Rescuer workers carry Kaan, a-13-year old Turkish teenager, to an ambulance after being rescued from the rubble after 182 hours, in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in Hatay, Turkey February 13, 2023. (Reuters)Turkey, Syria Earthquake News Highlights: Rescuers in Turkey pulled a handful of people alive from collapsed buildings on Monday and were digging to reach a grandmother, mother and daughter from a single family, a week after the country’s worst earthquake in modern history. Hopes of finding many more survivors were fading as the combined death toll in Turkey and neighbouring Syria from the 7.8 magnitude quake on Feb. 6 and a massive tremor just hours later climbed above 37,000. In the shattered Syrian city of Aleppo, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said the rescue phase was “coming to a close”, with the focus switching to shelter, food and schooling.
Turkish officials Sunday detained or issued arrest warrants for some 131 people allegedly involved in shoddy and illegal construction methods of collapsed buildings, news agency AP reported. Turkey’s justice minister has vowed to punish anyone responsible, and prosecutors have begun gathering samples of buildings for evidence on materials used in constructions.
Meanwhile, the seventh Operation Dost flight reached earthquake-hit Syria on Sunday with over 23 tons of relief material which was received by Deputy Minister of Local Administration & Environment Moutaz Douaji at Damascus airport. According to the Ministry of External Affairs, the flight is carrying more than 35 tons of relief material, of which over 23 tons is headed for relief efforts in Syria, and around 12 tons to Turkey.
The devastating earthquake to hit Turkey and Syria has fanned resentment among some Turks towards the millions of Syrian refugees in the country who are being blamed anecdotally by some for looting amid the destruction and chaos.
Several Turks in quake-hit towns and cities have accused Syrians of robbing damaged shops and homes. Anti-Syrian slogans such as "We don't want Syrians," "Immigrants should be deported," and "No longer welcome" trended on Twitter.
Syrians left homeless by the earthquake said they had been kicked out of emergency camps and a Syrian man opened a shelter in the city of Mersin just for his compatriots after they had faced racist slurs. (Reuters)
A 10-year-old girl was rescued from the rubble of an apartment block in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmaras on Monday, 183 hours after a devastating earthquake shook the region, state broadcaster TRT Haber reported. (Reuters)
Turkey will not allow a new influx of refugees from Syria after last week's devastating earthquake, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Monday.
"Claims that there is a new influx of refugees from Syria to Turkey (after the earthquake) are not true. We will not allow that; it is out of question," Cavusoglu said at a news conference in Ankara.
Cavusoglu was commenting on claims that Syrians were flooding into Turkey following last Monday's 7.8 magnitude earthquake which has killed more than 37,000 in the two countries. (Reuters)
Thousands left homeless by a massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria a week ago packed into crowded tents or lined up in the streets for hot meals Monday, while the desperate search for anyone still alive likely entered its last hours.
Thousands of local and overseas teams, including Turkish coal miners and experts aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, are scouring pulverized apartment blocks for signs of life.
While stories of near-miraculous rescues have flooded the airwaves in recent days — many broadcast live on Turkish television and beamed around the world — tens of thousands of dead have been found during the same period. Experts say given temperatures that have fallen to minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) — and the total collapse of so many buildings — the window for such rescues is nearly shut. (AP)
After years of war, residents of areas in northwest Syria struck by a massive earthquake are grappling with their new and worsening reality.
Almost one week after the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck northern Syria and neighboring Turkey, the United Nations has acknowledged an international failure to help Syrian quake victims.
In Atareb, a town that Syrian rebels still hold after years of fighting government troops, survivors dug through the debris of their homes Sunday, picking up the remnants of their shattered lives and looking for ways to heal after the latest in a series of humanitarian disasters to hit the war-battered area.Excavators lifted rubble and residents with shovels and picks destroyed columns to even out a demolished building. (AP)
Turkey's worst earthquake in almost a century has left a trail of destruction that could cost Ankara up to $84.1 billion, a business group said, while a government official put the figure at more than $50 billion.
