The Turkish Epicenter of the Earthquake: “We are face to face with a great disaster,” says Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The death toll from the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria five days ago has risen to over 25,000, despite efforts by rescue workers to find survivors.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which struck southern Turkey in the early hours of Monday, was followed by more than 100 aftershocks and a second 7.5 magnitude earthquake. More than 11,000 have been killed across Syria and Turkey, and hundreds more are feared trapped under the rubble.

In a visit to Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter of the quake, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to survivors, saying “we are face to face with a great disaster.” Erodgan admitted there were shortfalls by his government in the immediate aftermath of the quake, but said nobody would be “left in the streets.” Erdogan will also travel to the worst-hit province of Hatay on Wednesday.

“I know my son is inside and I think he’s still alive. She told NPR that his brother dug to find him. Rescuers were called to the ruins of the building after nightfall, and found his body and wrapped it up in a blanket.

World Bank, Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Cross-Syria have Helped to Save Hundreds of People from the Damned Syria Earthquake

The situation in Syria is so bad that the U.S. has relented on its sanctions for a period of three months. Despite preexisting exemptions on humanitarian assistance, fear of running afoul of sanctions might have affected the delivery of much-needed aid.

Thousands of people have volunteered in both countries. There are millions of hot meals delivered by the World Food Programme. The World Health Organization (WHO) is supplying hospitals with painkillers and antibiotics. The World Bank has pledged nearly US$1.8 billion for recovery and reconstruction, and UN secretary-general António Guterres is appealing for $1 billion for Turkey and close to $400 million for Syria, to be distributed to organizations providing food, shelter and education. A $700 million appeal was launched by the Red Cross/Red Crescent.

Turkey’s emergency management agency, AFAD, reports it has set up more than 70,000 tents for emergency shelter to the more than 380,000 people who have been temporarily displaced by this disaster.

The shock and horror of the disaster caused many cardiac arrests, Abu Hatab says. More cases of post-earthquake trauma are expected by the medical community.

How far is Turkey from the east Anatolian fault? A geoscientist’s perspective on the earthquakes that have killed at least three people and injured hundreds in Syria

Most of Turkey is located between the two major fault, the North and East Anatolian Fault. The tectonic plate that carries Arabia, including Syria, is moving northwards and colliding with the southern rim of Eurasia, which is squeezing Turkey out towards the west, says David Rothery, a geoscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. He says that Turkey is moving 2 centimetres per year along the East Anatolian Fault. Half the length of the fault is lit up by earthquakes.

A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck southern Turkey on Monday killing at least three people and injuring hundreds more, according to Turkish and Syrian officials, two weeks after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands of people in both countries.

Deaths in earthquakes are often caused by falling bricks and masonry. According to the US Geological Survey, many people in Turkey who were affected by the earthquake live in structures that are extremely likely to be damaged by shaking, with unreinforced brick masonry and low-rise concrete frames.

Things are worse in Syria, where more than 11 years of conflict have made building standards impossible to enforce. The earthquake struck Syria’s northwestern regions, with buildings collapsing in Aleppo and Idlib. Some war-damaged buildings in Syria have been rebuilt using low-quality materials. “They might have fallen down more readily than things that were built at somewhat greater expense. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.

Tonight’s weather is going to be very cold in the region. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. These risks continue, he says.

The crisis of Syria: How the world will respond to quake victims in the coming era of mass displacement and mass displacement, according to Amnesty International

The Syrian crisis, Alsamman said, “has become an afterthought, a footnote to mention when talking about the geopolitical complexity of the Middle East.”

Syrian victims of the devastating earthquake that hit their country and Turkey on Monday may become hostages of the politics that have divided Syria for over a decade, analysts have warned.

“Syrians must not be forgotten,” Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, told CNN. People who are already vulnerable are often the ones who suffer the worst during disasters.

Turkey is a NATO member whose international stature has only grown in recent years. Syria is ruled by a number of different groups. Its regime, internationally sidelined and heavily sanctioned due to its brutal suppression of an uprising there that started in 2011, counts Iran and Russia as its closest allies – both global pariahs.

The Syrian regime is shunned by most Western countries. But leader Bashar al-Assad has begun forging ties with former enemies as regional states welcome him back into the fold. Last year, the United Arab Emirates welcomed Assad, and last month the Turkish president said that there could be a meeting soon.

