The prospect of rescuing more people in Turkey and Syria — trapped under the rubble four days after the 7.8 magnitude and the 7.5 magnitude earthquakes — is fading, but on Friday several survivors were pulled from the ruins in Hatay province in Turkey's south, including a woman and her 6-month-old daughter.
Officials say the death toll from the powerful earthquakes that struck the border region between Turkey and Syria on Monday is now more than 24,000, making it the world’s deadliest seismic event since a 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly 20,000 people in Japan.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday visited Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged the government could have reacted faster to this week’s earthquakes.
"Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be," he said.
Erdogan has declared seven days of national mourning and a three-month state of emergency in the 10 provinces directly affected by the quake.
Both Erdogan and Syrian President Bashar Assad have faced questions about the speed of their governments’ responses to the crisis.
Assad and his wife made their first visit Friday to quake victims at a hospital in the government-controlled city of Aleppo, which suffered extensive damage from years of bombardment during the country’s civil war.
The Syrian president has appeared on television chairing emergency meetings on the quakes but has neither addressed the country nor held a news conference about the disaster.
In a move that could help speed assistance to survivors, Syrian state media reported Friday that the government has approved the delivery of humanitarian aid to all parts of the country, including opposition-held areas in the northwest.
The World Health Organization said Friday that it has sent 72 tons of lifesaving supplies to Turkey and Syria that will be used to treat 100,000 people.
Hope fading for survivors
More than four days after the powerful quakes, hope of finding survivors is diminishing. However, tens of thousands of rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, continued to work, day and night, in their search for survivors.
Turkey’s disaster management agency said Thursday that about 110,000 personnel are involved in rescue efforts and 5,500 vehicles, such as tractors, cranes, bulldozers and excavators, have been shipped to assist the operations.
On Friday, a frantic mother in the Mediterranean city of Kahramanmaras told VOA Turkish she has been waiting four days for a team to help locate her four missing children.
“Since yesterday, we have been calling their names out, but no response,” Ilkay Balt said of her children Onur Ali, Tayfun, Şaziye, and 18-month-old Eylül. “I am asking to those going from here, those soldiers here, please look for them. They say it is not a task we can do. Why isn’t there a crew here then?”
Search sites also have been the scene of some celebrations as people are found alive.
In Gaziantep, The Associated Press reported Adnan Muhammed Korkut, 17, was pulled from the rubble of a basement. He had been trapped for 94 hours, forced to drink his own urine to survive.
“Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance.
The Swiss ambassador to the United Nations told reporters that their rescue teams who joined the effort Monday rescued a mother and her 6-month-old baby Friday in Hatay province.
“A glimpse of hope,” Ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl told reporters.
Devastation
The success stories are overshadowed by the overwhelming number of dead. The region’s morgues and cemeteries are struggling to cope, and bodies lie wrapped in blankets, rugs and tarps in the streets of some cities.
The destruction is unimaginable.
“I have never seen such an earthquake in the world. The city is destroyed,” survivor Yusuf Demir told VOA Turkish in the southeastern city of Adiyaman. “There is no such place that can be called a city. Adiyaman is now a place that has been erased from the map.”
A doctor in Adiyaman, Aydın Şirin, told VOA’s Turkish Service that people need disinfectants in aid packages to prevent possible epidemics after the earthquake.
“At least, from now on, organizations that send aid should send us disinfectants. We don’t have water. Disinfectants are very valuable,” Şirin said.
Aid workers warn that millions of people have been left homeless by the quakes. Temperatures at night drop below freezing in much of the affected region. In Turkey, people huddled in government shelters, shopping malls, stadiums, mosques and community centers, while others spent the night outside wrapped in blankets gathering around fires.
The earthquakes struck a region affected on both sides of the border by more than a decade of civil war in Syria.
On the Syrian side, the impact zone is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. The U.N. refugee agency estimates as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria. Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from the conflict, many living near the epicenter.
In Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, declared a cease-fire in its separatist insurgency.
Humanitarian response
U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths was in the Turkish capital Ankara on Friday. He met with the head of the national disaster agency, Governor Yunus Sezer, and other senior officials.
A U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) Team is embedded in the Turkish disaster management operations center so there can be better coordination.
Griffiths will go to Aleppo and Damascus in Syria as he evaluates needs and the U.N. response.
His office announced Friday an additional $25 million for earthquake relief efforts in Syria from the organization’s central emergency relief fund. That’s in addition to the $25 million he released Tuesday from the same account.
The U.N. said a second aid convoy of 14 trucks from the International Organization for Migration, crossed Friday at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing from Turkey into northwest Syria with shelter and non-food items. The first convoy of a half dozen trucks arrived Thursday. The road from the aid hub in Gaziantep to Bab al-Hawa had been damaged in the quakes and temporarily closed.
The United Nations is authorized by its Security Council to use only a single border crossing — Bab al-Hawa — to move humanitarian supplies from Turkey into areas outside of Syrian government control in the country’s north.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for more access and told reporters Thursday that he would be “very happy” if the Security Council could agree to allow more crossing points to be used.
Turkey said it was working on opening two new routes into rebel-held parts of Syria.
Before the earthquakes, there were 15.3 million Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance because of the war and an economic crisis. The U.N. said that the quakes affected 10.9 million Syrians.
The Pentagon said Friday that the U.S. European Command has positioned military capabilities, personnel and equipment to assist the Turkish government in its search and rescue efforts. One of its teams arrived Thursday at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey at Ankara’s request, to assess how the U.S. military can rapidly respond with critically needed capabilities and equipment.
