Earthquake
For Syrian women, quake adds disaster on top of war’s pain
Draped in a heavy wool shawl against the cold, Ayesha dragged her feet, her toddler granddaughter trailing behind her, as they made the 15-minute walk from her tent to the nearest bathroom in a nearby building, the only place they have to wash.
Seven days after the earthquake leveled their home in the northwest Syrian town of Atareb, the 43-year-old still has no access to water, electricity or heat for her and 12 family members, all crammed into a single tent.
“When I look at our house, I wonder how did anyone come out alive?” Ayesha said. “Maybe it would have been better if I died,” she added. “I came from under that rubble carrying the rubble of the whole world on my shoulders.”
She doesn’t know how much more she and other Syrians can take. Women in particular have shouldered the responsibility of keeping shattered families together during the past 12 years of civil war. The conflict and economic collapse left millions of people dependent on international aid. Now added to the litany of hardships is destruction from the earthquake, which killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless in southern Turkey and northern Syria.
Also Read: Newborn saved from rubble in quake-hit Syria in good health
With hospitals swamped by quake victims, Ayesha can’t get medical services to treat and monitor her liver disease. She and her husband both lost their sources of income in the quake. His taxi was crushed, and her stock of clothes that she once sold to neighbors was destroyed.
They have nothing to provide for their six children and their five grandchildren, including two she took in after one of her sons was killed in the war. They have to share mattresses to sleep in their tent.
“If hardships are a sign of the love of God, it means God really loves the Syrian people,” Ayesha said, breaking out in tears. Like most women in this conservative community, she spoke on condition her last name be withheld.
Also Read: After quake, war-hit Syrians struggle to get aid, rebuild
Their tent is in a camp for quake victims in Atareb, part of the last opposition-held territory in northwest Syria, which has seen bombardment and fighting for years. Walking between rows of destroyed homes in the town, it is hard to distinguish which collapsed from the quake and which from intense military operations at the height of fighting.
Syria’s war has loaded a particular burden and isolation on women, with so many men who were killed, detained, maimed or forced out of the country. The number of female-headed households across Syria increased by around 80% to comprise more than a fifth of households in 2020, according to the U.N.
Even before the quake, over 7 million women and girls across Syria needed critical health services and support against physical and sexual violence. Child marriage was on the rise, and hundreds of thousands of girls were out of school.
The immediate impact of the earthquake put at least 350,000 pregnancies in Syria and Turkey at risk, according to U.N. figures.
Women in the opposition-held northwest are especially vulnerable. Most of the territory’s population of 4 million fled there after being displaced from other parts of Syria. Health care was already stretched thin and dependent on foreign aid. Now non-emergency medical services have been suspended to deal with the earthquake.
“We can treat the women after trauma or after delivery, but they need to go back to a safe environment with minimum housing, nutrition and clean water. Unfortunately, this is in general lacking in northwest,” said Basel Termanini, chairman of the Syrian American Medical Society which has dozens of facilities in the northwest.
Throughout the war, Ayesha and her family repeatedly fled from their home in Atareb during times of bombardment to safer areas, where they would stay for months until they could return. One of her sons was killed in 2019, and she’s been taking care of his two young children since.
But, she said, “in 12 years of war, we never tasted terror and pain like that night” of the earthquake.
When the quake hit before dawn on Feb. 6, Ayesha and her family managed to get out of her building as part of it collapsed. They stood in the cold, pouring rain, looking at the destruction in disbelief.
The building next door was completely flattened, killing many of those inside -- including a woman who had just given birth, the baby, her seven other kids and her mother, who had arrived just hours earlier to help with the newborn.
The building’s dead now lie in a mass grave on the far end of a neighboring piece of farmland. The owner of the plot donated the land because cemeteries have filled up with quake victims.
Things were already hard before the earthquake. In the opposition-held territory, 90% of the population is dependent on humanitarian assistance.
There has been no work for the men, and many of the men were handicapped in the war, she said. Some women find jobs in community service and with aid groups. Others do household crafts like making soap or sewing clothes. There are hundreds of female civil defense volunteers, many of whom participated for the first time in the rescue and search missions.
But in the largely conservative community, dominated by a group once affiliated with al-Qaida, jobs for women are not easy to come by.
Halima, a 30-year-old mother of two children, lost her husband in the early days of the war. For years, she has moved between shelters for the displaced in the northwest in search of more generous donated food baskets. The quake caused cracks in the place where she’s currently staying and she’s afraid to stay there but has nowhere else to go.
“I pray for God’s grace. Maybe someone can take care of my children,” she said Sunday as she picked donated clothes at a Turkish Red Crescent warehouse.
International aid has only trickled in for quake victims in the northwest, increasing anger at the United Nations.
The sentiment has been building for some time. Humanitarian aid to Syria, locked in one of the world’s most complex crises for years, has been among the best funded by donors. But the gap between funding and need has grown, and U.N. appeals for emergency responses have gone more than 50% unanswered. In 2021, the health sector in northwest Syria was 60% underfunded, with only $6.4 million of $23.3 million covered.