“There is likely to be less international assistance provided to opposition areas because that is additionally complicated,” Lister told CNN. “It’s not an area controlled by a sovereign government and makes it difficult for aid operators.”

That hasn’t been received well by activists and observers who fear that the regime could hamper timely aid to thousands of quake victims in rebel-held areas, most of whom are women and children, according to the UN.

The civil war in Syria, in which President Bashar al-Assad is accused of killing his own people, has made it difficult to deliver vital supplies to earthquake-hit areas. Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad says any aid it receives must go through the capital Damascus.

“We are exploring all avenues to reach people in need and conducting assessments on feasibility,” Madevi Sun-Suon, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), told CNN on Tuesday. The road issue is a big challenge now, but we do have aid.

The Syrian regime has also used the opportunity to call for sanctions against it to be lifted. Its UN envoy Sabbagh said on Tuesday that planes refused to land at Syrian airports because of American and European sanctions. “So even those countries who want to send humanitarian assistance, they cannot use the airplane cargo because of the sanctions,” he said in New York.

In November, the UN-appointed human rights expert asked for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Syria because they were making the people there worse off.

“It would be quite ironic, if not even counterproductive, for us to reach out to a government that has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now – gassing them, slaughtering them, being responsible for much of the suffering that they have endured,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price told a media briefing on Monday.

It’s very convenient for the regime to be making that argument because if sanctions were dropped, the ramifications of the much broader situation would be game changing

The 22nd anniversary of the invasion of Saudi Arabia by the United States of America (US): Syria left behind earth earthquake-mime intl

Why it matters: The announcement comes less than 10 days after a drone attack on a military plant in Iran’s central city of Isfahan that US media outlets attributed to Israel . IRNA said the new underground base was one of the country’s most important air force bases, built deep underground, housing fighters equipped with long-range cruise missiles.

The Prime Minister of Sweden said he was ready to restart stalled negotiations over Sweden’s application to become a member of NATO whenever Turkey was ready.

The NATO membership applications from Sweden andFinland were accepted after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but Turkey has yet to approve them. Turkey last week said it looks positively on Finland’s application, but does not support Sweden’s, even though the two Nordic neighbors are seeking to join at the same time.

Why it matters: The three nations last year reached an agreement on a way forward, but Ankara suspended talks last month as tensions rose following protests in Stockholm, where a far-right politician burned a copy of the Quran. Turkey goes to elections in May.

The move comes amid an apparent thaw in relations. Two years after the lifting of the Arab boycott, the crown prince of B.C. spoke with the emir of Kuwait in a phone call. The leaders of the two countries attended a small Arab Summit hosted by the President of the United States of America in Abu Dhabi.

Background: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt ended a three-year political and economic boycott of Qatar in January 2021. But since then there have been no bilateral discussions between Doha and Manama to resolve remaining differences. In 2021, all but one of the countries restored travel and trade links.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/middleeast/syria-left-behind-earthquake-mime-intl/index.html

Suspension of Musk’s account of AlMoahf, a secular account of the violation of the principles of the Holy Quran

The account AlMoahf had more than 13 million followers before it was taken down.

According to a user, Musk did not violate the rules because it quoted from the Holy Quran. We demand the lifting of the suspension of this account.”

Some users were happy with the suspension. Some decried the account’s use of incomplete Quranic verses that they said are taken out of context and thus change the meaning of the text.

The account owner posts translations of Quranic verses on sister accounts in English, French, and German. The sister account that shows Quranic videos has been trying to get the original account unblocked.

The only humanitarian aid corridor between Turkey and rebel-held areas of north Syria was crossed by a United Nations convoy from Turkey to northwest Syria.

The administration that controls the only point of access between the two countries says there were 300 bodies when the delivery ended.

The earthquakes that devastated Syria have left many homeless: Changing the lives of people in the country’s hardest hardest hardest work, including human aid workers in Laticia

Meanwhile, “Syrians don’t know where their next meal comes from. It’s not about vegetables or meat when we say meal. Moutaz Adham, country director for Syria for Oxfam, said it was about simple bread.

This was the case in Samandağ in Turkey where civilians were digging through rubble in an attempt to save family and friends following the earthquake. After several hours, a small group of rescuers arrived and they were stretched thin, The Guardian reported.

After initial trading showed rapid declines, the Istanbul stock exchange had a circuit breaker that stopped trading for two weeks. The Turkish economy was already reeling from out-of-control inflation.

