Within hours of getting news of Monday’s devastating earthquakes, Dundee-based takeaway owner Ali set off with three family members to Turkey. The plane from Stansted airport was full of people on their way to Kahramanmaras, Gaziantep and Sanlıurfa, all embarking on the same desperate challenge: a race against the clock, across Europe, to rescue loved ones.
But reaching Turkey was only the beginning. At Kayseri airport, Ali, 46, was forced to wait while he was held and questioned by Turkish authorities. “Why? Because I am a Kurdish man from a remote Kurdish village near the Syrian border,” he told the Observer. “Now, my home town is destroyed too.” Then they had trouble finding essentials for their journey: fuel for their hire car, water and bread.
When he finally got to Elbistan, where his cousin was trapped under her collapsed apartment building, on Tuesday, the rescue effort was yet to begin. There was no food, water or medicine and he found his diabetic mother, whose phone had run out of power, outside the hospital trying to get medicine in the snow. Driving just a few miles takes hours.
While he is trying to be positive, he is not expecting his cousin, who is in her 30s, to be found alive. “We’re ready to see a dead body,” he said. “When you see the news it’s different. When you’re there, there’s no words to explain. It’s a disaster. Basically it’s a disaster.”
As the horrifying scale of the destruction across Turkey and Syria starts to become clear and the death toll soars, the events of last week have had a cataclysmic impact on the countries’ diaspora in Britain.
Suleymaniye Mosque in Hackney, east London, said one of its members lost 18 relatives in the earthquakes. Another community member lost 12. They are fundraising to send emergency aid to the affected areas.
Taylan Sahbaz, a coordinator at Day-Mer Turkish and Kurdish community centre in north London, said they have been inundated since last Monday with people seeking advice and wanting to talk. “Most of them in a certain state, traumatised over phones trying to get to family, see what’s happening, but most are receiving very negative news. Deaths, injuries, people on the streets,” he said.
Some community members have gone to Turkey to help but have been faced with huge logistical issues. One of Sahbaz’s colleagues flew to Turkey and rented a crane to help with rescue efforts, but was stopped from using it and had been waiting by the rubble since.
In the UK, communities have so far been unified by the disaster, he said. “Turkish Kurdish organisations, and the community in general, is fairly well organised because of its traumas.” At 11am last Monday a network of 30 organisations met and, due to concerns over transport and distribution, decided to focus on collecting money rather than material goods.
Semra Bulut, 45, who works in communication at the centre, has family members missing in Hatay. “I feel helplessness. I feel that deep down in my veins. I think everyone who lives abroad, immigrants, are all feeling the same,” she said. Her cousin, who drove overnight from Istanbul as soon as she heard the news, is desperately trying to get machinery to move concrete to find the bodies of her parents, who she believes are dead. “She’s out of her mind. Because her mum and dad are in the rubble,” Bulut said.
“After war we’re attacked by a natural disaster and no one can help who is in London, like me. I don’t know. It’s so difficult.”
On nearby Harringay Green Lanes, where the majority of traders are Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish Cypriot, many from the worst-affected areas, the earthquake has brought great sadness.
Sabri Barackilic, who runs a restaurant, said one of his chefs flew to Hatay last week to help find missing family members.
At the nearby restaurant Gökyüzü, the owner, Ercan Yavuz, scrolls through photos of scenes from Kahramanmaras, where six of his family members – including three children – have been buried under the rubble of the 10-storey building where they live. His brother went there yesterday. He has been sent a picture of what he has been told are his aunt’s possessions in the rubble and of a body that it is feared could be his cousin. His brother told him: “It’s like hell. Everyone cries.”
Further up the road, in a function room, a group of young people are packing donations to be loaded into a van and taken to the airport to be flown to Turkey. It is one of dozens of drop-off points around the UK.
Bunak Ali Birbudak, 23, has got three days off work which he plans to spend volunteering, after hearing about it on Instagram. One of his friends lost a cousin in the earthquakes. His family in Turkey are not in the affected area but he is struggling to cope. “It’s really bad. It’s really hard to take emotionally. I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Usually I’m the kind of guy to cheer people up but this time I feel hopeless. Even I can’t be optimistic.”