When the earthquake hit, hospitals were not only damaged by the tremors but also overwhelmed by the injured and casualties, with supplies of essential emergency kits running out. Maternity hospitals were flooded with early deliveries and complications in pregnancies.
“Mothers are still living in the streets,” said Ikram Haboush, director of the maternity hospital in Atareb. “We don’t have enough incubators for early deliveries. The situation is far from stable.”
Over the years of conflict, Syrian women have exhausted their coping strategies. A natural disaster is the last thing they were prepared for.
“We are tired,” said Ayesha.
“For 12 years, we didn’t sleep a night from fear of bombings, from air strikes, or from displacement. Now we have eternal displacement,” she said. “We are living the tragedy of all tragedies.”
Bangladesh team rescues one alive, recovers 12 bodies so far in Turkey
A joint rescue team of Bangladesh continues to play its part in the rescue effort in Turkey for the fourth day following last Monday's earthquake, one of the deadliest natural disasters ever to hit the region.
The Bangladesh team has so far wrested a 17-year-old girl from the rubble and recovered 12 bodies, Shahjahan Sikder, deputy assistant director of the fire service headquarters media cell, said Monday.
The rescuers were among thousands of local and overseas teams, including Turkish coal miners and experts aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, who scoured pulverized apartment blocks for signs of life.
The Bangladesh team consisting of 34 members from the army and 12 from the fire service left Dhaka Wednesday at 10pm and reached Turkey's Adana Military Air Base Thursday at 9:46pm.
Later, they reached Adiyaman city in southeastern Turkey and started search and rescue operations, Shahjahan said.
Read more: Bangladeshi rescue team starts operations in Turkey
The quake and hundreds of aftershocks, some nearly as powerful as the first, struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, killing more than 35,000 and reducing whole swaths of towns and cities inhabited by millions to fragments of concrete and twisted metal, reported AP Monday.
As survival window closes, more rescued in quake in Turkey
Rescue crews on Monday pulled a 40-year-old woman from the wreckage of a building a week after two powerful earthquakes struck, but reports of rescues are coming less often as the time since the quake reaches the limits of the human body's ability to survive without water, especially in sub-freezing temperatures.
The magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes struck nine hours apart in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on Feb. 6. They killed at least 33,185, with the toll expected to rise considerably as search teams find more bodies, and reduced much of towns and cities inhabited by millions to fragments of concrete and twisted metal.
On Monday rescuers pulled a 40-year-old woman from the wreckage of a 5-story building in the town of Islahiye, in Gaziantep province. The woman, Sibel Kaya, was rescued after spending 170 hours beneath the rubble by a mixed crew that included members of Turkey’s coalmine rescue team.
Also REad:After quake, war-hit Syrians struggle to get aid, rebuild
Earlier, a 60-year-woman, Erengul Onder, was also pulled out from the rubble in the town of Besni, in Adiyaman province, by teams from the western city of Manisa.
“We received the news of a miracle from Besni which helped put the fire raging in our hearts a little,” wrote Manisa’s mayor Cengiz Ergun on Twitter.
Eduardo Reinoso Angulo, a professor at the Institute of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico said the likelihood of finding people alive was “very, very small now.”
The lead author on a 2017 study involving deaths inside buildings struck by earthquakes, Reinoso said that the odds of survival for people trapped in wreckage fall dramatically after five days, and is near zero after nine days, although there have been exceptions.
David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London, agreed, saying the window for pulling people alive from the rubble is “almost at an end.”
But, he said, the odds were not very good to begin with. Many of the buildings were so poorly constructed that they collapsed into very small pieces, leaving very few spaces large enough for people to survive in, Alexander said.
“If a frame building of some kind goes over, generally speaking we do find open spaces in a heap of rubble where we can tunnel in,“ Alexander said. “Looking at some of these photographs from Turkey and from Syria, there just aren’t the spaces.”
Wintery conditions further reduce the window for survival. Temperatures in the region have fallen to minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight.
“The typical way the body compensates for hypothermia is shivering — and shivering requires a lot of calories,” said Dr. Stephanie Lareau, a professor of emergency medicine at Virginia Tech. “So if somebody’s deprived of food for a number of days and exposed to cold temperatures, they’re probably going to succumb to hypothermia more rapidly.”
A week after the quakes hit, many people were still without shelter in the streets. Some survivors were still waiting in front of collapsed buildings waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be retrieved.
Many in Turkey blame faulty construction for the vast devastation, and authorities have begun targeting contractors allegedly linked with buildings that collapsed.
At least 131 people were under investigation for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes, officials said.
Turkey has introduced construction codes that meet earthquake-engineering standards, but experts say the codes are rarely enforced.
In Syria, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said that the international community has failed to provide aid.
Visiting the Turkish-Syrian border Sunday, Griffiths said Syrians are “looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” he said, adding, “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”
The earthquake death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue group the White Helmets. The overall death toll in Syria stood at 3,553 on Saturday, although the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days. Turkey’s death toll was 29,605 as of Sunday.
In the Syrian capital of Damascus, the head of the World Health Organization warned that the pain will ripple forward, calling the disaster an “unfolding tragedy that’s affecting millions.”
