Guwahati: Rescuers extracted children from the rubble as the death toll from the Turkey-Syria earthquake passed 24,000 on Friday (local time), according to The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).
Four days after the earthquake, which was the deadliest in the area in twenty years, struck, more than 24,000 people have been verified dead across southern Turkey and northwest Syria.
The city of Kahramanmaras in eastern Turkey, which was the epicentre of the initial 7.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked millions of lives early on Monday, was filled with the stench of death. According to France24, it is situated in an isolated area where many people have already been uprooted by fighting.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that authorities should have responded to this week’s significant earthquake more quickly.
Erdogan recognised that the government’s response was not as quick as it could have been while on a visit to the Turkish region of Adiyaman on Friday.
“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.
Erdogan’s opponents have seized on the fact that he is running for re-election to attack him ahead of the election on May 14. The calamity might now force a postponement of the election.
If the election happens, the catastrophe is likely to influence the outcome because of simmering resentment about the length of time it took to start the rescue effort and supply help.
Erdogan has urged unity and denounced what he has called “negative campaigns for political purpose,” saying that the referendum was his hardest test in his 20 years in leadership, even before the earthquake.
The leader of Turkey’s largest opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, criticised the government’s response.
“The earthquake was huge, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.
Leaders in both countries have come under fire for their response after hundreds of thousands of people were left hungry and homeless over the harsh winter.
Rescuers, including teams from other nations, worked day and night through the wreckage of tens of thousands of destroyed structures to look for buried alive. They frequently asked for stillness while they listened for any sounds of life coming from broken concrete mounds in the frigid conditions.
At least 870,000 people in Turkey and Syria urgently required hot meals, the UN warned. Up to 5.3 million people may have lost their homes in Syria alone.
“That is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering mass displacement,” said Sivanka Dhanapala, the Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
According to state media, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma on his first known trip to the afflicted areas since the earthquake.
Moreover, his government authorised the distribution of humanitarian supplies along the frontlines of the nation’s 12-year civil conflict, a decision that might hasten the receipt of aid for millions of indigent people. As the state of war there hindered humanitarian efforts, the World Food Program earlier declared that it was running out of supplies in rebel-held northwest Syria, according to SMH.