Death toll in Turkey, Syria quake tops 33,000 as Turkey starts legal action
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Rescuers pulled more survivors from the rubble on Sunday six days after one of the worst earthquakes to hit Turkey and Syria, as Turkish authorities sought to maintain order across the disaster zone and began legal action over some building collapses.
With chances of finding more survivors growing more remote, the toll in both countries from Monday’s earthquake and major aftershocks rose above 33,000 and looked set to keep growing. It was the deadliest quake in Turkey since 1939.
Displaced residents in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre, said they had set up tents as close as they could to their damaged or destroyed homes in an effort to prevent them from being looted.
Facing questions over his response to the earthquake as he prepares for a national election that is expected to be the toughest of his two decades in power, President Tayyip Erdogan promised to start rebuilding within weeks.
In Syria the disaster hit hardest in the rebel-held northwest, leaving homeless yet again many people who had already been displaced several times by a decade-old civil war. The region has received little aid compared to government-held areas.
In Syria, the hostilities that have fractured the country during 12 years of civil war are now hindering relief work.
Earthquake aid from government-held regions into territory controlled by hardline opposition groups has been held up by approval issues with Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which controls much of the region, a U.N. spokesperson said.
An HTS source in Idlib told Reuters the group would not allow any shipments from government-held areas and that aid would be coming in from Turkey to the north.
“Turkey has opened all the roads and we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping,” the source said.
The U.N. is hoping to ramp up cross-border operations by opening an additional two border points between Turkey and opposition-held Syria for aid deliveries, spokesperson Jens Laerke said.
The foreign minister of U.S. ally the United Arab Emirates met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday in the first high-level visit by an Arab official since the quake.
Several Arab countries have provided support to Assad in the quake’s aftermath. Western countries, which sought to isolate Assad after his crackdown on protests in 2011 and the outbreak of civil war, are major contributors to U.N. relief efforts across Syria but have provided little direct aid to Damascus.
The first shipment of European earthquake aid to government-held parts of Syria also arrived in Damascus on Sunday.
U.N. relief chief Griffiths will travel to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday to survey the damage and launch a United Nations appeal for Syria, which he hopes will cover both government and non-government zones of control.
The quake ranks as the world’s sixth deadliest natural disaster this century, its death toll exceeding the 31,000 from a quake in neighbouring Iran in 2003.
It has killed 29,605 people in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria, where tolls have not been updated for two days.
Turkey said about 80,000 people were in hospital, and more than 1 million in temporary shelters.