“The compounding crises of conflict, COVID, cholera, economic decline, and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
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Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey, and El Deeb from Adana, Turkey. Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia contributed.
Turkey probes contractors as earthquake deaths pass 33,000
Turkish authorities are targeting contractors allegedly linked with buildings that collapsed in the powerful Feb. 6 earthquakes as rescuers found more survivors in the rubble Sunday, including a pregnant woman and two children, in the disaster that killed over 33,000 people.
The death toll from the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 quakes that struck nine hours apart in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria rose to 33,185 and was certain to increase as search teams find more bodies.
As despair bred rage at the agonizingly slow rescues, the focus turned to assigning blame.
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said 131 people were under investigation for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes. While the quakes were powerful, many in Turkey blame faulty construction for multiplying the devastation.
Turkey's construction codes meet current earthquake-engineering standards, at least on paper, but they are rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings toppled over or pancaked down onto the people inside.
Among those facing scrutiny were two people arrested in Gaziantep province on suspicion of cutting down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. The justice ministry said three people were arrested, seven others were detained and another seven were barred from leaving Turkey.
Also Read: Turkey detains building contractors as quake deaths pass 33,000
Two contractors held responsible for the destruction of buildings in Adiyaman were arrested Sunday at Istanbul Airport while trying to leave the country, the private DHA news agency and other media reported. One detained contractor, Yavuz Karakus, told DHA: “My conscience is clear. I built 44 buildings. Four of them were demolished. I did everything according to the rules.”
Rescuers reported finding more survivors amid increasingly long odds. Thermal cameras were used as crews demanded silence to hear those trapped.
In hard-hit Hatay province, a 50-year-old woman who appeared badly injured was carried out by crews in the town of Iskenderun. Similar rescues in the province saved two other women, one of them pregnant, according to broadcasters TRT and HaberTurk.
HaberTurk showed a 6-year-old boy rescued from his wrecked home in Adiyaman. An exhausted rescuer removed his surgical mask and took deep breaths as several women cried in joy.
Health Minister Fahrettin Koca posted a video of a young girl in a navy blue jumper who was found alive. “There is always hope!” he tweeted.
Rescuers in Antakya, elsewhere in Hatay province, pulled a man in his late 20s or 30s from the rubble, saying he was one of nine trapped in the building. He waved weakly as he was removed on a stretcher as workers applauded and chanted, “God is great!”
German and Turkish workers rescued an 88-year-old in Kirikhan, German news agency dpa reported. Italian and Turkish rescuers found a 35-year-old man in Antakya who appeared unscathed, private NTV television reported.
A child was freed overnight in the town of Nizip, in Gaziantep, state-run Anadolu Agency said, while a 32-year woman was found in a wrecked eight-story building in Antakya and asked for tea when she emerged, according to NTV.
Those were the rare exceptions.
Backhoes and bulldozers prepared a large cemetery in Antakya’s outskirts as trucks and ambulances brought a steady stream of black body bags. Hundreds of graves were marked with simple wooden planks.
Hatay’s airport reopened Sunday after its runway was repaired, and military and commercial planes ferried in supplies and will take away evacuees.
There are 34,717 Turkish personnel involved in rescue efforts. On Sunday, Turkey's Foreign Ministry said they were joined by 9,595 personnel from 74 countries, with more on the way.
In the Syrian capital of Damascus, the head of the World Health Organization warned that the pain will ripple forward, calling the disaster an “unfolding tragedy that’s affecting millions.”
“The compounding crises of conflict, COVID, cholera, economic decline, and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Tedros said WHO experts were waiting to enter northwestern Syria “where we have been told the impact is even worse.”
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, visiting the Turkish-Syrian border Sunday, said Syrians are “looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” he said, adding, “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”
In the town of Atareb, in opposition-run northern Aleppo province, Abdel-Haseeb Abdel-Raheem returned Sunday to his ruined four-story building to try to salvage any valuables but could find only blankets, pillows and some clothes. His aunt and her husband died there, but their three children survived.
With no international rescue efforts in the war-battered region, the 34-year-old had to recover the bodies himself.
“You can’t hear someone inside screaming and sit tight. You can’t sit still. You can’t have the heart to hear someone (crying for help) and you do nothing,” he said, sitting above a mound of debris.
Political disputes have held up aid convoys sent from areas of northeast Syria controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish groups to those controlled by the Syrian government and by Turkish-backed rebels who have fought with the Kurdish groups over the years.
A U.N. aid convoy sent to northwestern Syria through government-held areas was postponed due to obstruction from Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, an al-Qaida affiliated group ruling Idlib province, a U.N. spokesperson told The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, U.N. aid convoys continue to cross from Turkey into northwestern Syria through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing. The first U.N. convoy only reached northwest Syria from Turkey on Thursday, three days after the disaster struck.
Before that, it was only a steady stream of bodies coming through Bab al-Hawa: Syrian refugees who had fled the civil war and settled in Turkey but died in the disaster, being returned home for burial.