The combined death toll in Turkey and Syria from last Monday's 7.8 magnitude quake approached 36,000 and looked set to rise, as the focus of the response switched from rescuing survivors trapped under the rubble to providing shelter, food and psychosocial care.
A report published at the weekend by the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation put the cost of the damage at $84.1 billion - $70.8 billion from the repair of thousands of homes, $10.4 billion from loss of national income and $2.9 billion from loss of working days. (Reuters)
The Nordlotus sailed from Turkey's Ceyhan oil export hub loaded with Azeri crude oil on Monday, the first since the series of earthquakes on Feb. 6, ship-tracking data showed and a trading source said.
Loading of Azerbaijani oil at Ceyhan resumed on Sunday, a spokeswoman for BP said. (Reuters)
Kevser said she could hear her two sons trapped beneath the rubble of their collapsed apartment building in the Turkish city of Antakya but for two days she was unable to find an emergency response leader to order their rescue.
"Everyone's saying they're not in charge. We can't find who's in charge," she said on Tuesday last week, standing on a downtown street where at least a dozen other buildings had collapsed. "I've been begging and begging for just one crane to lift the concrete."
"Time's running out. A crane, for God's sake."
When Reuters returned to the street a day later, neighbours said no more survivors had been pulled from the wreckage of the building.
Many in Turkey say more people could have survived the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck the south of the country and neighboring Syria a week ago if the emergency response had been faster and better organized. (Reuters)
A young girl named Miray was rescued from the rubble of an apartment block in the southern Turkish city of Adiyaman on Monday, 178 hours after a devastating earthquake shook the region, a minister and media reports said.
Broadcaster CNN Turk said the girl was six years old and that rescuers were also close to reaching her older sister. Turkish Transport Minister Adil Karaismailoglu had earlier said she was four years old. (Reuters)
Thousands who survived the earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria a week ago are pondering what comes next. While many have been evacuated from the devastated region, others are staying by wrecked homes and as the search for missing loved ones continues.Rescuers found a woman alive 174 hours after the first quake struck, but reports of rescues were coming less often as the time since the quake reaches the limits of the human body's ability to survive without water, especially in freezing temperatures.
The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes struck nine hours apart in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on Feb. 6. They killed over 35,000, with the toll expected to rise considerably as search teams find more bodies, and reduced much of towns and cities inhabited by millions to fragments of concrete and twisted metal.
On Monday rescuers from Istanbul pulled a woman named Naide Umay from a collapsed building in the hard-hit city of Antakya. Earlier, a 40-year-old woman was rescued from the wreckage of a 5-story building in the town of Islahiye, in Gaziantep province, while a 60-year old was rescued in Besni, in Adiyaman province. A week after the quakes hit, many people were still without shelter in the streets.
Some survivors were still waiting in front of collapsed buildings for the bodies of their loved ones to be retrieved.In the village of Polat, in Malatya province, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the epicenter, almost no houses were left standing. Residents were trying to salvage refrigerators, washing machines and other goods from wrecked homes.Resident Zehra Kurukafa said not enough tents had arrived, forcing up to four families to share the tents that were available. (AP)
In the Turkish town of Elbistan, a young man sat atop a pile of collapsed concrete and twisted metal, staring for half an hour at a small opening in the ruins of what had been his family’s home.
He did not want to speak.
“His mother and sister are still under the rubble,” a neighbour, Mustafa Bahcivan, said.
The stench of dead bodies wafted through the cold, dusty air in Elbistan, epicentre of a powerful aftershock that struck hours after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 33,000 people in Turkey and neighbouring Syria one week ago. Read more
The Turkey and Syria earthquake's rescue phase is 'coming to a close', with urgency now switching to providing shelter, food, schooling and psychosocial care, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths said during a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria on Monday.
"What is the most striking here, is even in Aleppo, which has suffered so much these many years, this moment, that moment... was about the worst that these people have experienced," Griffiths added.
The UN official also mentioned that the United Nations will have aid moving from government-held regions in Syria to the rebel-held northwest of the country - also devastated by the deadly earthquake. (Reuters)
The rescue phase in earthquake-hit Turkey and Syria is 'coming to a close', with priority now switching to providing shelter, food, schooling and psychosocial care, said United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths, news agency Reuters reported.