Arabic for God is great is chanted by the crowd. Volunteers and civil defense groups — themselves earthquake survivors — pull a boy out from the rubble alive in rebel-held northwestern Syria.

NPR was granted rare access to this part of Syria after the earthquakes. Aid workers from the United Arabs are helping Syrians devastated by their 12 years of conflict and earthquakes, so they accompanied by aid people from the United Arabs made it possible to enter the city of Jableh, which is located in Laticia province.

Humanitarian aid has not appeared 72 hours after the devastating earthquake, and was described as a haphazard grassroots effort by individual groups.

The crisis will take months and months of work for us to deal with. People with amputations, people with psychological stress and collapsed schools are some of the people who have been injured. ,” he says. “This is the hard part.”

Local authorities in the rebel-held part of Syria say 11,000 families have been left homeless by the earthquake. Up to 2,000 deaths have been reported and thousands more injured, according to the United Nations.

Each hour brings news of more death, children who have 888-492-0 888-492-0’s, families buried under the rubble, and survivors still trying to hold onto hope.

“The situation remains grim in north-west Syria where only five percent of reported sites are being covered by search and rescue,” the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report.

There is little heavy machinery to lift rubble in northwestern Syria, where people are digging with their own hands. Power outages have resulted in fuel shortages in hospitals.

There are areas in Turkey and Syria where the temperatures are less than normal, making the challenge bigger. The Syrian city of Aleppo is predicted to have lows of -2 degrees C this weekend, whereas February lows are usually 2.5C.

Standing near a building destroyed by the earthquake, Assad told reporters that Western countries “have no regard for the human condition.” This comment is in line with statements heard from government officials and Syria’s state-run media, who have pinned the lack of humanitarian aid and hindered rescue equipment on US and EU sanctions.

Assad and his wife, Asma, visited different sites affected by the earthquake and visited survivors at a hospital in Aleppo, pictures on state-run news agency SANA showed.

The delivery of urgent supplies to quake-hit areas of northern Syria has been complicated by a long-running civil war between opposition forces and Assad’s government, who is accused of killing his own people. Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad says any aid it receives must go through the capital Damascus.

Juma slept on a heap of rubble where his family were killed as he survived. In the freezing nights, the 20-year-old and others in this town — still dazed and in shock — burn possessions found in the debris for heat.

The people of the town of Jinderis in the northwest of Syria heard the cries of those trapped under the rubble, but were powerless to save them because they lacked machinery and equipment.

On a rare visit to this rebel-held enclave of a country broken and isolated by more than a decade of civil war, NPR saw no international crews of rescuers; no trucks loaded with machinery or medical aid; no streams of ambulances to save the wounded. The border crossing with Syria was empty.

The Narli Family in Sawran, Syria, Died after a High-Energy Severe Earthquake and Their Relatives

The Juma’s home collapsed on top of them, but their wife, son and daughter were all alive. Juma and his neighbors pulled at the shattered concrete for hours until their hands bled, but the effort was futile.

The Syrian civil defense teams use the few excavators that are available to recover the dead. The bodies had been pulled from the rubble on Friday. Zakaria Tabakh, 26, remembers cuddling his son, 2-year-old Abdulhadi, to sleep and laying him in his bed, where he was killed by the falling debris. Tabakh’s wife died in the bed beside him. He said that few friends were able to come to the burial because they were too busy burying their own loved ones.

After years of war, they’ve been left with nothing. Tens of thousands now live with almost no access to basic services in makeshift tents set up in the olive groves where the mud clogs and weighs down the legs of children playing outside.

Less than one hour’s drive from one of the open border crossings, the town of Sawran now has no running water. On one side of the main street is the destroyed home of the Turki family, where nine people, including five children died. A lot of people were killed across the road. The Syrians fled to Sawran after the government of Syria attacked the population with sarin, killing 89 people.

The Narli family was rescued by Turkish TV after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck central Kahramanmaras. First, 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli was saved, then both of her parents.

That followed the rescue of a family of five from a mound of debris earlier in the day, according to TV network HaberTurk. Rescuers cheered and chanted, “God is Great!” The last family member to be lifted to safety was the father.

“God is great!” cried the man who rescued Diyarbakir, from the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province

“In some parts of our settlements close to the fault line, we can say that almost no stone was left standing,” he said earlier Saturday from Diyarbakir.

