Fourteen days after two powerful earthquakes shook southern Turkey and northern Syria, in what has been described as one of the deadliest of the 21st century, the death toll has surpassed 46,000. Dozens of towns have been reduced to rubble with six-story buildings crumbling in a matter of seconds. After five days, there was already no place for the dead in the cemeteries of the affected regions while hundreds of thousands of people were sleeping in the open air, in often subzero conditions. Many have slept in their cars or in makeshift tents under market stalls, with nowhere else to go. For more than a week, rescuers worked day and night, hampered by a large winter storm, in an attempt to find the survivors.
Above: a pedestrian passes a collapsed building in
Kahramanmaraş, southern Turkey. Right, far right and below: scenes of damage to Pazarcık, the epicentre of the earthquake
Babies, teenagers and sometimes entire families were pulled, still alive, from the rubble, to the applause of the people and the tears of relatives. Some survived for up to 11 days buried beneath the remains of their houses. Many families said that, in the first few days after the earthquakes, they could make out the faint voices of relatives under the debris. Then, slowly, silence fell over the piles of concrete and bricks that were once homes and are now tombs.
For 60 hours, Barış Yapar tried to dig his grandparents’ bodies out from under the rubble of their own home. With his parents, Habip and Sevcan, the 27-year-old clinical psychology student tried in vain to remove them. It was desperate work. It took two full days after the two earthquakes before Turkey’s official disaster relief agency reached the town of Samandağ near the Syrian border. When they finally arrived, the small number of rescuers were stretched thin. The Yapars watched as rescue workers pulled people from the smashed concrete, a number of whom they had known for generations.
Above: a view of the of destruction in Samandağ. Right: Barış Yapar and his parents are now living in the town’s central square, spending the nights in their car. Below: people displaced by the earthquake in Samandağ gather in front of a truck distributing food, clothes and other items.
As in other places affected by the earthquake, Samandağ cemetery had no more room for other bodies. The freshly dug graves are marked with blank headstones, with only pieces of ripped cloth gathered from the victims’ clothing to identify them.
On the street outside the Nurdağı cemetery in the Turkish province of Gaziantep, dozens of bodies lie piled on top of each other on a row of pickup trucks, waiting to be buried. At least five imams have rushed to Nurdağı to officiate a ceaseless rush of mass funerals, sometimes for as many as 10 victims at once. Officials brought in deliveries of coffins from neighbouring villages and as far as Istanbul to provide a final resting place for the overwhelming numbers of bodies arriving in the town.
Top: residents and workers in front of destroyed homes in Nurdağı cemetery. Right: three earthquake victims are buried at the cemetery. Below left: the aftermath in Kahramanmaraş. Below right: a body is carried through the streets of Kahramanmaraş.
“Forty per cent of the people who lived in this town could be gone,” said Sadık Güneş, an imam in Nurdağı. His home had been next to the mosque, which collapsed. Without a place for their prayers, mass funeral services in Nurdağı and the rest of southern Turkey having been taking place outdoors. “I’ve lost count of the bodies we’ve buried since Monday,” Güneş said. “We built an extension to the cemetery. There are still people under the debris. We will bury those ones too, once they are recovered. We are burying the bodies even late at night with the help of citizens who come to help us.”
Yet, even today, tens of thousands of people have been left in the streets. Many families spend the night in front of the ruins of their homes, for fear that they may be looted, warming themselves around a fire lit with wood gathered from the remains of their own houses.
People walk past ruined buildings in Idlib province, Syria.
When the earthquake trembled across the towns in the rebel-held province of Idlib in Syria, people thought it was another airstrike from the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers. Mohammed Hadi, who lived with his wife and five children in a five-story apartment block, destroyed by the quake, in al-Haram, even thought that Moscow was testing a new type of weapon on people, one capable of making the earth shake. Hadi said the earthquake struck while he was still sleeping and that, within seconds, he grabbed his wife and two of his children and took them with him, outside the building.
Mohammed Hadi, with his two children and his baby daughter, survived at the earthquake.
‘’My wife was gripping my hand tightly as we ran,” he told the Guardian. “But then, once we got outside, she realised two of our daughters were still inside and ran back in to save them.” He described seeing a flash of white, which cleared to reveal the rubble of what was once his new home. The collapse of the five-storey apartment block had claimed his three loved ones’ lives as Hadi watched.
The earthquake has compounded layers upon layers of humanitarian crisis in Idlib. These were homes of people already internally displaced once when the Syrian regime had attacked their villages, forcing them to seek shelter in Idlib. Most said they had arrived so recently that they had been sleeping in houses with bare concrete walls and little else. Idlib had been a place of last resort for thousands displaced by more than a decade of war. Across the province, some pitched their tents among ancient Byzantine ruins in sheer desperation for somewhere to live.
Top: a small makeshift hospital in al-Haram. Above: scenes from a hospital near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing.
The schools in Idlib, which had been converted into hospitals, are collapsing, where the few doctors available are busy treating patients with very serious injuries. These makeshift facilities are run on a shoestring and lack most of the basic medical supplies and medications that us needed to treat earthquake survivors. Hundreds of children were orphaned after the earthquake, joining the other hundreds of orphans from the war.
Jinan, 5, at a hospital in Idlib, Syria.
The Guardian met five-year-old Jinan and her nine-month-old brother Abdullah, filmed trapped under the rubble in a video that went viral a few days after the earthquake. The two children, now in hospital, lost their parents and five other siblings to the earthquake. Jinan had a serious leg wound and the doctor said if it did not improve, they could be forced to amputate it.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Dr Wajih al-Karrat in a low voice. “You see these children here, next to Jinan’s bed. They are orphans too. And the majority still wonder where their parents are and when they will come to get them. First, we want to treat them well. Then, at some point, we will be forced to tell them their parents will never come back.’’
