Death toll from the colossal earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria earlier in the week topped 21,000 even as biting cold hampered search and rescue operations dimming hopes of finding more survivors buried under the rubble.
On Thursday, World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus left for Syria to oversee aid efforts as bitter cold hampered the search of thousands of flattened buildings and threatened the lives of many quake victims who are without shelter and drinking water.
According to disaster experts, chances for finding more survivors have dropped significantly, now that the crucial 72-hour mark has passed.
Ground reports said that people were scouring body bags laid out in a hospital car park in Turkey’s southern city of Antakya to search for missing relatives, a cruel reminder of the scale of the tragedy.
An AFP report quoted a Syrian refugee, Rania Zaboubi, as saying that she lost eight members of her family and somehow found her aunt alive.
An aid convoy reached militant-held north-western Syria on early Thursday via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, first since the 7.8 magnitude quake struck on Monday.
The crossing in the way UN aid efforts can reach militant-held zones without passing through Syrian regime-controlled areas.
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The war-torn nation, already on the brink of collapse due to the decade long civil war which has razed key infrastructure such as hospitals, is ill-equipped to face a disaster of this magnitude and scale.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged the Security Council to authorise the opening of new cross-border humanitarian aid points between Turkey and Syria to deliver aid.
Four million people living in militant-held areas of northwest Syria have had to rely on the Bab al-Hawa crossing as part of a cross-border aid operation authorised by the Security Council nearly a decade ago.
Temperatures in the Turkish city of Gaziantep plunged to minus five degrees Celsius early Thursday, but thousands of families spent the night in cars and makeshift tents.
Parents walked the streets of the city — close to the epicentre of Monday’s earthquake — carrying their children in blankets because it was warmer than sitting in a tent. Gyms, mosques, schools and some stores have opened at night. But beds are still at a premium and thousands spend the nights in cars with engines running to provide heat.
International rescue teams have said the bitter cold has forced them to weigh whether to use their limited fuel supplies to keep warm or to carry out their work.
The death toll in the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and neighbouring Syria has mounted to over 15,000 even as survivors of the disaster scramble for food and shelter amid freezing weather.
On Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded “shortcomings” after the Turkish government received flak for its response of lack thereof to the massive quake that razed thousands of buildings and trapped an ever-mounting number of people beneath the rubble.
According to on ground reports, survivors have been left to scramble for food and shelter — and in some cases watch helplessly as their relatives called for rescue, and eventually went silent under the debris. The rescue efforts have, however, been marred by freezing weather and the massive scale of the devastation.
Experts fear the toll to rise sharply over the next few days.
Turkey is in one of the world’s most active seismic zones in the world. A 7.8-magnitude tremor in 1939 killed over 33,000 people in the eastern Erzincan province.
The Turkish region of Duzce suffered a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in 1999, when more than 17,000 people died.
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