Melisa Ulku, a woman in her 20s, was extricated from the rubble in Elbistan in the 132th hour since the quake, following the rescue of another person at the same site in the same hour. Police said that people should not cheer or clap while other rescue efforts are going on around them. She was covered in a thermal blanket on a stretcher. Rescuers were hugging each other. ” God is great!” shouted some people.

Just an hour earlier, a 3-year-old girl and her father were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, also in Gaziantep province, and soon after a 7-year-old girl was rescued in the province of Hatay.

The rescues brought shimmers of joy amid overwhelming devastation days after Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake and a powerful aftershock hours later caused thousands of buildings to collapse, killing more than 25,000, injuring another 80,000 and leaving millions homeless.

Not everything ended so well. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province early Saturday and intubated her. She died before medical teams could cut out a limb and free her from the rubble.

As aid continued to arrive, a 99-member group from the Indian Army’s medical assistance team began treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.

Wincing in pain, he said he had been rescued from his collapsed apartment building in the nearby city of Antakya within hours of the quake on Monday. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without getting proper treatment for his injuries.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156313344/turkey-syria-earthquake-death-toll-survivors

The first day of operation of a makeshift graveyard in Antakya, Turkey, announced by World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

″I buried (everyone that I lost), then I came here,” Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives: “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son” who was 8 ½ months pregnant.

A large makeshift graveyard was under construction on the outskirts of Antakya on Saturday. The northeastern edge of the city was home to pits dug by bulldozers and backhoes as trucks and ambulances loaded with body bags arrived. Soldiers directing traffic on the busy adjacent road warned motorists not to take photographs.

A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs who did not wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said that around 800 bodies were brought the cemetery on Friday, its first day of operation. He said that between 2000 and 2000 had been buried by midday.

“People who are coming out from the rubble now, it’s a miracle if they survive. He said most of the people that come out now are dead.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, was in Syria on Saturday with 35 tons of medical equipment, according to SANA. He said there will be more medical equipment arriving in the coming days.

The horror of the night: Telling the tales of Al-Dahhan, his wife, and another family whose death occurred in the rain

He describes in detail the photos he’s seen from the ground and recites story after story of the horrors that keep him up at night. The other is about a colleague who crawled out of the rubble with his 5-month old baby and returned to save his family, who were stuck in the rain for two days.

Al-Dahhan told CNN that it was destroying him. When it happened, I was getting voice messages from other people and they were telling me that people were dying around me. I can’t stop hearing them.”

Alsamman has been using social media as a way to raise money and he has already raised over $1,000 for charities on the ground and 10 food boxes that were delivered directly to those affected.

Meanwhile, on the ground, his colleagues who survived have been in a race against time, using the funds raised by workers like Al-Dahhan to help rescue those still trapped under the rubble and deliver relief to shell-shocked survivors.

The exhaustion that Al-Dahhan speaks of can be seen in his voice, he says he cannot sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time.

He said he gets a little bit of relief, knowing what he is doing, because the more money he can raise, the more help he can give. “But I am in constant stress that I’m not doing enough and I need to keep going. When I sleep, I feel guilty. I need to be awake in the middle of the night. I need to be working. I want to get more updates. I feel like I’m operating here, but my mind and soul are there.”

A Syrian boy’s story of survival in a disaster-torn town: a case study of mental health in the United States

Omar Abu Lebda described visiting Antakya and meeting a 13-year-old boy who’d survived three days under the rubble. He’d suffered a leg injury and was now living in a car with his younger sister and father. Another sister and his mother had died in the earthquakes.

“My mind started racing and I immediately thought it was an Israeli airstrike, since we have had a few of those in Latakia over the past few years,” Alsamman, 27, told CNN. “When I saw the reports of a massive earthquake in the middle of the night, I began to wish it had only been an airstrike.”

He was in pain as he watched images of death and destruction pour into his phone, but he didn’t know if his friends or family were trapped under the rubble.

“It felt like no one was there for them, no aid was coming through, the only organizations able to provide aid were the ones already there,” Al-Dahhan said.

The opportunity to rescue survivors decreased, making Syrians in the US desperate to raise money for charities on the ground.

Following the civil war in Syria that began in 2011, Nour Al Ghraowi, a New York City native, joined the Karam Foundation, a non profit organization dedicated to empowering women.

Even though the world is quieter, there are organizations and people who are still fighting for them, who have never stopped fighting for them.

