Rescue crews saved a 10-day-old baby and his mother trapped in the ruins of a building in Turkiye yesterday and dug several people out from other sites as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said authorities should have reacted faster to this week’s huge earthquake.
The confirmed death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades stood at more than 23,700 across southern Turkiye and northwest Syria four days after it hit.
Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to affected areas since the quake, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma, state media reported.
His government also approved humanitarian aid deliveries across the frontlines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of desperate people.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said earlier that it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war complicated relief efforts.
The UN agency appealed for $77mn to provide food rations and hot meals for 874,000 people affected by the deadly quake.
The number in need of aid “includes 284,000 newly displaced people in Syria and 590,000 people in Turkiye, which includes 45,000 refugees and 545,000 internally displaced people”, it said.
The earthquake, which struck in the early hours of Monday, ranks as the seventh most deadly natural disaster this century, ahead of Japan’s 2011 tremor and tsunami and approaching the 31,000 killed by a quake in neighbouring Iran in 2003.
Yesterday Erdogan visited Turkiye’s Adiyaman province, where he acknowledged the government’s response was not as fast as it could have been.
“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.
He also said that looting of shops had taken place in some areas.
Erdogan is standing for re-election in a vote scheduled for May 14 and his opponents have seized upon the issue to attack him.
The election may now be postponed due to the disaster.
With anger simmering over delays in the delivery of aid and getting the rescue effort underway, the disaster is likely to play into the election, if it goes ahead.
Erdogan has called for solidarity and condemned what he has described as “negative campaigns for political interest”.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of Turkiye’s main opposition party, criticised the government response.
“The earthquake was huge, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.
The death toll from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and several powerful aftershocks across both countries has surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Turkiye.
The number of deaths in Turkiye rose to 20,213 yesterday, the country’s health minister said.
In Syria, more than 3,500 have been killed, with many more people believed to remain under rubble.
Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors.
In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.
In the Samandag district of Turkiye, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs and whispering “Inshallah” (God willing), carefully reached into the rubble and picked out a 10-day-old newborn.
His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and carried to a field hospital.
Emergency workers also took away his mother, dazed and pale but conscious on a stretcher, video images showed.
In Diyarbakir to the east, Sebahat Varli, 32, and her son Serhat were rescued and taken to hospital yesterday morning, some 100 hours after the quake.
People’s survival chances fall greatly after the first 72 hours because of the cumulative effects of dehydration and cold.
A mother and her two daughters were rescued from the rubble of an apartment block in the city of Kahramanmaras on Friday evening.
Broadcaster CNN Turk showed rescue workers carrying out the three of them in succession.
Across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used their hands to dig though plaster and cement until reaching the bare foot of a young girl, still wearing pink pyjamas, grimy but alive and free.
However, hopes were fading that many more would be found alive.
In the Syrian town of Jandaris, Naser al-Wakaa sobbed as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal that had been his family’s home, burying his face in the baby clothes that had belonged to one of his children.
“Bilal, oh Bilal,” he wailed, shouting the name of one of his dead children.
The head of Turkiye’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bulent Yildirim, went to Syria to see the impact there.
“It was as if a missile has been dropped on every single building,” he said.
Some 24.4mn people in Syria and Turkiye have been affected, according to Turkish officials and the United Nations, in an area spanning roughly 450km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east.
In Syria, people were killed as far south as Hama, 250km from the epicentre.
Many people have set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins.
Survivors are often desperate for food, water and heat.
In Syria, the aid deliveries across the frontlines agreed yesterday will take place in co-operation with the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, state media said.
The United Nations had pushed for aid to flow more freely into Syria, especially into the northwest, where it estimated more than 4mn people were already in need before the quake.
Dozens of planeloads of aid have arrived in areas held by Assad’s government since Monday but little has reached the northwest.
One of the single biggest tragedies involved 24 Cypriot children aged 11-14, who were in Turkey for a volleyball tournament when the quake swallowed their hotel.
Ten of their bodies were repatriated to their homeland in northern Cyprus.
Turkish media reports that at least 19 people in the group – which included 15 accompanying adults – have now been confirmed dead.
Meanwhile, Turkish police detained yesterday a contractor trying to flee the country after his building collapsed in Turkiye’s catastrophic earthquake, state media reported.
Ronesans Residence, a block of high-rise luxury flats that toppled over in Antakya city, Hatay province, has sparked anger on social media.
Former Ghana international footballer Christian Atsu, who was caught up in the quake, is believed to be under the rubble of the 12-storey block of flats, which was built in 2013.
His sporting director at Hatayspor club, Taner Savut, is also trapped, local media said.
The 2013 date is particularly important because Turkiye introduced tougher building regulations after a 1999 quake in northwestern Turkiye killed more than 17,000 people.
Officers detained the contractor, Mehmet Yasar Coskun, at Istanbul airport as he tried to run away to Montenegro, state news agency Anadolu said.
He was allegedly carrying an unknown amount of money with him, but the agency did not detail exactly why police detained him.