"What is the most striking here, is even in Aleppo, which has suffered so much these many years... was about the worst that these people have experienced," Griffiths added.
He mentioned that the United Nations will have aid moving from government-held regions in Syria to the rebel-held northwest of the country, which has been devastated by the earthquake.
More than 4,300 people were dead and over 7,600 others were injured in northwest Syria as of Feb. 12 following the deadly earthquake and aftershocks in neighbouring Turkey, the UN office for humanitarian affairs (OCHA) statement released on Monday claims.
Rescue workers in Syria's opposition-held northwest zones have revealed a lower toll as of Friday, and are anticipating announcing higher toll in the hours ahead, news agency Reuters reported.
Residents of areas in northwest Syria struck by a massive earthquake are grappling with their new and worsening reality.
In Atareb, a town that Syrian rebels still hold after years of fighting government troops, survivors dug through the debris of their homes Sunday, picking up the remnants of their shattered lives and looking for ways to heal after the latest in a series of humanitarian disasters to hit the war-battered area, according to news agency AP.
Syrians were doing what they have honed over years of crises: relying on themselves to pick up the pieces and move on., the report stated. “We are licking our own wounds,” Hekmat Hamoud, who had been displaced twice by Syria’s ongoing conflict before finding himself trapped for hours beneath rubble told AP.
Syria's northwestern rebel-held enclave, hosts 4 million people for years who have struggled to cope with ruthless airstrikes, rampant poverty and were already displaced from the ongoing conflict. They lived in crowded tent settlements or buildings weakened by past bombings. “l lost everything,” said father of two Fares Ahmed Abdo, 25, who survived the quake. But his new home and body shop where he fixed motorcycles for a living were destroyed. Once again with barely any shelter and no power nor toilets, he, his wife, two boys and ill mother are crammed in a small tent. “I am waiting for any help," he said, according to the AP report.
“We are trying to tell everyone, put politics aside. This is the time to unite behind the common effort to support the Syrian people," said Geir Pedersen, the U.N. special envoy for Syria who landed in Damascus on Sunday. At the United Nations, U.S. envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield called for an urgent U.S. Security Council vote to authorize the opening of additional cross-border passages into northwestern Syria." People in the affected areas are counting on us," she said in a statement.
Northwest Syria relies almost entirely on aid for survival, but post-quake international assistance has been slow to reach the area. (AP)
China Monday sent the second batch of supplies to earthquake-hit areas of Syria, according to a report by news agency Reuters.
It also asked Chinese rescue teams that have not left for disaster-hit zones in Turkey and Syria to cancel trips in order to ease the burden on rescue operations.
According to CCTV, "cotton tents, family kits, jackets and other daily necessities, as well as medical supplies, were being provided to Syria by the Red Cross Society of China."
As the death toll topped 33,000 in earthquake-hit Turkey and Syria, the Chinese government sent 82 members as part of the rescue operations and committed financial assistance to the countries. (Reuters)
The U.S. government on Sunday called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and all parties to immediately grant humanitarian access to all those in need across the country, Reuters reported.
"All humanitarian assistance must be permitted to move through all border crossings, and distribution of aid must be permitted to all affected areas without delay," a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.
Washington also urged Assad to follow through on a blanket authorization for humanitarian assistance deliveries. (Reuters)
Residents of Turkey Sunday expressed their frustration over delayed and "painfully slow" rescue operations after a pair of earthquakes hit the country last week. Sorrow and disbelief have turned to anger and tension over a sense that there has been an ineffective, unfair and disproportionate response to the historic disaster, according to a report by news agency AP. Many claim that valuable time has been lost during the narrow window for finding people alive beneath the rubble.
In the southern Hatay province near the Syrian border, people say that Turkey’s government was late in delivering assistance to the hardest-hit region for what they suspect are both political and religious reasons.This sentiment that not enough is being done to free people’s buried family members has taken hold in other parts of the earthquake zone as well (AP). Read more.