The region’s critical lack of health care is partly caused by hospitals and medical staff being targeted during the war, explains Ekzayez, who is a co-investigator on a UK-funded project called Research for Health System Strengthening in Syria. In a separate study, Ekzayez estimated that as of June 2021, 350 medical facilities had been attacked and 930 health-care personnel killed.

The need for immediate needs, including food, shelter, non-food items and medicine, is paramount, but Zahra emphasized the importance of providing Syrians with mental-health care.

There is a feeling of being abandoned and forgotten among Syrians in the United States, which is one of the reasons for their mental health issues.

She said it was natural for people to ask themselves whether or not they mattered as much or if they were forgotten again. “‘Will I just be another statistic or another undignified picture that is circulated but not humanized?’”

How Syrian people can help the United Nations: Mental health and earthquake-supression efforts in the United States and in Syria, as emphasized by the White Helmets

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Sunday that it was the first group to send team to provide mental-health support to earthquake victims in Syria. The children and their families that are suffering from trauma and depression as a result of the earthquake are being helped by a team of Palestinians and volunteers.

photos and videos of buildings falling during the earthquake and the aftermath of airstrikes that killed and left thousands displaced are just two of the psychological triggers that Al-Dahhan has experienced.

Years ago I built a wall because the war messed me up. Al-Dahhan said that he did not want to be hurt like that again. I feel those walls crumbling after this earthquake. I can not think of anything else to remember, and I am remembering things I don’t want to remember.

They are struggling withsurvivor’s guilt, possessed with a sinking feeling that it won’t be enough, and they can’t help it.

“Don’t move on and forget about us,” he begged. “In three weeks, when it isn’t as trendy to post and talk about Syria, know that the people of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and Hama don’t have the option of moving on.”

We don’t have time to heal the wounds, so we are shouting from the rooftops, please don’t get distracted, please donate, please help.”

Organizations on the ground need help raising awareness, funds and basic items like food, clothing and medicine. But the issue doesn’t stop with short-term relief efforts, Zahra says, arguing that activists must pressure the US and other countries to “activate disaster mechanisms and push for access to hard-to-reach communities.”

The White Helmets are a group of volunteers who save lives and strengthen communities in Syria. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Rescue workers in northwest Syria for the White Helmets have been working around the clock and night, searching for survivors and finding no help from the outside world.

We are the only organization here with the equipment and training to undertake heavy search and rescue. The volunteers have been doing the impossible, and I am humbled by their selflessness and dedication.

The United Nations needs to do better. If the very system that was supposed to save human lives when emergencies happen leaves children to die under the rubble, something is clearly broken.

The UN was asking the Security Council to authorize aid access through two additional border crossings which wasted time, according to the UN’s ambassador to the UN. Humanitarian organizations say the need is too high for aid entry to be politicized and that legal analysts have argued against it.

Time and again Russia has used its veto at the Security Council to shut border crossings, reducing the routes for delivery of cross-border aid via Turkey to a single entry. There is more than enough need for more cross-border routes to be opened on a temporary basis.

Emergency Management in Turkey after the Erdoseismology of the Middle Town of Altnozu: Evidence of Rapid Response from the Syria-Sudan Crossroads

The local communities that were victims of the disaster lent their cars, trucks and generators to the effort, helping to dig, and provide fuel to keep themselves warm.

Remarkable footage of the split olive grove has emerged from Turkey’s south-east Altınozu district, which borders Syria, showing a jagged, sandy-colored, canyon-like chasm. The depth of the cleavage is over 40 meters.

Its creation is another show of the devastating power of last Monday’s magnitude 7.8 quake, which killed tens of thousands of people in Syria and Turkey and destroyed entire city blocks.

Irfan Aksu, who lives in the neighborhood, told Turkish news agency Demioren News Agency that when the earthquake started last Monday it created “an incredible sound” where he lived.

He implored for experts to inspect the area for possible future damage. He said that there are more than 7,000 people living in this town. “Of course, we are scared… if it was a little closer, it would have happened in the middle of our town.”

Last Monday’s earthquake was the strongest to hit anywhere in the world since an 8.1 magnitude quake struck a region near the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 2021, though the remote location of that incident resulted in little damage.

Lanning and other emergency and disaster response experts say that no matter the area around the world hit by an earthquake or other kind of emergency, people should know that effective help often comes from the immediate community.

“While search and rescue operations are critical, research is very clear that mitigation and prevention are the most effective when it comes to minimizing disaster losses,” Davis with the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The window of opportunity to save people is closing fast and will be over by the fourth or fifth day, according to Lanning.

