Pain, grief and anger among the rubble: Euronews reports on the Turkey & Syria earthquakes
By Euronews Brussels bureau
In Antakya, the cemeteries have run out of room to bury the dead.
Mass graves are appearing across the city in Southern Turkey, triggering an effort to collect DNA samples from the unidentified bodies so that their families can one day give them a proper send-off.
Those who were fortunate enough to survive the 7.8-magnitude earthquake are now scrambling to make it to the next day as the absolute devastation turns consumes daily life.
“People are basically sleeping rough in their cars and in tents. But there aren’t enough tents to go around. Many are sleeping out in the open and it gets quite cold at night,” Euronews correspondent Anelise Borges reports from Antakya, one of the worst-hit cities by the earthquake.
“Authorities here are well aware that this is very much a race against time to both bury the dead but also to keep the living alive.”
The scale of the tragedy is practically unfathomable: at the time of writing, more than 36,000 people have died in Turkey, while the number of wounded exceeds 100,000 and is expected to keep rising.
In neighbouring Syria, over 5,800 people have lost their lives, compounding a humanitarian crisis that has been raging since the start of a bloody civil war back in 2011.
Ten days after the earthquakes hit and forever changed both countries, rescue efforts continue in a race against time, driven by the hope of finding survivors among the rubble.
Anelise saw first-hand the endeavours of these workers, many of them volunteers with no previous experience. One day, she recalls, the team asked everyone to stay quiet. They had heard some noises coming through the debris – a possible sign of life – and were desperate to know the exact location. The engines of cars and diggers were turned off, and family members were called in to guide rescuers through the building plan.
“But the miracle many hoped for wasn’t meant to happen tonight,” Anelise said. The hint of life turned out to be a false alarm that wasted precious hours of work.
“The pain that is already immense grew just a little larger, as if the wave of hate and destruction submerging this country didn’t want to recede.”
Stories like this one, ridden with despair and sorrow, have fuelled the anger of Turks, who, shocked by the ease with which hundreds of buildings collapsed, demand answers from the government and decry the slow pace of relief operations.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime target of the criticism, has admitted “shortcomings” in the response but also said that no other government could have done it better. The catastrophe has brought his centralised system, often defined as a one-man rule, under renewed scrutiny, giving the opposition a powerful argument to mount a presidential challenge in this year’s elections.
The country, however, is not thinking about politics.
“Here in the city of Adana, most hospitals are operating at capacity and many family members are literally camping out on site, waiting for their loved ones to recover. Many of them are survivors themselves, still haunted by what they went through last week,” Anelise tells us in her latest report.
There, she met with Halil Ibrahim Gokpinar, who told her how he spent 20 minutes trying to get her wife Cigdemn and child out of the rubble in the city of Kahramanmaras, using his own bare hands.
“Her lips were purple. It was clear she was lacking oxygen and blood. She was not responding to my voice,” Halil said, fighting back tears.
“When we got to the hospital it is not possible to describe: it was horror,” he went on. “We took my wife inside. Forget about beds, chairs, stretchers. There was no room to put her in because of the dead bodies and patients. I had to push people aside and put her on the floor.”
Halil’s wife underwent surgery on Tuesday and is still in the ICU, offering a modest glimmer of hope in the midst of breathtaking desolation.
HELP OUT If you wish to donate to aid efforts in Turkey and Syria, we recommend you to check out established international organisations such as the World Health Programme, UNICEF or the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. |
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