The death toll in Turkey and Syria from this week’s catastrophic earthquake surpassed 23,600 on Friday as relief organisations struggled to overcome an array of obstacles to deliver aid to survivors in both countries.
The second aid convoy in two days, loaded with medicine, food and clothes, reached an opposition enclave in northwestern Syria, as the leaders of Turkey and Syria visited shattered earthquake zones to meet survivors.
Bashar Assad, Syria’s authoritarian president, appeared in Aleppo, one of the cities most severely damaged by the earthquake. His visit came as a reminder of his lasting power after more than a decade of civil war that has left his country in ruins. Beginning in 2012, he presided over the siege of Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, in his effort to crush a nationwide revolt and keep himself in power. Thousands were killed, and much of the city was obliterated.
But Friday, Assad presented himself as there to provide succour to the thousands affected by the week’s earthquake. In photos released by his office, he appears smiling, accompanied by his wife, as he greets the injured. In another video he appears wearing a face mask and hairnet as he tours a soup kitchen set up for victims.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the hard-hit province of Adiyaman and admitted that the relief response was not as swift as the government had wished.
“I know very well that words are meaningless to describe our pain,” Erdogan said. Death tolls in both countries continued to mount, with more than 20,200 in Turkey, and nearly 3,400 in Syria.
This has now become Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939 and one of the deadliest worldwide in decades.
The effort to provide aid to millions of people across both countries has been strained by bitter cold; power outages; shortages of fuel, trucks and other essential supplies; and by the many constraints posed by a continuing state of war inside Syria.
The earthquake zone in Syria includes areas controlled by the Syrian government and others held by opposition forces backed by Turkey. Those territorial divisions, and an array of political obstacles stemming from the ongoing civil war, have created fatal delays in delivering help to Syrians.
The flow of aid has also been hampered because the border crossing used by humanitarian convoys, known as Bab al-Hawa, is the only route approved by the United Nations to reach the opposition-held region in northwestern Syria.
On Thursday, the first significant delivery of aid crossed into the opposition-held region — six trucks carrying shelter material and non-food items. The International Organization for Migration said the initial shipment could meet the needs of “at least 5,000 people.”
Fourteen more trucks, laden with food and shelter materials, entered the same area Friday. But it was a small consolation to the war-ravaged enclave, home to millions of Syrians who have been displaced by more than a decade of fighting. Hundreds of thousands have already watched homes or family members vanish beneath the rubble in a matter of days.
As many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have lost their homes because of the earthquake, according to the UN refugee agency. “For Syria, this is a crisis within a crisis,” said Sivanka Dhanapala, the agency’s representative in Syria, citing economic turmoil, the pandemic and now the earthquake and blizzards.
“A number of our own staff are sleeping outside their homes because they are worried about the structural damage to their homes,” he said in Damascus. “This is just a microcosm of what is happening throughout the affected areas.”
In many of the hardest-hit areas in Turkey, a chaotic atmosphere prevailed. Turkey has imposed a three-month state of emergency in 10 provinces affected.
In the city of Antakya in Turkey’s hard-hit Hatay province, the ancient old town has entirely collapsed; traffic has been bumper to bumper for days now.
In Antakya, the air is acrid from the smoke of hundreds of bonfires lit by survivors who have been sleeping out in the open or in their cars. Thousands more are sheltering in white tents in the shadow of a soccer stadium.
But hope for finding survivors remains. Rescue workers resumed their search Friday, peering between the pancaked roofs and hushing motorists on the streets as they strained to listen for any hint of survivors alive in the rubble.
“If anyone can hear our voice, make some noise,” the group members shouted in unison as they worked their way through the sprawling landscape of debris.
The UN humanitarian chief said Friday that he was on his way to visit parts of Turkey and Syria most devastated by the quake. The official, Martin Griffiths, will visit the cities of Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, along with Gaziantep in Turkey, over the weekend, according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
“More help is on the way, but much more, much more is needed,” Guterres told reporters Thursday.
He said the greatest obstacle for delivering aid to Syria was access.
The United States was among the dozens of nations that moved to help Turkey, including through its military. A team from the US European Command arrived at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, Gen Christopher Cavoli said in a statement Friday.
A day earlier, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States had sent more than 150 search and rescue personnel to Turkey, and that US helicopters were helping “to reach areas that would otherwise be difficult to access.”
The UN emergency fund released US$25 million for aid Friday, in addition to $25 million authorised earlier this week. The UN food agency called for the opening of more border crossing points between Turkey and Syria on Friday to facilitate the flow of relief.
“We are running out of stocks, and we need access to bring new stocks in,” Corinne Fleischer, the World Food Program’s regional director for the Middle East, told reporters by video link from Cairo. “The border crossing is open now, but we need to get new border crossings open.”
Fleischer said aid agencies needed access through a second border crossing point aside from the one used by the first two convoys, because damage to roads was obstructing deliveries of humanitarian relief.
Syria’s government has said that US sanctions against the country over the civil war have exacerbated the humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquake. Those sanctions do not target humanitarian aid.
On Thursday, the State Department doubled down on its refusal to lift sanctions on Syria, saying that humanitarian aid efforts were not impeded by the policy. But the US Treasury Department issued a six-month exemption from sanctions for all transactions related to providing disaster relief to Syria.
As the humanitarian crisis builds, the possibility of further seismic activity hangs over the region. Dozens of tremors have been recorded in Turkey this week, including a few on Friday morning. Experts say that large aftershocks pose potential risks to the structural integrity of partly collapsed structures in the earthquake zone.
