Turkey Syria earthquake death toll rises above 16,000

ANTAKYA, Turkey: Freezing temperatures deepened the misery Thursday for survivors of a massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed more than 16,000 people, as rescuers raced to save countless people still trapped under rubble.

The death toll from Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake is expected to rise sharply as rescue efforts pass the 72-hour mark that disaster experts consider the most likely period to save lives.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday conceded “shortcomings” after criticism of his government’s response to the earthquake, one of the deadliest this century.

Survivors have been left to scramble for food and shelter — and in some cases watch helplessly as their relatives called for rescue, and eventually went silent under the debris.

“My nephew, my sisters-in-law are in the ruins. They are trapped under the ruins and there is no sign of life,” said Semire Coban, a kindergarten teacher, in Turkey’s Hatay province.

“We can’t reach them. We are trying to talk to them, but they are not responding… We are waiting for help. It has been 48 hours now,” she said.

Still, rescuers kept pulling survivors from the debris as the death toll continued to rise.

Twitter access returned on Thursday morning after the social network did not work on Turkish mobile networks for several hours Wednesday, according to AFP journalists and the NetBlocks web monitoring group.

Turkish officials had held talks with Twitter leaders after which deputy infrastructure minister Omer Fatih Sayan tweeted Thursday that Turkey expected the social network to cooperate more in the “fight against disinformation”.

Officials and medics said 12,873 people had died in Turkey and at least 3,162 in neighbouring Syria from Monday’s quake, bringing the total to 16,035. Experts fear the number will continue to rise sharply.

In Brussels, the EU is planning a donor conference in March to mobilise international aid for Syria and Turkey.

“We are now racing against the clock to save lives together,” EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Twitter. “No one should be left alone when a tragedy like this hits a people,” she said.

Due to the scale of the damage and the lack of help coming to certain areas, survivors said they felt alone in responding to the disaster.

“Even the buildings that haven’t collapsed were severely damaged. There are now more people under the rubble than those above it,” Hassan, who did not provide his full name, said in his rebel-held Syrian town of Jindayris.

“There are around 400-500 people trapped under each collapsed building, with only 10 people trying to pull them out. And there is no machinery,” he added.

The White Helmets, leading efforts to rescue people buried under rubble in rebel-held areas of Syria, have appealed for international help in their “race against time”.

They have been toiling since the quake to pull survivors out from under the debris of dozens of flattened buildings in northwestern areas of war-torn Syria that remain outside the government’s control.

A leading UN official called for the facilitation of aid access to rebel-held areas in the northwest, warning that relief stocks will soon be depleted.

“Put politics aside and let us do our humanitarian work,” the UN’s resident Syria coordinator El-Mostafa Benlamlih told AFP in an interview.