As rescuers still pulled a lucky few from the rubble six days after a pair of earthquakes devastated southeast Turkiye and northern Syria, Turkish officials detained or issued arrest warrants for some 130 people allegedly involved in the construction of buildings that toppled down and crushed their occupants.
The death toll from Monday's quakes stood at 28,191 — with another 80,000-plus injured — as of Sunday morning and was certain to rise as bodies kept emerging.
As despair also bred rage at the agonisingly slow rescue efforts, the focus turned to who was to blame for not better preparing people in the earthquake-prone region that includes an area of Syria that was already suffering from years of civil war.
Even though Turkiye has, on paper, construction codes that meet current earthquake-engineering standards, they are too rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings slumped onto their side or pancaked downward onto residents.
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said late on Saturday that warrants have been issued for the detention of 131 people suspected to being responsible for collapsed buildings.
Turkiye's justice minister has vowed to punish anyone responsible, and prosecutors have begun gathering samples of buildings for evidence on materials used in constructions. The quakes were powerful, but victims, experts and people across Turkey are blaming bad construction for multiplying the devastation.
Authorities arrested two people in the province of Gaziantep on Sunday who are suspected of having cut down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. (AP)
The impact of last week's earthquake on Turkey's growth domestic product (GDP) is unlikely to be as pronounced as after the earthquake that hit the country in 1999, IMF Executive Director Mahmoud Mohieldin told reporters on the sidelines of the Arab Fiscal Forum on Sunday.
Mohieldin added that, after the initial impact over the next few months, public and private sector investments in rebuilding could boost GDP growth going forward. (Reuters)
Two German aid organisations suspended rescue operations in quake-hit Turkey on Saturday, citing security problems and reports of clashes between groups of people and gunfire.
The German International Search and Rescue (ISAR) and Germany's Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) said they would resume their work as soon as Turkish civil protection agency AFAD classifies the situation as safe.
ISAR Operations Manager Steven Bayer said the security situation was slightly deteriorating as the days since the disaster wore on and this was typical in such circumstances. "That's partly due to the fact that food is now running out, water supply is running out, and then people are out searching for food and water," he said, speaking at a camp for rescue workers in the town of Kirikhan.
"A second thing is that the hope that people had is now increasingly fading, and that hope can then also turn into anger." (Reuters)
Collapsed apartment buildings, rubble strewed across streets, families sheltered in tents in a soccer stadium: Initial imagery shows widespread destruction in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, a city of about 400,000 located between the epicenter of the devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake Monday and the unusually strong aftershock that struck hours later.
Using satellite imagery, The New York Times identified nearly 200 buildings in central Kahramanmaras, also known as Marash, that showed clear signs of destruction. The downtown district with taller buildings was hit particularly hard, while residential areas outside the city’s center had less apparent destruction.
The damage in Marash is just a sliver of the wreckage seen across southern Turkey and northwestern Syria. The earthquake was one of the most powerful ever recorded in the region, about the same magnitude as a 1939 earthquake in Turkey that killed more than 30,000 people. (Read More)
The European Union's envoy to Syria said early on Sunday that it was not fair to accuse the group of failing to provide enough help to Syrians following the earthquake that devastated large parts of Syria and Turkey last week.
Dan Stoenescu told Reuters the bloc and its member states have gathered more than 50 million euros to provide aid and back rescue missions and first aid in both government-held and rebel-controlled parts of Syria.
The Syrian government, which is under Western sanctions, has appealed for U.N. aid while saying all assistance must be done in coordination with Damascus and delivered from within Syria, not across the Turkish border into rebel areas. Some observers have accused Damascus of directing aid towards loyalist areas.
Stoenescu said the EU was encouraging member states to provide help and that sanctions "do not impede the delivery of humanitarian aid." The EU was seeking "sufficient safeguards" to ensure that help provided would reach vulnerable people, Stoenescu said, adding the Syrian government had a "record of aid diversion." (Reuters)
Traffic jams, water-filled underpasses, hills of concrete and rubble, buildings with deep cracks and people rendered homeless in sub-zero temperatures – the images of devastation filed past as the Indian Army’s 99-member medical team undertook an arduous five-hour drive to the quake-hit city of Iskenderun, in southern Turkey’s Hatay province, minutes after they landed in the country.
