A week after two 7.8- and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes levelled swathes of southern Turkey and northern Syria, hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping in the open in often sub-zero conditions.
In Turkey’s southern province of Hatay, one of the areas hardest hit by the quake and where some citizens said it took emergency teams days to arrive, many sleep in their cars or in makeshift tents under market stalls, with nowhere else to go.
In a speech last Wednesday at a tent city in Kahramanmaraş, close to the quake’s epicentre, the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pledged that the state would provide immediate help to the displaced. Those whose homes were destroyed or who did not know if it was safe to return would be housed in hotels, he said. “We can never let our citizens stay on the street.”
The vice-president, Fuat Oktay, said more than 1 million people were living in tent encampments. At night, the temperature dips to as low as -9C .
The situation is even worse in Syria. “As many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless by the earthquake,” the Syria representative of the UN high commissioner for refugees, Sivanka Dhanapala, told a press briefing. “That is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering mass displacement.”
In the Çukurova district of the Turkish city of Adana, volunteers distributed hot soup in what was previously an open-air market. Survivors clustered around a phone-charging unit.
Sitting on the edge of a playground nearby, across from the tent she now calls home, Tülin Çiroğlu said she was grateful for the volunteers. “God bless our people. They offered food and blankets to everyone. They never left us hungry,” she said.
Çiroğlu, her husband and son initially sought refuge at a mosque in the days after the quakes. Despite little visible damage to their house, Çiroğlu said they were afraid to return, fearing it might collapse.
°I’ve been looking for a house for three days. I inquired about renting a home two days ago. But it was too expensive, we can’t afford it, she said. Landlords were now demanding exorbitant rates, she added.
While touring ruined towns, Erdoğan doubled down on his pledge to rebuild swiftly. “We’ve planned to rebuild hundreds of thousands of buildings,” he said during a visit to Diyarbakır, in the country’s east. ‘‘We will start taking concrete steps within a few weeks.”
Days earlier, he had promised that all of the destroyed buildings across a vast swath of southern Turkey would be rebuilt within a year, a pledge that appeared remote as officials struggle to comb through towering piles of rubble.
Avni Bulut was rescued alive from beneath a building after an earthquake struck the Turkish town of Varto in 1966. Fifty-seven years later, another earthquake had struck. He was now living in a tent with his family in Çukurova.
“Our conditions are good here. We have access to food, toilet, electricity. But I went to İskenderun two days ago to attend a funeral of a relative of mine who died in the earthquake. There were hardly any tents there,” he said.
“We would go if they said our house was safe. Otherwise, I don’t know what to do. We have no choice but to stay here. We just cannot afford to relocate. I have a child in Izmir, maybe I can make it there.”
Others said they would risk returning home even if their houses were dangerously damaged, simply because they had no other place to stay.
“We were not be able to stay in tents. It becomes cold at night. I have a little baby and he gets cold if we sleep in a tent. That’s why we had to return home,” said Buse Ersoy, who has lived in her car and at relatives’ houses since the earthquake.
Ersoy remains unsure whether her home is secure, as emergency workers from Turkey’s disaster management agency AFAD are yet to inspect it. Her family said the elevator cables in her building had snapped and that several fractures were visible.
“What shall we do? We had nowhere to go. We had to go back to our house,” Ersoy said. She said her parents were having to sleep in a conference room with up to 25 other people in a hotel in Adana.
Officials and medics said 29,605 people had died in Turkey and 3,574 in Syria, bringing the confirmed total to 33,179. The UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said he expected the death toll to at least double.
