A first aid convoy entered Syria on Tuesday heading for the rebel areas in the north, eight days after the earthquake which killed nearly 40,000 people in this country and in Turkey, “the worst natural disaster in a century in Europe” , according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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On the same day, the UN Secretary General launched an appeal for donations of nearly 400 million dollars to meet over “a period of three months” the “tremendous needs” of the populations affected by the earthquake in Syria.
Antonio Guterres urged all United Nations member states to provide this sum “without delay” to guarantee “humanitarian aid which almost five million Syrians desperately need”, starting with “shelter, medical care, food”.
“We all know that life-saving aid is not coming in at the speed and scale needed,” he insisted, adding that there should soon be a similar appeal for Turkey. .
“We are witnessing the worst natural disaster in the WHO Europe region in a century and we are still measuring its magnitude,” said an official from the World Health Organization. health.
And its balance sheet is growing inexorably, it could even double, warned the UN on Sunday.
As of Tuesday evening, the death toll stood at 39,106 – 35,418 officially in southern Turkey, while authorities counted 3,688 in Syria.
A rare cause for consolation for rescuers, four people were still able to be extracted alive from the rubble on Tuesday in Turkey.
Like this couple of Syrians in Antakya, the Antioch of Antiquity, one of the Turkish cities that suffered the most from the earthquake, who exclaimed “Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest”!) once saved, about 210 hours after the earthquake of magnitude 7.8 on February 6, testified an AFP photographer.
Earlier, two younger brothers were also able to get out into the open after spending 198 hours trapped under rubble.
Aged 17 and 21 respectively, they said they survived by consuming protein powder.
“I was calm. I knew I would be saved. I prayed. It was possible to breathe under the ruins, ”said one of them, quoted by the NTV television channel.
But, despite these veritable little miracles, the chances of still finding survivors in the collapsed buildings become almost nil.
“The teams that came to search here made it clear that they were looking for the living. They worked for two days without finding any”, laments for his part Tuesday in Antakya a soldier soon to be in his fifties, Cengiz, five of whom are close to him buried in the rubble.
“We understand that we favor living people, but we have the right to claim the remains of our loved ones,” adds, resigned, Husein, who hoped to find his brother’s wife and their four children.
In these circumstances, the priority now is to care for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people whose homes were destroyed by the earthquake.
“We have met the accommodation needs of 1.6 million people. Nearly 2.2 million have been evacuated or left the (affected) provinces of their own free will,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday after a government meeting.
In addition to the extreme material deprivation of those affected, there is psychological distress, which hits the youngest hardest.
More than seven million children – 4.6 in Turkey and 2.5 in Syria – live in the affected areas, UNICEF said.
On the Syrian side, for the first time since 2020, a convoy carrying aid was heading towards the rebel areas in the north on Tuesday through the Bab al-Salama border post with Turkey, an AFP journalist saw.
It consists of 11 trucks from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) loaded with, among other things, tents, mattresses, blankets and mats.
The Bab al-Salama border crossing connects Turkish territory to the north of the province of Aleppo controlled by Syrian factions loyal to Ankara. It had been closed to UN humanitarian aid under pressure from Russia, an ally of the Damascus regime.
Areas beyond the control of the latter in the north of the province of Aleppo and in that of Idleb (north-west), where nearly three million people live, are among the most devastated by the earthquake in Syria .
This country had previously announced the opening, for an initial period of three months, of two new crossing points with Turkey in order to speed up the arrival of humanitarian aid.
The UN Secretary General welcomed this decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad which “will allow more aid to enter, faster”.
A United Nations delegation arrived at the same time on Tuesday to assess the needs of these hard-hit regions, according to an AFP correspondent.
According to the Syrian Ministry of Transport, 62 planes carrying aid have so far landed in Syria, including one from Saudi Arabia, the first in ten years.