’s death toll rose to 20,213 on Friday, the country’s health minister said. In Syria, more than 3,500 have been killed. Many people still remain under the rubble.
HOPE AMONG THE DESTRUCTION
Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled day and night in the rubble of thousands of destroyed buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they often call for silence as they listen for any sound of life from the broken concrete mounds.
In Turkey’s Samandag district, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispered “Inshallah” (God willing), carefully reached into the rubble and picked out a 10-day-old newborn.
His eyes opened, the baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and taken to the field hospital. Emergency workers also removed his mother, who was shocked and pale but conscious on a stretcher, video images showed.
In Diyarbakir in the east, Sebahat Varli, 32, and his son Serhat were rescued and taken to hospital on Friday morning, 100 hours after the earthquake. A mother and her two daughters were rescued from the collapse of an apartment block in the town of Kahramanmaras on Friday night. Broadcaster CNN Turk showed rescue workers following the three of them.
Across the Syrian border, rescuers from the White Helmets group used their bare hands to dig through plaster and cement until they reached the bare feet of a little girl, still wearing a pink pajama, ugly- ad but alive and free.
But hope that more would be found alive is fading.
In the Syrian town of Jandaris, Naser al-Wakaa wept as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal that was his family’s home, burying his face in a baby’s clothes that belonged to a to his children.
“Bilal, oh Bilal,” she cried, calling out the name of one of her dead children.
The head of Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bulent Yildirim, went to Syria to see the impact there. “It was like a missile falling on every single building,” he said.
About 24.4 million people in Syria and Turkey have been affected, according to Turkish and United Nations officials, in an area roughly 450 km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east. In Syria, people died as far south as Hama, 250 km from the epicenter.
Many people set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or among the ruins. Survivors are often desperate for food, water and warmth.
In Syria, the delivery of aid to the frontlines agreed on Friday will take place in cooperation with the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, state media said.
The United Nations has pushed for aid to flow more freely to Syria, especially to the northwest, where it is estimated that more than 4 million people were in need before the earthquake.
Dozens of planeloads of aid have arrived in areas held by Assad’s government since Monday but few have reached the northwest.
Additional reporting by Umit Bektas in Antakya, Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Ece Toksabay and Huseyin Hayatsever in Adana, Jonathan Spicer, Daren Butler, Yesim Dikmen and Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Writing by Angus MacSwan and Alistair Bell; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Rosalba O’Brien
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