Natalie Simpson is the professor of operations management and strategy at the University at Buffalo School of Management, and she said that even if a bystander cannot help someone out of the rubble, they can still point responders in the right place.

“It takes a long time at each building, to have to listen and carefully remove pieces of the building debris to get to people,” Lanning said. And with the scene in Turkey “there’s thousands and thousands of these buildings,” he added.

What is the best thing to do when you’re not going out of business: When is it all good? The Community Emergency Response Team at the University of Buffalo

Knowing the importance of quick, local aid, the Community Emergency Response Team was developed in the U.S. It’s a FEMA program that trains volunteers across all 50 states with basic disaster response skills.

It teaches people what to do after a major earthquake, where to get water after an emergency, how to check on immobile neighbors, and how to search collapsed buildings, Lanning said.

There are factors, like types of injuries and how many search and rescue teams are on the scene, that contribute to how likely a trapped person is to survive. A person trapped under a building can last up to a week if they are undamaged or have minor injuries.

Simpson with the University at Buffalo wishes every time there was a disaster, rescue crews and military would be quickly deployed. She said that it wasn’t always the case in Turkey and Syria.

The Turkish government has come under fire for its response. The first day we had some problems, but by the second and third days, the situation got under control, according to the president.

Simpson said the biggest failure in emergency response was failure to pick up on the fact that this is an emergency. The instinct is to wait to get more information.

“With an earthquake and other emergencies you’re no longer in Kansas,” she said. “These are not normal conditions and so one of the traps that we fall into is, ‘Oh God, what’s the best thing to do at this moment?’ Stop it with ‘best.’ It’s all good. Let’s get moving.”

She said that the military is best equipped to operate in a disaster-transformed landscape and to open airstrips to get aid in quickly in many parts of the world.

But the Turkish government failed to immediately mobilize its military to aid in the direct rescue efforts or to establish those all-important field hospitals and airstrips, according to an analysis published by the Middle East Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

“There’s a very important lesson here: It’s never too early to activate your large-scale response when you’re not getting any information out of a region,” she said. I think that that will make people think and help them in the future.

Major earthquakes that struck Turkey in 1999 and 2011 served as two important lessons to officials that the country’s building construction needed to be retrofitted to combat future disasters.

Lanning, who has worked for 15 years in various earthquake-prone areas of the world, said a lot of the damage there is because of the construction and type of buildings.

This is despite the knowledge that concrete buildings are not the best at withstanding earthquakes. He said that they are easy to create and can hide some flaws.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1156636019/the-earthquake-in-turkey-and-syria-offers-lessons-and-reminders-for-disaster-res

The empathetic exchange between Mustafa Avci and his friend, Sakiroglu, 33, in the aftermath of the February 6 earthquake

In the next months and years, we’ll see what went wrong in this latest disaster. But it’s incredibly valuable work, Lanning said.

“How is my mother and everyone?” The man on the stretcher is talking into a cell phone. Crying in disbelief, his friend replies: “Everyone is well… they are all waiting for you… I am coming to you.”

This was the emotional exchange that followed the rescue of Mustafa Avci, 33, who was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey’s southern Hatay province 261 hours after a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region on February 6.

A video showing a phone call between Avci and his friend was released by the Turkish Health Minister on Friday as a reminder that there is still hope.

The rescue of Avci late on Thursday night came as the death toll across Turkey and Syria rose to at least 43,885 people, according to official figures.

In the video, Avci can be seen wearing a neck brace and appears wide-eyed with hope as he asks: “Did everyone escape okay…? Let me listen to their voices.

Koca, the minister, said both Avci and a second man, Mehmet Ali Sakiroglu, 26, were rescued around the same time from under the ruins of a private hospital building.

Aydinli assumed the boy had died with his eyes open and that his fellow rescue workers were hallucinating. But the child cried out. I don’t feel my legs. Don’t let me go!

Aydinli said they get tears in their eyes from time to time because of the boy’s rescue. He is conscious and well. Hopefully, he will get better.”

Emergency medical workers in Turkey are battling earthquake-damaged areas: the case of Defne and a 29-year-old mother trapped in the rubble

Meanwhile, though donations are pouring in from all over the world, many survivors have been left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures with a lack of access to basic necessities.

“A lot of lives have been saved, a lot of people have been pulled from rubble by their neighbors, by their friends, by their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers. The WHO emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said during the teleconference that frontline health workers had done amazing work in both countries.