The earthquake death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue group the White Helmets. The overall death toll in Syria stood at 3,553 on Saturday, although the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days. Turkey’s death toll was 29,605 as of Sunday.
Turkey’s Justice Ministry announced the establishment of Earthquake Crimes Investigation bureaus to identify contractors and others responsible for building works. It would gather evidence; instruct experts including architects, geologists and engineers; and check building permits and occupation permits.
A contractor was detained Friday at Istanbul airport before he could leave the country. He built a luxury 12-story building called Ronesans Rezidans in Antakya, and when it fell, it killed an untold number. He was formally arrested Saturday.
In leaked testimony published by Anadolu, the man said the building followed regulations and he did not know why it didn't stay standing. His lawyer suggested his client was a scapegoat.
Under programs that allowed building owners to pay fines instead of bringing them up to code, the government agency responsible for enforcement acknowledged in 2019 that over half of all buildings in Turkey — accounting for some 13 million apartments— were not in compliance.
The detentions could help direct public anger toward builders and contractors, deflecting it from local and state officials who allowed apparently substandard construction to proceed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, already burdened by an economic downturn and high inflation, faces parliamentary and presidential elections in May.
The nongovernmental business organization TURKONFED estimated the earthquake damage at $84.1 billion, based on statistics from the devastating 1999 quake in northwestern Turkey, including $70.1 billion in housing and $10.4 billion to gross domestic product.
Rescue crews have been overwhelmed by the widespread damage that has affected roads and airports, making it even harder to move quickly.
Erdogan acknowledged the initial response was hampered by the damage, with the worst-affected area 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter and home to 13.5 million. During a tour Saturday, Erdogan said such a tragedy was rare, referring to it as the “disaster of the century” in multiple speeches.
In New York City, mourners gathered Saturday at a mosque to remember a family of four from the borough of Queens who were killed while visiting relatives in Turkey. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Burak and Kimberly Firik and their sons, aged 1 and 2, died in the disaster.
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Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul. Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Abby Sewell in Beirut, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Sarah El Deeb in Atareb, Syria, contributed.
Grief gives way to anger over Turkey’s earthquake response
When Zafer Mahmut Boncuk's apartment building collapsed in Turkey's devastating earthquake, he discovered his 75-year-old mother was still alive — but pinned under the wreckage.
For hours, Boncuk frantically searched for someone in the ancient, devastated city of Antakya to help him free her. He was able to talk to her, hold her hand and give her water. Despite his pleas, however, no one came, and she died on Tuesday, the day after the quake.
Like many others in Turkey, his sorrow and disbelief have turned to rage over the sense there has been an unfair and ineffective response to the historic disaster that has killed tens of thousands of people there and in Syria.
Boncuk directed his anger at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, especially because she seemed so close to rescue but no one came. Her remains were finally removed Sunday, nearly a week after the building collapsed. His father's body is still in the rubble.
“What would happen if it was your own mother, dear Recep Tayyip Erdogan? What happened to being a world leader? Where are you? Where?” he screamed.
“I gave her water to drink, I cleared her face of rubble. I told her that I would save her. But I failed,” said Boncuk, 60. “The last time we spoke, I asked if I should help her drink some water. She said no, so I rubbed some water on her lips. Ten minutes later, she died.”
Also Read: Turkey detains building contractors as quake deaths pass 33,000
He blamed “ignorance and lack of information and care — that’s why my mother died in front of my eyes.”
Many in Turkey express similar frustration that rescue operations have been painfully slow since the Feb. 6 quakes and that valuable time was lost during the narrow window for finding people alive.
Others, particularly in southern Hatay province near the Syrian border, say Erdogan’s government was late in delivering assistance to the hardest-hit region for what they suspect are both political and religious reasons.
In the southeastern town of Adiyaman, Elif Busra Ozturk waited outside the wreckage of a building on Saturday where her uncle and aunt were trapped and believed dead, and where the bodies of two of her cousins already had been found.
“For three days, I waited outside for help. No one came. There were so few rescue teams that they could only intervene in places they were sure there were people alive,” she said.
At the same complex, Abdullah Tas, 66, said he had been sleeping in a car near the building where his son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren were buried. He said that rescuers had first arrived four days after the earthquake struck. The Associated Press could not independently verify his claim.
“What good is that for the people under the debris?” he asked.
Onlookers stood behind police tape Saturday in Antakya as bulldozers clawed at a high-rise luxury apartment building that had toppled onto its side.
Over 1,000 residents had been in the 12-story building when the quake struck, according to relatives watching the recovery effort. They said hundreds were still inside but complained the effort to free them had been slow and not serious.
“This is an atrocity, I don’t know what to say,” said Bediha Kanmaz, 60. The bodies of his son and 7-month-old grandson had been pulled from the building — still locked in an embrace — but his daughter-in-law was still inside.
“We open body bags to see if they’re ours, we’re checking if they’re our children. We’re even checking the ones that are torn to pieces,” she said of herself and other grief-stricken relatives.
Kanmaz also blamed Turkey’s government for the slow response, and accused the national rescue service of failing to do enough to recover people alive.
