More than seven million children are affected by the devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria, UNICEF said on Tuesday, fearing that several thousand of them may have lost their lives.
“In Turkey, the total number of children living in the ten provinces affected by the two earthquakes was 4.6 million children. In Syria, 2.5 million children are affected,” James Elder, a spokesperson for the organization, told a regular press briefing in Geneva.
“Children and families desperately need additional support. Many staff from our local partner organizations and frontline responders have been killed, injured, displaced, and their offices and equipment destroyed,” he added.
UNICEF fears that “several thousand children have been killed”. These figures, explained the spokesperson, have not been verified but it is clear that they “will continue to increase”.
According to UNICEF, tens of thousands of families, living outdoors in open areas, are exposed to the cold. “Every day there are reports of increasing numbers of children suffering from hypothermia and respiratory infections,” Elder James said, noting that families are sleeping with children in the streets, malls, schools , mosques, bus stations and under bridges.
In Turkey, UNICEF, in coordination with the Ministry of Family and Social Services, has deployed social workers to hospitals to help identify unaccompanied and separated children. In addition, the organization launched ten new helplines for unaccompanied and separated children.
Alongside these efforts, UNICEF is also working with partners to provide affected children with psychosocial support.
In Syria, he said, “every child under the age of 12 has known only conflict, violence or displacement. Some children have been moved six or seven times”.
According to UNICEF, more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees were registered in the ten affected provinces of Turkey, of which 811,000 are children.