Rescuers on Friday removed a survivor from the rubble of a collapsed building in the district of Defne, in hard-hit Hatay province, more than 11 days after the powerful earthquake struck.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported that the man was under the rubble for more than 260 hours. He was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance.

Neslihan Kilic, a 29-year old mother of two, was removed from the rubble of a building in Kahramanmaras after being trapped for 258 hours.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said that it was working with Turkey to find a way to rehabilitate the agricultural sector damaged by the earthquake.

The agency said in a statement that areas affected by the earthquakes suggest major disruption to crop and livestock production capacity, threatening immediate and longer-term food security.

The decision allows holders of Turkish temporary protection cards to cross into Syria without a travel permit, if they reside in earthquake-damaged areas. Syrians with protected status who crossed into Syria without a permit to have given up their status as an asylum-seeker would normally be considered by Turkey. They’d have to give up their protection cards and be banned from entering Turkey for five years.

Spain says it will take in some 100 Syrian refugees in Turkey that have suffered in the earthquake. The minister said that the refugees would be vulnerable and badly affected by the earthquake.

Making the announcement late Thursday, Escrivá said “the earthquake reminds us of Syria’s drama in a tremendous way and we are going to try to help within our possibilities.”

U.N. Donor Fatigue in Turkey after the September 11 Earthquake: The Vice President, the UNICEF Administrator and the United Arab Emirates

The vice president said 1,589 children were separated from their families in the earthquake and that the state was caring for them.

The conflict in Syria had set in before this month’s earthquakes. The U.N. Children’s Fund’s yearly appeal for Syria was half the amount set by the United Nations.

Donor support is critical for UNICEF to continue its work of reuniting unaccompanied children with relatives, Mardini says, and distributing sanitation services and safe drinking water to people to avert the spread of diseases in quake-stricken areas.

She says that it is essential for them to reach us as quickly as possible so that aid can be brought to where it is most needed.

Aid groups are trying to drum up more support for the Syrians while the focus is on the earthquakes, but there will be a long and uncertain road to recovery.

He too spoke with NPR at the World Government Summit in Dubai. He’d just returned to the United Arab Emirates from Syria, where the WHO is delivering tons of medical supplies such as amputation equipment, intravenous fluids and medicine.

Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s humanitarian relief administrator, visited areas affected by the earthquakes and described “unspeakable” hardship.

A Syrians in Turkey with millions of followers on social media posted a video detailing psychological trauma among Syrians.

Abu Lebda saw a Syrian man get off a bus after he claimed to have heard his two children calling for him.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1157783760/turkey-syria-earthquake-aid-donor-fatigue

Search for survivors of a 10-kilometer earthquake in the northern province of Hatay, Turkey, according to state news agency Anadolu

Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency says it closed last year with only 56% of its funding needs met, leaving a $4.7 billion budget shortfall. The agency says to date it has received just 15% of its global funding requirements for a budget that isn’t yet accounted for by the earthquakes.

The quake’s epicenter was in the province’s Defne district, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said Monday, adding that there have been 26 aftershocks since.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported the quake as being of magnitude 6.4 at a depth of 10 kilometers before revising it down to 6.3 magnitude.

The public was told to stay away from buildings. Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay earlier Monday asked the public “not to enter the damaged buildings, especially to take their belongings.”

“We went back to our house and this shock happened again and we went out… may God help us,” said Zahir, who lives in a town between the cities of Iskenderun and Antakia, in Turkey’s Hatay province.

The chances of survivors in the debris of the earthquake are not likely to increase, as Turkey has ended most search and rescue operations nearly two weeks later.

Efforts are being made in the provinces of Kahramanmara. On Saturday, a couple and their 12-year-old child were rescued in Hatay, 296 hours after the earthquake, state news agency Anadolu reported.

More than 8,500 injured people need to be accommodated in only 66 functional hospitals providing 1,245 beds for short hospital stays, according to the WHO. Moreover, all of northwest Syria has just 86 orthopaedic surgeons, 64 X-ray machines, 7 computerized tomography (CT) scanners and one magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine across the region, according to WHO-compiled data published towards the end of 2022. Gynaecologist Ikram Haboush, director of Idleb city’s sole public maternity-hospital, says “the medical situation in northwest Syria is catastrophic”.

The UN and aid agencies have trouble getting supplies to areas affected by the earthquake because there are only three temporary crossing points along the border.