She and others in Antakya expressed the belief that the presence of a large minority of Alevis — an Anatolian Islamic community that differs from Sunni and Shia Islam and Alawites in Syria — had made them a low priority for the government. Traditionally, few Alevis vote for Erdogan’s ruling party. There was no evidence, however, that the region was overlooked for sectarian reasons.
Erdogan said Wednesday that disaster efforts were continuing in all 10 affected provinces and dismissed allegations of no help from state institutions like the military as “lies, fake slander.”
But he has acknowledged shortcomings. Officials said rescue efforts in Hatay were initially complicated by the destruction of the local airport’s runway and bad road conditions.
Anger over the extent of the destruction, however, is not limited to individuals. Turkish authorities have been detaining or issuing detention warrants for dozens of people allegedly involved in the construction of buildings that collapsed, and the justice minister has vowed to punish those responsible.
Kanmaz blamed negligence on the part of the developer of the apartment building where her family had been killed.
“If I could wrap my hands around the contractor’s neck, I would tear him to shreds,” she said.
That contractor, who oversaw the construction of the 250-unit building, was detained at Istanbul Airport on Friday before boarding a flight out of the country, Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency reported. On Saturday, he was formally arrested. His lawyer suggested the public was looking for a scapegoat.
In multiethnic southern Turkey, other tensions are rising. Some expressed frustration that Syrian refugees who fled to the region from their devastating civil war are burdening the sparse welfare system and competing for resources with Turkish people.
“There are many poor people in Hatay, but they don’t offer us any welfare; they give it to the Syrians. They give so much to the Syrians,” Kanmaz said. “There are more Syrians than Turks here.”
There were signs Saturday the tensions could be boiling over.
Two German aid groups and the Austrian Armed Forces temporarily interrupted their rescue work in the Hatay region citing fears for the safety of their staff. They resumed work after the Turkish army secured the area, the Austrian Defense Ministry spokesman tweeted.
“There is increasing tension between different groups in Turkey,” Lt. Col. Pierre Kugelweis of the Austrian Armed Forces told the APA news agency. “Shots have reportedly been fired.”
German news agency dpa reported that Steven Berger, chief of operations of the aid group I.S.A.R. Germany, said that “it can be seen that grief is slowly giving way to anger” in Turkey’s affected regions.
For Kanmaz, it was a mixture of grief and anger.
“I’m angry. Life is over,” she said. “We live for our children; what matters most to us is our children. We exist if they exist. Now we are over. Everything you see here is over.”
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Emrah Gurel in Adiyaman, Turkey, Zeynep Bilginsoy in Istanbul, Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.
Earthquake: Syrian authority receives humanitarian assistance package from Bangladesh
The government of Bangladesh has handed over the relief goods to the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) for proper coordination and distribution among the earthquake- affected people in Syria.
The humanitarian assistance package for the people of Syria from the government of Bangladesh, under the directives of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, arrived at Damascus, Syria on Saturday by a special flight of Bangladesh Air Force Aircraft C-130J.
Ambassador of Bangladesh to Syria resident in Amman Nahida Sobhan and Deputy Minister of Local Administration and Environment of Syria Moutaz Douaji received the relief goods at the Damascus international airport.
Read more: Survivors still being found as quake death toll tops 28,000
The humanitarian assistance package contains dry food, medicine, blankets, tents and winter clothes, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Earlier, President Md Abdul Hamid, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen conveyed profound condolences to their Syrian counterparts on behalf of the government and the people of Bangladesh.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs coordinated the whole course of sending the humanitarian assistance package in collaboration with the AFD, BAF and the MDMR in successfully dispatching the relief goods to Syria.
First war, now earthquake: Many Syrians displaced again
Living for years in a tent camp for displaced people in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, Ali Abu Yassin used to envy friends and relatives who had brick walls around them and solid ceilings over their heads.
The situation was turned on its head after Monday’s devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing more than 23,000 people, collapsing and damaging tens of thousands of buildings and potentially leaving millions displaced.
More than 20 of Abu Yassin’s relatives were killed when their apartment buildings collapsed from the quake in the nearby village of Bisnya, he said, including one cousin’s entire family of 14.
Abu Yassin made it to the village to help with rescue efforts.
“It took us two days to pull out their bodies and bury them in a mass grave,” Abu Yassin said by telephone from the rebel-held province of Idlib. From the tent he had once wished to leave, the father of three said, “I am so lucky. It’s God’s will.”
Before the earthquake, Syria’s 12-year-old uprising-turned-civil war had already displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. Abu Yassin was among them, fleeing from his home in another part of Idlib years ago.
Now the earthquake has caused a new wave of displacement.
Also Read: Earthquake stuns Syria's Aleppo even after war's horrors
The swath of destruction included the rebel-held enclave, centered on Idlib province, as well as heavily populated government-held cities like Aleppo, Hama and Latakia. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said Friday that as many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless.
For many, this is their second displacement.
Wassim Jaadan left his house in the rebel-held village of Zardana in Idlib, then under bombing by government forces, and fled to Lebanon with his family in 2013. Nine years later, after Lebanon collapsed into a protracted economic crisis and they could no longer afford rent, Jaadan brought his wife and four children home to Zardana.
