Many Rescued Days after Turkey-Syria Earthquake But Death Toll Tops 23,700
Editor
11 February 2023 13:12 WIB
TEMPO.CO, Antakya - Rescue crews saved a 10-day-old baby and his mother trapped in the ruins of a building in Turkey on Friday. They also dug several people out from other sites as President Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to this week's huge earthquake.
The confirmed death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades stood at more than 23,700 across southern Turkey and northwest Syria four days after it hit.
Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to affected areas since the quake, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma, state media reported.
His government also approved humanitarian aid deliveries across the frontlines of the country's 12-year civil war, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of desperate people. The World Food Programme said earlier it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war complicated relief efforts.
The earthquake, which struck in the early hours of Monday, ranks as the seventh most deadly natural disaster this century, ahead of Japan's 2011 tremor and tsunami and approaching the 31,000 killed by a quake in neighboring Iran in 2003.
Erdogan on Friday visited Turkey's Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged the government's response was not as fast 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 fast as we wanted them to be," he said.
He also said looting of shops had taken place in some areas.
The death toll from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and several powerful aftershocks across both countries has surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Turkey.
The country's health minister said that the number of deaths in Turkey rose to 20,213 on Friday. In Syria, more than 3,500 have been killed. Many more people remain under the rubble.
Hope amid the ruins
Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.
In the Samandag district of Turkey, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispering "Inshallah" (God willing), carefully reached into the rubble and picked out a 10-day-old newborn.
