KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey — There is an almost assembly-line quality to the burials in this southern Turkish city near the epicenter of one of the world's deadliest natural disasters in years. The exigencies of mass death have left little other choice since Monday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake transformed the area into a charnel house of mangled bodies and crushed masonry.
And so, with every day as the death count climbs higher — on Thursday, it leaped past the 20,000 threshold across southern Turkey and northern Syria — excavators lumber like ungainly beasts across the pine-forest cemetery on Kahramanmaras' outskirts, scooping out 200-foot-long trenches to receive victims.
Every yard of trench was claimed on Thursday as soon as it was turned over. The digger would barely lift its bucket before survivors would appear, chanting "La ilaha illa Allah" (There is no god but Allah) as they lifted yet another body bag and heaved it into the fresh opening.
