KAHRAMANMARAS: Rescuers are racing against time to recover people from under the rubble as the death toll from the Turkiye-Syria earthquake crossed 23,000 on Friday.

According to the Turkish disaster management authority, the death toll in the country has risen to 20,213 by Friday.

More than 3,500 people have been killed by the quake in Syria, according to tallies by state media and a rescue service in the insurgent-held northwest of the conflict-divided country.

According to the UN, 5.3 million people in Syria have been left homeless while another one million people are in urgent need of food.

Erdogan admits slow response in wake of widespread tragedy; Syria allows aid delivery in conflict-hit areas

“As many as 5.3 million people in Syria may have been left homeless by the earthquake,” the Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sivanka Dhanapala, told a press briefing.

‘Miraculous rescues’

As anger mounts in Turkiye over the government’s failure in helping the victims, miraculous rescues continued in some areas more than 100 hours after the first tremor.

Turkish television showed rescuers pulling out a family of four — a mother and her three children — from the rubble 108 hours after the disaster in the Syria-border province of Hatay. Three-year-old Zeynep Ela Parlak was also rescued in the same province on Friday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded for the first time on Friday that his government was not able to reach and help the victims “as quickly as we had desired”.

“So many buildings were damaged that unfortunately, we were not able to speed up our interventions as quickly as we had desired,” he said during a visit to Adiyaman province. He said rescuers had been slowed by a winter storm over the area that had made some roads impassable.

Syria allows aid

Syria’s government has approved humanitarian aid delivery across the frontlines of the country’s 12-year-old civil war, state media said on Friday, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of people affected by the quake.

Aid distribution will take place in cooperation with the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, state media said.

Dozens of planeloads of aid have arrived in areas held by President Bashar al-Assad’s government since Monday but little has reached the northwest, leading many residents to say they feel left alone.

The UN’s World Food Programme appealed on Friday for $77 million to provide food rations and hot meals for 874,000 people affected by the deadly earthquake in Syria and Turkiye.

The number in need of aid “includes 284,000 newly displaced people in Syria and 590,000 people in Turkiye,” it said in a statement.

Militants halt fighting

On Friday, Kurdish militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) group announced a temporary halt in fighting after UN rights chief Volker Turk called for ceasefira in Syria to ease recovery work in Turkiye’s southeastern region which has witnessed some of the heaviest fighting between Turkish government forces and the PKK.

The group’s co-leader Cemil Bayik told the PKK-linked ANF news agency that “thousands of our people are under the rubble” and urged a focus on recovery work rather than waging war.

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2023