Three children were rescued on Friday, but hopes of finding other survivors dimmed Friday in Turkey and Syria, some 100 hours after the massive quake that killed more than 22,300 people in one of the worst disasters that have occurred in the region for a century.
International humanitarian aid is flowing into Turkey – Germany notably announced on Friday the sending of 90 tons of material by plane – but access to Syria at war, whose regime is under international sanctions, is much more complicated.
Almost all the humanitarian aid destined for the rebel areas is sent from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa crossing, the only one currently guaranteed by the UN.
Turkish diplomacy says it is working to open two other crossing points “with the regions under government control” of Damascus, “for humanitarian reasons”.
The UN had indicated on Tuesday that the transport through this border post was disrupted due to damaged roads.
For his part, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced Thursday that he was “on his way to Syria”. The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, arrived the same day in Aleppo, Syria.
“Delivered to Ourselves”
On both sides of the border, thousands of homes are destroyed and rescuers are stepping up their efforts to search for survivors, even if the crucial window of the first 72 hours to find survivors has closed.
However, Friday in Antakya, “at the 105e hour” after the quake, rescuers extracted alive an 18-month-old infant, Yusuf Huseyin, from the debris of a three-storey building, then 20 minutes later his brother Muhammed Huseyin, according to the NTV channel.
And two hours earlier, Zeynep Ela Parlak, a three-year-old girl, had already been rescued in this city destroyed by the earthquake.
The situation, aggravated by freezing cold, is such that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in armed struggle against the Turkish army since 1984, decided on Friday “not to carry out any operation as long as the Turkish State does not not attack”, according to Cemil Bayik, an official quoted by the Firat agency, close to the PKK. “Thousands of our people are still under the rubble. […] Everyone must mobilize all their means”.
In Antakya, about thirty miners arrived on Thursday after traveling a thousand kilometers to lend a hand, equipped with pickaxes, shovels, maces, hacksaws and crowbars.
On Thursday in Samandag, in the province of Hatay, the emergency services were able to free a 10-day-old baby and his mother alive after 90 hours under the rubble, according to the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu.
Many survivors criticize the slow government response. “I didn’t see anyone before 2 p.m. on the second day of the earthquake”, 34 hours after the first shock, accuses Mehmet Yildirim. “No state, no police, no soldiers. Shame on you ! You left us on our own”.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sketched out a form of mea culpa on Friday. “The destruction affected so many buildings […] that unfortunately, we were not able to carry out our interventions as quickly as hoped”, declared the Head of State on a visit to the city of Adiyaman, very affected by the disaster.
In Cyprus, the first bodies of Turkish-Cypriot victims excavated from the rubble after the earthquake in Turkey were repatriated to the island on Friday, including those of seven teenage volleyball players who were taking part in a tournament, local television announced.
The hotel in which the group (24 young people aged 11 to 14, four of their teachers, a coach and 10 parents) were staying in Adiyaman, in southern Turkey, has completely collapsed. According to the Turkish channel NTV, “the bodies of 19 young people (from the group) were discovered under the rubble”.
Cholera risk
According to the latest official reports, the earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8, followed by more than a hundred tremors, killed at least 22,368 people, including 18,991 in Turkey and 3,377 (status unchanged since Thursday) in Syria.
The WHO estimates that 23 million people are “potentially exposed, including around five million vulnerable people”, and fears a major health crisis that would cause more damage than the earthquake.
Humanitarian organizations are particularly worried about the spread of cholera, which has reappeared in Syria.
The EU sent first aid to Turkey hours after the quake on Monday. But it initially offered only minimal aid to Syria through existing humanitarian programs, due to international sanctions in place since the civil war began in 2011.
On Wednesday, Damascus officially requested EU assistance. The European Commission has asked Member States to respond favourably.
The World Bank announced Thursday that it will provide $1.78 billion in aid to Turkey and Washington an envelope of $85 million to Turkey and Syria. The US Treasury Department also announced the temporary lifting of certain sanctions imposed on Syria, with the aim of seeing aid reach the affected populations as quickly as possible.
France, four nationals of which perished in the earthquake, will release emergency aid to the Syrian population to the tune of 12 million euros. For its part, London announced on Thursday additional financial aid of at least 3.4 million euros, for a total amount of nearly 4.3 million euros allocated to the White Helmets, an organization operating in rebel areas.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma visited Friday the bedside of earthquake victims in Aleppo, for the first time since the earthquake, according to the presidency.