“The economic situation was better than Lebanon, and we had our family, our parents here,” he said.
When the earthquake struck on Monday, the family was awoken by a light shaking that quickly became more violent. They escaped before the building fell and crumbled to rubble.
The family now lives in a tent, which is nearly empty since all their possessions were destroyed. “We are about to die from the cold,” Jaadan said. “I am unable to think because of the shock.”
UNHCR said in a statement that it is trying to ensure that shelters housing displaced people have adequate facilities, as well as tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats and winter clothing.
However, aid has been slow to reach many areas. The first earthquake-related aid convoy of 14 trucks crossed through Turkey into northwestern Syria on Friday, a U.N. spokesperson told The Associated Press. The road to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing was obstructed for days following the earthquake due to road damage and debris from collapsed buildings.
In the rural areas of northwest Syria, there are “tens of thousands of displaced people staying under olive trees in freezing temperatures,” Raed Saleh, head of the opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets, said during a news conference Friday. Saleh said 500 buildings in northwest Syria have been completely destroyed, 1,400 partially crumbled and tens of thousands of homes were damaged.
In other earthquake-damaged areas, displaced people crowded into temporary shelters in churches and mosques, schools, hotels and gyms.
On Friday, in his first visit to areas hit by the earthquake, President Bashar Assad and his wife Asma visited two shelters in the northern city of Aleppo and a kitchen preparing 3,000 meals a day for displaced people.
In the coastal city of Latakia, a base of support for Assad, some 2,000 people on Friday evening crammed into the city’s sports center.
Under a banner with Assad’s face and a Syrian flag, the floor of the center’s basketball court was crowded with mattresses and sleeping bags. Families huddled in winter jackets to stay warm and ate hot meals provided by a local aid organization.
Wardah al-Hussein, a 67-year-old mother of nine, said she has been sleeping in the stadium since the earthquake. Originally from Aleppo, she was now starting her second displacement.
“We fled from our city and our house was destroyed, and we came here,” she said. “Now because of the earthquake we went through it all again.”
Those whose homes were spared have opened them to relatives and neighbors.
A resident of the rebel-held northwestern town of Atmeh, Mustafa Ali, said that already two families of relatives moved in with his family in his three-room apartment while they wait to see if experts will make sure their own homes are suitable for living.
“What people urgently need now is tents” as well as warm clothes and baby formula, Ali said.
An aid worker based in northern Syria, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said eight sprawling facilities, including a center where coronavirus patients were once kept, have been opened to host the displaced in the region.
Adding to the troubles of the displaced, he said, food prices are going up in the wake of the earthquake due to limited supplies.
“Our conditions are miserable,” he said. “I need aid now.”
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Associated Press reporter Abdelrahman Shaheen in Latakia, Syria, contributed to this report.
Earthquake compounds Turkish leader’s woes as election nears
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power 20 years ago riding a wave of public outrage toward the previous government’s handling of a deadly earthquake.
Now, three months away from an election, Erdogan’s political future could hinge on how the public perceives his government’s response to a similarly devastating natural disaster.
“It is going to be a big challenge for Erdogan, who has established a brand for himself as an autocratic figure but an efficient one that gets the job done,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute and the author of several books on Erdogan.
The aftermath of a massive earthquake isn’t the only parallel to the election of 2002. Back then, Turkey was in the midst of a financial crisis that was punishing its economy.
Today, Turkey’s economy is being hammered by skyrocketing inflation, and Erdogan has faced widespread criticism for his handling of the problem, which has left millions of poor and middle class people struggling to make ends meet.
Also read: Hope dims for families in Turkey as rescue turns to recovery
Erdogan’s political rivals have already begun criticizing his government’s response to the earthquake, saying that over the course of two decades he failed to prepare the country for the inevitable. Experts point to lax enforcement of building codes as a major reason why this week’s quakes were so deadly. But with less than 100 days before the election, Erdogan’s rivals have yet to put forth a candidate to run against him.
The memory of how Bulent Ecevit, the late prime minister, was undone by his poor handling of financial and natural disasters two decades ago must be on Erdogan’s mind as he tries to contain the twin problems he faces today, analysts say.
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck on Feb. 6 was followed nine hours later by another powerful quake, killing more than 24,000 people in both Turkey and Syria.
The devastation spreads across a wide swath of Turkey, affecting 10 provinces in the country’s southeast, and it has strained the ability of domestic and foreign crews to quickly execute rescue efforts. In the first few days after the quake, Turkish television and social media showed people waiting helplessly beside piles of debris in frigid conditions, or using their bare hands to claw through rubble.
“We’ll still have to see the outcome of the relief efforts, whether subzero temperatures continue, casualties increase, whether international assistance which is flowing could make a difference,” said Cagaptay.
Erdogan, who toured the region this week, conceded shortcomings in the initial stages of the response but insisted that everything was now under control.
“If the disaster response is strong, the ruling administration will be rewarded, likely in the polls — if it is poor, the opposite,” Timothy Ash, an analyst at BlueBay Asset Management in London, wrote in an email.
