Miraculously saved lives, improvised morgues and a difficult security situation: relief efforts continued on Saturday in Turkey and Syria after the powerful earthquake which killed more than 25,000 people and made millions homeless according to the latest official reports from the day.
In the winter cold, rescuers continued to extricate living people, including children, from the rubble five days after the disaster.
But the Austrian army announced the suspension of its rescue operations in the affected Turkish areas, citing “the security situation” on the spot.
“There have been attacks between groups,” theFrance Media Agency a spokesman in Vienna, without giving further details on these incidents. The 82 Austrian soldiers took shelter in a base camp in the province of Hatay “with other international organizations, pending instructions”, he added.
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has meanwhile arrived in the Syrian city of Aleppo, hard hit by the earthquake, to visit several hospitals and shelters with Syrian authorities. , said the official Sana agency.
According to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting the city of Sanliurfa (southeast), 21,848 bodies have been found at this stage in Turkey, while the authorities have counted 3,553 dead in Syria.
The WHO estimates that 23 million people in the two countries 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 Syrian government on Friday authorized “the delivery of humanitarian aid to the whole” of the country – including areas held by the rebels – where 5.3 million people are at risk of becoming homeless according to the UN.
In Turkey, a two-year-old girl, Asya, was rescued in the province of Hatay (south), according to Turkish media, but her family has not yet been found.
“Is the world there? »
Rescuers also pulled a 70-year-old woman, Mnekse Tabak, in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province alive from the rubble, amid cheers and cries of “Allah is great”, according to a video broadcast by public broadcaster TRT Haber. “Is the world there? she asked as she came back to daylight.
Anadolu news agency reported on the rescue of 35-year-old mother Ozlem Yilmaz and her six-year-old daughter Hatice from a collapsed building in Adiyaman province. An American doctor gave them first aid before they were taken to a hospital.
A German NGO has announced the death from her injuries of a 40-year-old woman found alive in Kirikhan (southern Turkey) after more than 100 hours under the rubble.
In the south of the country, it was necessary to resort to improvised morgues in car parks, stadiums or gymnasiums, where anguished families search for their dead.
“May God help me find her,” sighs Tuba Yolcu, without news from her aunt, in a sports complex in Kahramanmaras where the bodies are deposited.
According to the Turkish agency in charge of natural disasters, nearly 32,000 people are mobilized for search and rescue operations, as well as more than 8,000 foreign rescue workers. More than 25,000 Turkish military personnel are also in the affected areas, according to Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar.
If humanitarian aid from abroad flows into Turkey, access to Syria at war, whose regime is under international sanctions, is more complicated.
“The Council of Ministers has accepted the delivery of humanitarian aid to the whole” of Syrian territory, “including areas outside the control of the State”, announced the Syrian government.
Damascus specified that the distribution of the aid should be “supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Red Crescent”, with the support of the UN.
Until then, almost all the aid provided to the rebel areas transited in dribs and drabs, from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa crossing point, the only one currently guaranteed by the United Nations.
On the Syrian coast, Jableh, a stronghold of the regime in the province of Latakia (northwest), was relatively spared from the hostilities, but the violence of the earthquake made the city unrecognizable.
“This is the first disaster of its kind in Jableh. I am 52 years old and I have never experienced anything like this,” says Abdelhadi al-Ajji, a father of four whose cracked house overlooks a collapsed building.