Sakine Nur Gül unfurled a worn piece of squared paper on which more than a dozen hospitals across south-east Turkey were listed in blue biro, a grim roll call of everywhere she and her brother have tried to find their missing family members. Next to the words “intensive care unit” and “morgue” are the names of every single state and private hospital in the capital, Ankara, the southern cities of Adana and Mersin, and many across the province of Hatay, accompanied by delicate crosses showing where Gül, known as Nur, and her brother Ertuğrul Delen have already searched and found no trace of their parents and brother.
“We went to hospitals that aren’t even on that list. I think we’ve been to every single hospital in Hatay,” said Ertuğrul. At a cemetery on the outskirts of the southern city of Antakya, where a field of hundreds of sticks mark the graves of many unidentified corpses, the siblings scoured photos of the dead and found nothing. A DNA test brought no matches among the bodies there or elsewhere.