Ecevit blamed the poor response after the 1999 quake that killed some 18,000 people on the vastness of the destruction. Similarly, Erdogan said the response to this week’s quake — which he described as the “strongest in the history of this geography” — has been hampered by winter weather and the destruction of a key airport, making it difficult to quickly reach people trapped in the rubble.
“It is not possible to be prepared for such a disaster,” Erdogan said, promising that “we will not leave any of our citizens uncared for.”
While the bumpy quake response so far hasn’t been great for Erdogan’s reputation, analysts say there is time for him to turn things around before the election set for May 14.
“He has the levers of state at his command and Turkish politics was hardly a level playing field before the earthquake,” Hamish Kinnear, Middle East and North Africa analyst for risk-intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, said in an email.
Right after the quake, Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency, giving him the power to “lavish public spending” in those areas, said Kinnear, who believes an Erdogan victory is still likely.
Erdogan has promised to donate 10,000 Turkish lira ($530) to people affected by the quake and to subsidize their rent. On Friday he said an additional 100 billion lira ($5.3 billion) would be allocated for post-quake efforts.
In the last presidential and parliamentary elections in 2018, Erdogan and his alliance for parliament overwhelmingly won in seven of the 10 provinces devastated by this week’s earthquakes. And in recent years he has pushed through changes that eliminated checks and balances between different branches of government, concentrating more power within the presidency.
In Turkey, freedom of expression is limited and the government largely controls the media, which has meant television stations mostly show scenes of “miracle rescues,” while appearing to censor scenes of hardship.
In the face of crushing inflation, Erdogan has increased the minimum wage, pensions and civil-servant salaries. While these steps may have been popular with voters, others have earned him severe criticism.
For example, he has insisted on fighting inflation by repeatedly lowering interest rates to stimulate growth — a strategy that mainstream economists around the world have said only makes the problem worse.
For now, all eyes are on the earthquake response.
In the hard-hit city of Adiyaman, Ahmet Aydin, a resident who lost six relatives as well as his home, his shop and his car in the earthquake, complained about the slow emergency response. But he said he would never stop supporting Erdogan — highlighting the Turkish leader’s potentially lasting appeal.
“We trust our president,” Aydin said. “He would never leave us alone, he would never leave us hungry or thirsty. May Allah protect him.”
Erdogan’s political rivals tell a different story.
This week, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, blamed the devastation on Erdogan’s two-decade rule.
“Let me be very clear; if there one person responsible for this process, it is Erdogan,” Kilicdaroglu said in a video address. “For 20 years, this government has not prepared the country for an earthquake.”
He also accused the government of misspending taxes imposed in the wake of the 1999 quakes that were intended to prepare the country for future disasters.
As the death toll continues to rise with each passing day, Erdogan says the country’s leaders should strive to be above the political fray.
“This time is one of unity and standing together,” he said on Wednesday. “I cannot tolerate how in a time like this such filthy and negative campaigns are led for the sake of basic, political interests.”
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Bilginsoy reported from Istanbul.
Earthquake stuns Syria's Aleppo even after war's horrors
For years, the people of Aleppo bore the brunt of bombardment and fighting when their city, once Syria’s largest and most cosmopolitan, was among the civil war’s fiercest battle zones. Even that didn’t prepare them for the new devastation and terror wreaked by this week’s earthquake.
The natural disaster piled on many human-made ones, multiplying the suffering in Aleppo and Syria more broadly.
Fighting largely halted in Aleppo in 2016, but only a small number of the numerous damaged and destroyed buildings had been rebuilt. The population has also more recently struggled with Syria's economic downslide, which has sent food prices soaring and residents thrown into poverty.
The shock of the quake is all too much.
Hovig Shehrian said that during the worst of the war in Aleppo, in 2014, he and his parents fled their home in a front-line area because of the shelling and sniper fire. For years, they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to avoid the fighting.
“It was part of our daily routine. Whenever we heard a sound, we left, we knew who to call and what to do,” the 24-year-old said.
“But … we didn’t know what to do with the earthquake. I was worried we were going to die.”
Monday’s pre-dawn 7.8-magnitude quake, centered about 70 miles (112 kilometers) away in Turkey, jolted Aleppans awake and sent them fleeing into the street under a cold winter rain. Dozens of buildings across the city collapsed. More than 360 people were killed in the city and hundreds of others were injured. Workers were still digging three days later through the rubble, looking for the dead and the survivors. Across southern Turkey and northern Syria, more than 11,000 were killed.
Even those whose buildings still stood remain afraid to return. Many are sheltering in schools. A Maronite Christian monastery took in more than 800 people, particularly women, children and the elderly, crammed into every room.
“Until now we are not sleeping in our homes. Some people are sleeping in their cars,” said Imad al-Khal, the secretary-general of Christian denominations in Aleppo, who was helping organize shelters.
For many, the earthquake was a new sort of terror — a shock even after what they endured during the war.
For Aleppo, the war was a long and brutal siege. Rebels captured the eastern part of the city in 2012, soon after Syria’s civil war began. For the next years, Russian-backed government forces battled to uproot them.
