Kahramanmaras, Turkey – “We were all alone. It was raining and we waited for days in front of the collapsed building. No one came to help us,” says Fatma, who sits with other women at a soup kitchen set up in a large white tent in the courtyard of an empty building in Turkey’s southern city of Kahramanmaras.
That cry resonates across the earthquake zone, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government was accused earlier this year of a slow response to the disaster, and for lax enforcement of existing building regulations. “Where is the state?” people would ask over and over as they camped out in front of demolished buildings, waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be pulled out.