Hospitals in this region have been overwhelmed as they attempt to accommodate thousands of injured people in spaces with severely limited beds, medical supplies, surgical equipment and intensive-care facilities.

According to Abdulkarim Ekzayez, the supply of antibiotics ran out in the three days after the earthquake. “We have used the medications and serums that would have lasted us for four to six months in two to three days,” adds Haboush. The WHO has started airlifting medicines and medical supplies, but says northwest Syria also needs essential diagnostic equipment such as X-ray machines.

“People are running all over the place to make use of any existing resources, including basic ambulances,” Ekzayez says. “The medical staff have been working non-stop,” adds Haboush, who was working at the maternity hospital in Idleb when the first earthquake hit at 01:17 universal time. The fifth and sixth floors are occupied by the hospital. “We had to evacuate the incubators and move all the babies to the ground floor,” Haboush recalls.

Assessing the structural status of buildings in northwest Syria: The voices of the diaspora and the Syrian engineer’s association (Danish)

According to three doctors who Nature spoke to in northwest Syria, the most common injuries are limb fractures, trauma injuries, crush injuries including ‘crush syndrome’ (damages that result in organ dysfunction including kidney failure) and bleeding.

In order for people with crush syndrome to get proper care, intensive care is needed, according to Jawad Abu Hatab. The data from the WHO shows that the region has only 73 machines.

Volunteers are house to house checking to see if the damaged buildings are safe for people to return to. But lacking in the necessary tools and safety equipment, they are resorting to tapping walls with household implements such as simple hammers and making decisions using the naked eye.

Assessing the structural status of buildings is just as urgent as the medical situation and should not be underestimated with the earthquakes still going on. But in northwest Syria, people are having to use whatever methods are available, he adds.

At the same time, experts from the Syrian diaspora are helping with virtual assessments in places inaccessible to local engineers. Residents of damaged buildings are uploading photos and videos of their interior to the Syrian Engineers Association based in Qatar.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00547-7

The Syrian crisis in Syria: Assad’s legacy as a president and a warning to all the power brokers in the war-torn country

Buildings in danger of collapsing are being reinforced with whatever materials are available, irrespective of whether they are suitable. An engineer with the volunteers association told Nature that carbon- fibre-reinforced polymers would work better for seismic reinforcement. Instead, they are having to use brittle industrial iron. “We are in an emergency situation, so we must respond quickly using the resources that we have,” Hayek says.

The engineers association based in northwest Syria is currently collecting data daily and will produce statistical studies important for the reconstruction phase, says Ali Hallak, a computer engineer.

There are research projects studying the situation. One is the UK-funded Research for Health Systems Strengthening in Syria, which is investigating how health care is being affected by war, and determining what more-sustainable models of governance and financing could look like, says co-investigator Abdulkarim Ekzayez, an epidemiologist at King’s College London.

The WHO should pay more attention to the region’s health needs. The agency is trusted and, through director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, it could do more to use that status to urge all the power brokers on the ground to allow it to work with other experts to deliver both immediate and longer-term help, including much-needed assistance to rebuild homes and health systems.

The tragedy opened a rare window for international support of people who have been neglected for a long time. Researchers can lend a hand in keeping that window open.

President Bashar Assad’s government lost full control of Syrian territory in the north to various armed groups, but it still rules much of the rest of the country. Rights groups cite extensive evidence of torture, imprisonment, disappearances as well as the bombing of civilian areas by the government and its Russian allies to hold onto power.

Western Syria was spared a lot of fighting. This is the president’s ancestral homeland and a regime stronghold. Members of the minority Alawite community, from which Assad hails, retain key posts throughout this region that is home to Christians and Sunni Muslims, as well.

A look at life for millions of people with photos that were taken in the area. Some of these images were taken from a moving car as the Emirates Red Crescent convoy traveled through towns and villages, accompanied by Syrian security forces. Other photos were taken during interviews with Syrian families who say they are traumatized and exhausted by war, and now by the earthquakes and its aftershocks.

Jableh, once brimming with tourists drawn to its Mediterranean coast and on the cusp of a construction boon, is without electricity most of the day and impoverished. The United States imposed sanctions that isolated it from most of the world.

The president’s image looms large over dilapidated buildings and shuttered storefronts throughout Jableh. His image, washed out and faded on posters and army checkpoint, reminds of an era of stability that has faded from view.