Quake deaths in Turkey and Syria top 9,500; deadliest in ten years

Turkey’s Civil Protection Agency said the death toll in the country rose to 7,108, bringing the total to 9,638, including deaths reported in neighboring Syria, since Monday’s earthquake and multiple aftershocks.

The death toll in government-held areas of Syria has risen to 1,250, with 2,054 injured, according to the Health Ministry. At least 1,280 people have died in the rebel-held Northwest, according to volunteer first responders known as the White Helmets, with more than 2,600 injured.

This surpassed the 8,800 deaths in a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Nepal in 2015.

Amid calls for the government to send more aid to the disaster area, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was due to travel to the city of Pazarcik, the epicenter of the quake, and the hard-hit province of Hatay on Wednesday.

Turkey now has around 60,000 relief workers in the earthquake zone, but given the widespread devastation, many are still waiting for help.

Almost two days after the 7.8-magnitude quake struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, rescuers pulled a 3-year-old boy, Arif Kaan, from under the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Kahramanmaras, a town not far from the epicenter.

With the boy’s lower body trapped under concrete slabs and twisted rebar, emergency crews placed a blanket over his torso to protect him from freezing temperatures while carefully cutting the debris away from him, aware of the possibility of one trigger further collapse.

The boy’s father, Ertugrul Kisi, who himself had been rescued earlier, sobbed as his son was rescued and loaded into an ambulance.

“Right now the name of hope in Kahramanmara is Arif Kaan,” proclaimed a Turkish television reporter as the dramatic rescue was broadcast to the country.

A few hours later, rescuers pulled 10-year-old Betul Edis from the rubble of her home in the city of Adiyaman. To applause from onlookers, her grandfather kissed her and spoke to her softly as she was loaded into an ambulance.

But such stories came little more than two days after Monday’s predawn earthquake that struck a vast area and brought down thousands of buildings, with freezing temperatures and prolonged aftershocks complicating rescue efforts.

Search teams from more than two dozen countries joined the Turkish emergency services, and promises of aid were received.

But as devastation spread across several towns and communities — some isolated by the ongoing conflict in Syria — the screams from the piles of rubble fell silent, and despair grew among those still waiting for help.

In Syria, the tremors collapsed thousands of buildings, bringing more misery to a region ravaged by the country’s 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.

On Monday afternoon, residents in a northwestern Syrian town found a crying newborn baby, still attached to her deceased mother by the umbilical cord. The baby was the only member of her family to survive a building collapse in the small town of Jinderis, relatives told The Associated Press.

Turkey is home to millions of war refugees. The affected area in Syria is divided into government-controlled territory and the last opposition-held enclave in the country, where millions depend on humanitarian aid.

As many as 23 million people could be affected in the quake-hit region, according to Adelheid Marschang, a senior emergency official at the World Health Organization, who described it as a “crisis of crises.”

Many survivors in Turkey have had to sleep in cars, outdoors, or in government shelters.

“We don’t have a tent, we don’t have a stove, we don’t have anything. Our children are in bad shape. We all get wet under the rain and our kids are out in the cold,” Aysan Kurt, 27, told the AP. “We didn’t die of starvation or earthquakes, but we will die freezing from the cold.”

Erdogan said 13 million of the country’s 85 million people were affected and he declared states of emergency in 10 provinces. More than 8,000 people were pulled from the rubble in Turkey and about 380,000 have taken refuge in government shelters or hotels, authorities said.

In Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by the ongoing war and the isolation of the rebel-held region along the border, surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. Syria itself is an international pariah under Western sanctions related to the war.

The United Nations said it was “exploring all avenues” to bring supplies to the rebel-held northwest.

In addition to the thousands killed in Turkey, another 40,910 were injured.

The region lies on major fault lines and is frequently rocked by earthquakes. About 18,000 people died in 1999 in similarly powerful earthquakes in north-west Turkey.

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Alsayed reported from Bab al-Hawa, Syria. Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. David Rising in Bangkok and Robert Badendieck in Istanbul contributed to this story.

Mehmet Guzel, Ghaith Alsayed and Suzan Fraser, The Associated Press

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