A diminishing number of survivors have been pulled from the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria as the death toll climbed to over 35,000 and UN aid officials pushed for more aid access to rebel-controlled north-west Syria, where only one crossing from Turkey was open.
Search and rescue teams began to wind down their work on Monday as hopes of finding anyone alive faded, but there were cheers in Turkish cities when people were freed after seven days under the rubble, including a young girl named Miray in Adıyaman and a 12-year-old boy named Kaan in southern Hatay province.
In one dramatic rescue attempt in Kahramanmaraş, rescuers said they had contact with a grandmother, mother and baby trapped in a room in the remains of a three-storey building. Rescuers were digging a second tunnel to reach them, after a first route was blocked.
“I have a very strong feeling we are going to get them,” said Burcu Baldauf, the head of the Turkish voluntary healthcare team. “It’s already a miracle. After seven days, they are there with no water, no food and in good condition.”
But in many places the grief was still overwhelming as more bodies were found and relatives blamed the government for a slow response.
Residents and aid workers from several Turkish cities have also complained of worsening security in the devastated areas, while the authorities have been cracking down on social media accounts they said had “provocative” posts that spread fear and panic. Police said they detained 56 people on Monday.
The Turkish toll now exceeds the 31,643 killed in a quake in 1939, the country’s disaster and emergency management authority said.
The death toll has reached 5,714 in Syria where, according to some estimates, millions of people are homeless through a combination of the earthquake and the long-running civil war, and the humanitarian situation is desperate with a severe need for aid in rebel-held northern areas.
In the shattered Syrian city of Aleppo, the UN’s head of emergency relief Martin Griffiths said the rescue phase was “coming to a close”, with the focus switching to shelter, food and schooling.
At the centre of the issues compounding the crisis in rebel-controlled Idlib are the complicated arrangements for humanitarian deliveries to the Syrian region which operate under a mandate from the UN security council through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing.
There has long been pressure to open other crossings to reach Idlib, but such moves have been vetoed by Russia and China who claim it undermines the sovereignty of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, was urging the security council to authorise the opening of new cross-border aid points between Turkey and Syria, but it was unclear whether that would overcome past objections.
Before a security council meeting on the crisis, however, diplomats said no draft resolution had yet been circulated.
Further complicating the issue since the earthquake has been the refusal of the hardline Hayat al-Tahjr al-Sham group to receive aid sent via Damascus, despite warnings that survivors living outdoors in winter conditions are facing a secondary catastrophe.
Underling the scale of the crisis, Griffiths acknowledged that humanitarian efforts to Syria were failing.
“We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” he said in a tweet on Sunday before a visit to Damascus.
“My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can. That’s my focus now,” he added during a visit to the border area.
Speaking separately to Sky News, he said: “We are also looking for authorisation from the security council to open up a couple of extra crossing points to maximise the volume of supplies we get through to the people of the north-west.
“Frankly it’s an open and shut case on humanitarian terms, why we need those extra crossing points now to save lives and to provide some sort of assistance to the people as they come into the post-rescue phase.
“So I hope it’ll go through. I think we’ll find out in the next couple of days.”
So far only a few dozen trucks have crossed over Bab al-Hawa into north-west Syria carrying aid that had already been scheduled for delivery before the quake.
The director general of the World Health Organization met Assad in Damascus on Sunday and said the Syrian leader had voiced readiness for more aid border crossings.
“He was open to considering additional cross-border access points for this emergency,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
He said the WHO was still waiting for approval from rebel-held areas before going in. “The compounding crises of conflict, Covid, cholera, economic decline and now the earthquake have taken an unbearable toll,” Tedros said.
Agencies contributed to this report
