kahramanmaras [Turkey]: Rescuers pulled children from the rubble of the Turkey-Syria earthquake on Friday (local time), as the death toll crossed 24,000, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported. The confirmed death toll from the region’s deadliest quake in two decades exceeded 24,000 four days after it hit southern Turkey and northwest Syria. The stench of death hung over Turkey’s eastern city of Kahmanaras – the epicenter of the first 7.8-magnitude earthquake that killed millions before dawn on Monday. As France24 reports, it is located in a remote area full of people already displaced by the war.
Meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to this week’s massive earthquake. Erdogan visited Turkey’s Adiyaman province on Friday, where he acknowledged the government’s response was not as swift as it could have been.
“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as rapid as we would like,” he said. Erdogan is up for re-election in a May 14 vote and his opponents have seized on the issue to attack him.
The election may now be postponed due to the disaster. The disaster is likely to play into the election if it goes ahead, with anger over the delay in aid delivery and the continuation of rescue efforts. Erdogan, for whom the vote was his toughest challenge in two decades in power even before the quake, called for solidarity and condemned what he described as a “negative campaign for political expediency”.
The head of Turkey’s main opposition party, Kemal Kilikdaroglu, criticized the government’s response. “The earthquake was huge, but what was even bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” Kilikdaroglu said in a statement. Hundreds more people have been left homeless and food has run short in the harsh winter conditions, SMH reports, and leaders of both countries have faced questions about their response. Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day among thousands of crumbling buildings to find people buried in the rubble. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sounds of life from the crumbling concrete mound. The United Nations warned that at least 870,000 people across Turkey and Syria are in urgent need of hot food. In Syria alone, 5.3 million people could be rendered homeless. “This is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering massive displacement,” said Shivanka Dhanapala, Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first visit 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 front lines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed the arrival of help for millions of desperate people. The World Food Program had earlier said that its stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria were running out because of the war situation, SMH reported.