A 26-year-old pregnant woman named Talibe Gezginci cleans her tent in a makeshift camp for displaced people in Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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Erin O’Brien for NPR
A 26-year-old pregnant woman named Talibe Gezginci cleans her tent in a makeshift camp for displaced people in Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
GAZIANTEP, Turkey – In a camp for displaced people inside the Municipal Stadium in downtown Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey, families devastated by this week’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake say they struggle to survive. At a camp set up by Turkey’s disaster relief branch and makeshift settlements in surrounding fields, earthquake survivors say they don’t have enough food, water, heating or basic amenities to stay alive.
“There is nothing to eat here for us,” says a soldier in his twenties named Faris, who fled the hard-hit city of Antakya. “There is no gas, no heating system, no electricity. We have no money or any of our cards.”
He asks to be identified only by his first name because he is still an active member of the Turkish army and risks sanctions if he criticizes the government.
The regions affected by Monday’s earthquake are home to around 13.5 million people, including no less than 2 million refugees, mainly from Syria. The quake killed more than 23,000 people in Turkey and Syria, according to the Associated Press, and tens of thousands were injured.
Tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed. Many residents of the hardest hit areas, including Antakya and satellite villages around Gaziantep, have fled to areas like downtown Gaziantep which remain relatively unscathed.
Five days after the earthquake, the Turkish government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been widely criticized for its scrambled and ineffective response. While around 200,000 people remain trapped under the rubble, many of those who survived are struggling to meet their basic needs.
A mother, Zehra Cati, with her young child in a makeshift camp for people displaced by the earthquake.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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A mother, Zehra Cati, with her young child in a makeshift camp for people displaced by the earthquake.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
A view of the makeshift camp inhabited by Kurdish migrant workers.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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A view of the makeshift camp inhabited by Kurdish migrant workers.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
Several hundred people in these camps are from villages surrounding the towns of Gaziantep and Hatay. In villages like Nurdagi, Islahiye and Pazarcik, small satellite neighborhoods, streets and entire neighborhoods crumbled to rubble.
Late Thursday night in Nurdagi, a rescue worker named Ozgur said his team no longer expected to find anyone alive under the rubble. He works in construction for a large holding company and asks to be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisals for providing aid without direct government approval.
“There are 30 to 40 people down there,” he said, pointing to a collapsed six-story building in front of him. “But none of them will come out alive.”
In the camps, people face a different kind of danger.
Crammed into white tents set up by Turkey’s emergency and disaster relief branch, known by the acronym AFAD, families of eight or more sleep on foam mattresses on the floor. Wrapped in the clothes they were wearing at the time of the earthquake and in colorful blankets donated for free, mothers, daughters, brothers and fathers huddle together for warmth.
Faris, who has been in the camp since Wednesday, says he hasn’t eaten since.
“We queue all morning and at lunch there is no more food,” he says.
AFAD said it deployed dozens of food trucks and hundreds of thousands of meals, but opposition politicians and members of the public widely condemned the organization’s response.
Faris says his family can barely access the restrooms for lines, as there are not enough facilities in the Municipal Stadium for the hundreds of people staying there temporarily.
A 64-year-old grandmother and her grandson in her daughter-in-law’s tent at the makeshift migrant camp.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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A 64-year-old grandmother and her grandson in her daughter-in-law’s tent at the makeshift migrant camp.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
The entrance to the AFAD camp for displaced people in the center of Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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The entrance to the AFAD camp for displaced people in the center of Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
He and his mother, three sisters, brother and brother-in-law all have dark purple circles under their eyes and are covered in wounds from falling rubble. Their hands are covered in deep gashes from which they dug themselves out of their collapsed home, their feet severed from when they finally managed to get out and had to fight their way through the rubble in the cold without shoes.
They stopped counting how many people had died.
They swapped shifts to sleep in a car and on the street in Antakya for three days before heading to Gaziantep camp, about 100 miles away.
The Antakya police told them they had to evacuate and they could find shelter and food in Gaziantep. Now Faris says he regrets the decision to come.
In Gaziantep, he explains, they have no food, no money, no credit card, no ID, no way to come up with a plan. He says the day before he went to the gas station next to the camp with a plastic cup to see if they would give him anything to eat or drink. He came back with an empty cup.
“We don’t know why we are here. We have nothing. We don’t know why we came here,” he said.
At a makeshift camp set up on a sports field outside Gaziantep Stadium, the situation is equally dire.
The camp built by AFAD in the central stadium of Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
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The camp built by AFAD in the central stadium of Gaziantep.
Erin O’Brien for NPR
There, a number of Kurdish migrant households have arrange the tents they most often worth all over the sowing season. Genco Demir, who arranged his folk’s exit to the grassland, says he and alternative farmers were isolated via the federal government. Of their beggarly group of Sekiz Subat, not up to 3 km away, they are saying no person has come to check up on or restore their properties, broken via the earthquake.
“We don’t have coal, we don’t have food, we don’t have anything,” he says. “We have to feed the children. Help us.”
Hayat Gezer, a 45-year-old girl with a standard Kurdish chin tattoo and a twilight headband, says the crowd is coping with the added tension of felony problems. Many individuals in their folk, she mentioned, were imprisoned for crimes starting from robbery to complicity in terrorism.
Turkey’s southeast is a closely Kurdish patch, and the Turkish executive there was concerned for 4 many years in a war with the armed separatist staff, the Kurdistan Staff’ Birthday party (PKK). This ended in the persecution of many Kurds for his or her alleged hyperlinks to the crowd.
Gezer’s daughter was once imprisoned in Islahiye, an segment closely broken via the earthquake. Gezer does no longer know if she is alive.
The desperation on this camp is sunny. At one level, a tender guy tries to get bread from his neighbor’s tent; a violent struggle ensues. Demir should prevent the younger guy.
Starvation and chilly have contributed to creating individuals of the AFAD camp very essential of the Turkish executive. Faris says he as soon as voted for Erdogan, who’s up for re-election this 12 months, however the soldier swears he’s going to by no means accomplish that once more.
When camp officers effort to secure again some other older guy, the person shouts, “Let them hear what we’re going through.
“I’m yelling at the president,” he says. “Shame on the president. No one is helping us.”
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