Syrian and Russian airstrikes and shelling flattened entire blocks. Bodies were found in the river dividing the two parts of the city. On the government-held western side, residents faced regular mortar and rocket fire from opposition fighters.
A final offensive led to months of urban fighting, finally ending in December 2016 with government victory. Opposition fighters and supporters were evacuated, and government control imposed over the entire city. Activist groups estimate some 31,000 people were killed in the four years of fighting, and almost the entire population of the eastern sector was displaced.
Aleppo became a symbol of how President Bashar Assad succeeded in clawing back most opposition-held territory around Syria’s heartland with backing from Russia and Iran at the cost of horrific destruction. The opposition holds a last, small enclave in the northwest, centered on Idlib province and parts of Aleppo province, which was also devastated by Monday’s quake.
But Aleppo never recovered. Any reconstruction has been by individuals. The city’s current population remains well below its pre-2011 population of 4.5 million. Much of the eastern sector remains in ruins and empty.
Buildings damaged during the war or built shoddily during the fighting regularly collapse. One collapse, on Jan. 22, left 16 people dead. Another in September killed 11 people, including three children.
Aleppo was once the industrial powerhouse of Syria, said Armenak Tokmajyan, a non-resident fellow at Carnegie Middle East who is originally from the city. Now, he said, it’s economically marginalized, basic infrastructure in gas and electricity is lacking, and its population – which had hoped for improvements after fighting ended – only saw things get worse.
They have also now experienced the physical — and psychological — blow of the earthquake, Tokmajyan said. “It left them wondering, do they really deserve this fate or not? I think the trauma is big and it will take some time until they swallow this really bitter pill after (more than) 10 years of war.”
Rodin Allouch, an Aleppo native, covered the war for a Syrian TV station.
“I used to be on the front line, getting video shots, getting scoops. I was never scared. Rockets and shells were falling and everything, but my morale was high,” he recalled.
The earthquake was different. “I don’t know what the earthquake did to us exactly. We felt we were going to join God. It was the first time in my life I got scared.”
During the war, he had to leave his neighborhood in the eastern sector and rent an apartment on the western side. But the quake has displaced him yet again. As their building shook, he, his wife and four children fled to a nearby garden. Allouch said he won't return until the building is inspected and repaired. It still stands, but has many cracks. The family will instead stay in a ground-floor store front nearby that he rented.
“It is safer to be down (on ground floor) if there is an earthquake,” he said, but complained that there is no fuel for heating. “Life is so miserable."
Many others in Aleppo have been displaced more than once.
Farouk al-Abdullah fled his farm south of Aleppo city during the war. Since then, he has been living with his two wives, 11 children and 70-year-old mother in Jenderis, an opposition-held town in Aleppo province.
Their building there collapsed completely in the earthquake, though the entire family was able to escape.
He said the earthquake, with its destruction everywhere and its aftermath — watching rescue crews pull bodies out of the rubble — “are much more horrible than during the war."
And while war may be senseless, those in it often have a cause they are sacrificing for and wrest some meaning out of the death and destruction.
The war’s devastation in Aleppo at least “is somehow a proof that we weren’t defeated easily,” said Wissam Zarqa, an opposition supporter from the city who was there throughout the siege and now lives in the Turkish capital Ankara.
“But the destruction of natural disasters is all pain and nothing else but pain.”
Turkey-Syria Tremor: BNP postpones Thursday’s march programme
The BNP Dhaka South City unit's march programme in the capital, that was scheduled to be held Thursday, has been postponed out of solidarity with the victims of the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria earlier in the week.
“Our senior leaders had a meeting on Wednesday night and decided to postpone the march, expressing the party’s profound shock and sympathy as a huge number of people were killed in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria,” BNP acting office secretary Sayed Imran Saleh Prince told UNB.
He said their party leaders thought it would not be decent to hold the march programme on Thursday amid the news of deaths of thousands of people in tremor-hit Turkey and Syria. A fresh date for the march will be announced later.
Bangladesh will observe a day state mourning on Thursday to condole the huge loss of lives in an earthquake in Turkey and Syria recently.
Leaders and activists of BNP’s Dhaka South City unit were supposed to march towards the Jatiya Press Club (JPC) from Gopibagh in the capital at 2pm on Thursday, to press home the 10-point demand that is the centrepiece of their movement, topped by a non-party caretaker government under whom the next JS election would be held.
On Tuesday, BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir announced the second phase of their party’s march programme in the capital.
The party’s Dhaka North City unit is also scheduled to march towards Bosila Saat Rasta intersection from Shyamoli playground at 2pm on February 12.
Earlier, leaders and activists of the party’s Dhaka north and south city units observed the march programme on January 28, 31, 30 and February 1, respectively, to push for their 10-point demand.
With hope of finding survivors fading, stretched rescue teams in Turkey and Syria searched Wednesday for signs of life in the rubble of thousands of buildings toppled by the world’s deadliest earthquake in more than a decade. The confirmed death toll approached 12,000, reported AP.
Read more: Hope fading as death toll in Turkey, Syria quake pass 12,000