After an eight-hour-long flight from India, the Army’s 60 Para Field Hospital unit had landed in Turkey in two separate batches on Tuesday, just hours after a massive earthquake struck Turkey and killed nearly 19,000 people and injured thousands. The team had almost immediately set off for Iskenderun.
At Iskenderun, the job at hand was urgent: to find a building without cracks. Speaking to The Sunday Express from Iskenderun, Lt. Col. Yaduvir Singh, commanding officer of the 60 Para Field Hospital, said, “We found a steady school building without cracks close to a hospital. It took us nearly five hours to set up the hospital. By evening, we were ready to see patients.” (Read More)
Volunteers struggling to find ever fewer survivors in the quake-hit Turkish city of Antakya said on Saturday ransacking and hygiene problems were adding to their daunting task.
One resident, searching for a colleague buried in a collapsed building, said he witnessed looting in the first days after Monday’s quake before leaving the city for a village.
“People were smashing the windows and fences of shops and cars,” said Mehmet Bok, 26, now back in Antakya and searching for a work colleague in a collapsed building. (Read More)
The family of Vijay Kumar, who died in the earthquake in Turkey, is in shock. A resident of Kotdwar in Uttarakhand, Vijay Kumar was on a business trip to Turkey when the earthquake struck. His mortal remains were found and identified among the debris of a hotel in Malatya. He left Kotdwar on January 23.
Kumar's family members were in deep shock as they came to know of the tragic news. They cried inconsolably. Neighbours and relatives came to Kumar's residence to express their condolences.
Vijay Kumar is survived by his mother, wife, and six-year-old child. He had lost his father about one-and a half months back. The Indian Embassy in Turkey informed on Saturday that mortal remains of Kumar have been found. (ANI)
The Indian Army has set up a field hospital in the Hatay region of Iskenderun in earthquake-hit Turkey to help victims, as part of the ongoing 'Operation Dost'. The Army has been providing medical aid and relief material to the people in a school building where the 60 Para Field hospital has been set up.
Lieutenant Colonel Adarsh, second-in-command, 60 Para Field Hospital, said that their team consists of 96 persons and has orthopaedic specialists, surgeons, and maxillofacial surgeons to take care of multi-trauma cases that are expected in such a disaster. He said that they have performed 10 surgeries, including the amputation of a patient who had recovered from the rubble. (ANI)
Turkey and Armenia opened their border gate for the first time in 30 years for the passage of humanitarian aid for the victims affected by the devastating earthquakes that hit the former, Anadolu Agency reported.
Taking to Twitter, Turkey's special representative for normalization talks with Armenia, Serdar Kilic said that the Armenia delegation with five trucks overloaded with 100 tonnes of food, medicine and drinking water passed through the Alican border gate.
Relations between Turkey and Armenia have been strained for decades and the land border between the two neighbours has been closed since 1993, in the wake of clashes between Armenians and ethnically Turkic Azerbaijan, Al Jazeera reported.
Since the 1990s, the relationship between the two countries is primarily at odds as over 1.5 million people in Armenia says were killed in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor to modern Turkey. Armenia says this constitutes genocide.
The seventh Operation Dost flight reached earthquake-hit Syria on Sunday with over 23 tons of relief material which was received by Deputy Minister of Local Administration & Environment Moutaz Douaji at Damascus airport.
The seventh Operation Dost flight on Saturday departed for earthquake-hit Syria and Turkey. The Indian Air Force C17 carrying relief material, medical aid, emergency and critical care medicines, medical equipment and consumables took off from Hindon Airbase in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad.
The IAF aircraft with relief materials, medical aid, and emergency and critical care medicines will first land in Syria and unload materials and then head to Turkey. EAM S Jaishankar also took to his Twitter handle to talk about the flight departing from Ghaziabad. (ANI)