ANTAKYA: Six days after one of the worst earthquakes to hit Turkey and Syria, rescuers continued to extricate people from the rubble on Sunday as Turkish authorities worked to restore order around the disaster area and began legal proceedings about some building collapses.
The death toll in both countries following Monday’s earthquake and subsequent aftershocks went past 33,000 and appeared to keep rising as the likelihood of discovering additional survivors decreased. It was Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939.
In order to protect their properties from being plundered, displaced residents in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, close to the epicenter, claimed they had pitched tents as close as possible to their damaged or destroyed homes.
President Tayyip Erdogan promised to begin rebuilding within weeks as he faced criticism for his handling of the earthquake as he prepared for a nationwide election that is anticipated to be the most difficult of his two decades in office.
Despite receiving less relief than in government-held areas, the disaster in Syria was most severe in the rebel-held northwest, which forced many people to flee their homes for a second time after being uprooted by a civil war that lasted for ten years.
From the Turkiye-Syria border, where there is just one open border crossing for UN humanitarian supplies, UN assistance head Martin Griffiths tweeted, “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria.” Griffiths stated, “They properly feel abandoned, and I am focused on dealing with that quickly.
Around 149 hours after the earthquake buried a 35-year-old man called Mustafa under a pile of rubble from a building in the southeast Turkish province of Hatay, according to CNN Turk.
One of the rescuers remarked, “His health is good; he was talking.” “Get me out of here soon, I have claustrophobia,” he was yelling.