More than 3,600 people, according to provisional reports, were killed on Monday in southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria by a powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.8, followed a few hours later by a strong aftershock, and international aid was mobilizing after these tremors while the relief operations were hampered by the cold and the night.
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In Turkey, the provisional toll rose Monday evening to 2,316 dead, according to the public body for disaster management (Afad). And in Syria the death toll has reached nearly 1,300, according to the Ministry of Health and rescue workers.
In Turkey, 7,340 people had been extracted alive from the rubble on Monday evening, according to Afad.
This death toll continues to grow, with large numbers of people remaining trapped under the collapsed buildings which number in the thousands. The rain and snow, which fell in some places in abundance, and the expected drop in temperatures with nightfall made Monday evening even more difficult the work of the relief workers.
Under these conditions, the World Health Organization said it expected a much higher final toll. “We often see numbers eight times higher than the initial numbers,” an emergency manager at the WHO’s European office, Catherine Smallwood, told AFP.
- Listen to the chronicle of Loïc Tassé, specialist in international politics at the microphone of Benoit Dutrizac on QUB-radio :
The first tremor occurred at 4:17 a.m. local time (1:17 a.m. GMT), in the district of Pazarcik, in the province of Kahramanmaras (southeast), about 60 km as the crow flies from the Syrian border.
Dozens of aftershocks followed, before a new earthquake of magnitude 7.5, at 10:24 GMT, still in southeastern Turkey, 4 km southeast of the town of Ekinozu.
“Everything fell apart”
“With my wife and children, we ran to the door of our apartment on the third floor. As soon as we opened it, the whole building collapsed,” said Oussama Abdelhamid, a resident of a Syrian village bordering Turkey, treated at Al-Rahma hospital in the city of Darkouch. He “miraculously” survived with his family.
In these areas held by the rebels fighting the Damascus regime, there are at least 700 dead.
In Sanliurfa, a city in southeastern Turkey, on the edge of a large boulevard, dozens of rescuers were trying in the evening to extract survivors from a seven-storey building reduced to nothing.
“There is a family that I know under the rubble,” Ömer El Cüneyd, a 20-year-old Syrian student who lives nearby, told AFP.
Monday evening, residents were preparing to spend the night outside, despite temperatures felt below zero degrees, AFP noted.
“We have nowhere to go, we are afraid,” said Mehmet Emin Kiliç, gathered around a fire at the foot of a building in his neighborhood with his wife, four children and other members of his family. family.
The same scenes were visible during the day in Diyarbakir, the large Kurdish-majority city in southeastern Turkey.
“My sister and her three children are under the rubble. Also her husband, father-in-law and mother-in-law. Seven members of our family are under the debris,” said Muhittin Orakci to AFP in the morning, in front of a collapsed building.
The balance sheet is still likely to evolve in the affected cities, Adana, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir in particular. In Iskenderun and Adiyaman, public hospitals collapsed under the effect of the earthquake, which occurred at a depth of about 17.9 kilometers.
“apocalypse”
This earthquake is the largest in Turkey since the earthquake of August 17, 1999, which caused the death of 17,000 people, including a thousand in Istanbul.
The bad weather in this mountainous region paralyzes the main airports around Diyarbakir and Malatya, where it continues to snow very heavily, leaving the survivors haggard in the cold.
Everywhere the inhabitants are mobilizing and trying to clear the ruins with their bare hands, using buckets to evacuate the debris.
In Hama, Syria, rescuers and civilians extract by hand, helped by heavy machinery, the bodies of victims under the rubble, including that of a child, AFP noted.
In Jandairis (north-west), a man, collapsed, mourns the death of his son, a very small boy bundled up in an anorak, whom he hugs.
“Ya Allah, Ya Allah” (my God), sobbed the man, kissing his son’s forehead.
More than forty homes collapsed like a house of cards in this border town of Turkey.
“My whole family is under the rubble. My sons, my daughter, my son-in-law, there is no one to take them out, ”breathes another man, Ali Battal, traces of blood on his face.
Biden, Xi, Putin
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for national unity, saying Turkey had received offers of aid from 45 countries. He decreed a seven-day national mourning.
As for the Syrian government, it appealed to the international community for help.
Messages of support poured in from around the world, from US President Joe Biden to his Russian counterparts Vladimir Putin and Chinese Xi Jinping, to Pope Francis who said he was “deeply saddened”, as well as offers of humanitarian aid. and medical.
“Our teams are on the ground to assess needs and provide assistance,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement, appealing to the international community as a minute’s silence was observed at the United Nations General Assembly.
AFP
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres
Two American detachments of 79 rescue workers each were preparing to leave for Turkey on Monday, the White House said.
The Kremlin, an ally of Syria, has indicated that rescue teams will leave for this country “in the next few hours”, while according to the army, more than 300 Russian soldiers are already on the scene to help with the relief.
The Kremlin also indicated that the Turkish president had accepted, after a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “the help of Russian rescuers”.
Greece, despite its stormy relations with its neighbour, promised “to make available (…) all its forces to come to the aid of Turkey” and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called Mr. Erdogan to offer him a ” immediate help.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that he has satisfied a request for help from Syria, with which the Jewish state does not have diplomatic relations. Damascus denied.
The European Union has activated its “civil protection mechanism” and “teams from the Netherlands and Romania are already on the way” as well as in particular 139 French rescuers who must leave in the evening and 76 Polish firefighters. Azerbaijan, an ally and neighbor of Turkey, announced the immediate dispatch of 370 rescuers, Qatar and the Emirates as well as India that of rescue and medical teams and relief equipment. It is up to Ukraine at war which proposed “a large group of rescuers”.
Citadel of Aleppo
In Aleppo, Syria’s second city, dozens of families have remained since the earthquake at dawn in public gardens despite the torrential rains, fearing aftershocks, noted an AFP photographer. Many buildings in the city collapsed and the famous citadel which surmounts the city was damaged.
In the neighborhood of al-Shaar, Mohammad al-Bouchi, a 30-year-old with a rain-soaked hat and leather jacket, anxiously watches the rescuers at work. “I have six relatives in this building, and no way to communicate with them. I call them on the phone and no one answers,” he said.
In Turkey, the heaviest damage was recorded near the epicenter of the night’s quake, between Kahramanmaras and Gaziantep, where entire city blocks lay in ruins under snow.
The tremors, felt throughout the south-east of the country, were also felt in Lebanon and Cyprus, according to AFP correspondents, as well as in Iraqi Kurdistan in the north of the country in Erbil and Douk, but none victim was not reported.
According to the Danish Geological Institute, the tremors were felt as far away as Greenland.
Turkey is located on one of the most active seismic zones in the world.