At the Nurdağı cemetery in the Turkish province of Gaziantep, on the Syrian border, there will soon be no more room for the dead. The freshly dug graves are marked with blank headstones, with only pieces of ripped cloth gathered from the victims’ clothing to identify them. The frayed ends of the cloth blow slightly in the frigid air.
On the street outside, dozens of bodies lie piled on top of each other on a row of pickup trucks, waiting to be buried. At least five imams have rushed to Nurdağı to officiate a ceaseless rush of mass funerals, sometimes for as many as 10 victims at once. Officials brought in deliveries of coffins from neighbouring villages and as far as Istanbul to provide a final resting place for the overwhelming numbers of corpses arriving in the town.
Five days after two powerful earthquakes shook southern Turkey in the country’s worst natural disaster in a generation, the death toll has surpassed 21,000 and Nurdağı and towns across southern Turkey and northern Syria are scenes of apocalyptic levels of destruction.
“Forty per cent of the people who lived in this town could be gone,” said Sadık Güneş, an imam in Nurdağı. His home had been next to the mosque, which collapsed. Without a place for their prayers, mass funerals in Nurdağı and the rest of southern Turkey are being celebrated outdoors.
“I’ve lost count of the bodies we’ve buried since Monday,” Güneş said. “We built an extension to the cemetery. There are still people under the debris. We will bury those ones too once they are recovered. We are burying the bodies even late at night with the help of citizens who come to help us.”
While awaiting the arrival of forensic doctors and prosecutors, the inhabitants of some cities in Turkey have piled bodies in stadiums or in car parks in order to give relatives an opportunity to quickly identify their loved ones before being issued a death certificate.
In Kahramanmaraş, emergency workers continued to comb the wreckage, often finding only body parts. One emergency worker described how she had tried to identify a severed arm, showing it to bereaved families in the hope of using the colour of the remaining nail polish to put a name to the deceased.
“This is where I lived,” said Sadi Uçar, pointing to his damaged house. “It was a new apartment. We just bought these two units a few weeks ago. One for my family and children, one for my father and mother. My mother and father lived two buildings away. They were supposed to move upstairs this week. We even put the curtains up with my mother a few days ago. After the earthquake, my mum and dad’s house collapsed.”
He added: “I dug through the rubble with my hands and took out my mother and father. Afterwards, I had to bury them with my hands too.”
In the Afrin district in north-east Syria, a cemetery has been extended with makeshift mass grave burial sites. In the southern Turkish city of Osmaniye, a cemetery ran out of space, while outside Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre of the quake, a makeshift graveyard overflowed with so many corpses that wooden planks and concrete blocks gathered from the debris had to serve as headstones.
In Jinderes, north-west Syria, a town full of people displaced by a decade of civil war, refugees who had survived bombardments and chemical gas attacks had again run for their lives as buildings collapsed.
When the first earthquake struck in the early hours of Monday, Abu Majed al-Shaar was jolted awake as the ground shook violently, slamming his head into the wall. He grabbed as many of his children as he could find and ran down the stairs into the street.
“There were some people I just couldn’t get to,” he said. “There are only two survivors from our extended family. We lost a lot of family members.”
Fleeing Jindires in the aftermath of the earthquake brought back painful memories of the family’s evacuation from their town in eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus destroyed by Syrian government airstrikes and a prolonged siege.
“The memories trickled back to when that entire town was destroyed, it felt like the same exact situation and it reminded me of my seven brothers who died in a building collapse after an airstrike hit our building,” he said. “And now, when we had to dig in the rubble in Jindires for my other brother and the rest of our family members, it broke my heart all over again.
Yasser Abu Ammar, a member of the Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, a group that has worked for years to pull people from the rubble of buildings destroyed in airstrikes, entered Jindires in the hours after the first earthquake and was overcome by the destruction.
More than 100 buildings filled with families had been turned to rubble. “I was stunned by the horror of the scene,” he said. “The destruction that befell the town was terrifying.”
Their rescue efforts continued throughout the week, slowed by a lack of machinery and assistance. Idlib remained largely closed off from the outside world until six trucks from the United Nations reached the province on Thursday, providing a lifeline of vital goods days after the quake.
Across northern Syria, people now living in tents in the snow began burning whatever they could to keep warm. Food and other basic goods remained scarce.
“The world has forgotten about us,” said Mohammed Abu Hamza, who had fled Jindires, experiencing displacement for a second time after escaping from Ghouta with his family.
“We have enough food to last us for a little while,” he said. “But to keep warm, we have a little wood we’re burning just a few hours a day to last us as long as possible. Somehow we’ve been left to face this situation alone.”
Survivors were still being found in a few places. In Hatay, a 30-year-old man was pulled from the rubble more than 100 hours after the earthquakes struck.
On the road out of Nurdağı, a group of people stood around a fire, gathered to find last survivors. “Moments ago we just pulled a little young girl from the rubble,” said Suleyman Şahin, one of rescuers.
Yet miracles were scarce. Many families said that in the first 24 hours after the earthquakes they could make out the faint voices of relatives under the debris.
Then, slowly, silence fell over the piles of concrete and bricks that were once homes, now tombs.
