Turkey is reluctant to end the rescue efforts, when a week has passed since the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and its worst aftershock, 7.6 magnitude. A stream of rescues, between Sunday night and Monday, has encouraged the displaced teams, both from official organizations and made up of volunteers.
This Monday afternoon, in two different operations, two brothers aged 8 and 15, as well as another 12-year-old boy, have been rescued alive in Antioquias, after having spent 181 hours buried. A few hours earlier, in Adiyaman, a four-year-old survivor had been pulled from the rubble.
Meanwhile, the balance of deaths officially amounts to 31,643 in Turkey, to which must be added 3,581 in Syria. There would be more than 158,000 wounded in Turkish territory alone. Also, tens of thousands of missing people are still under the rubble. Despite this, the government of Damascus has terminated the rescue operations today, something that the areas under jihadist control did two days earlier.
Although the possibility of finding survivors is already very remote, Turkey is not throwing in the towel. In Kahramanmaras, miners from the state mining company drilled a building on Monday and propped up tunnels with the aim of reaching a baby accompanied by his mother and his grandmother, who were presumed still alive. Some Spanish rescuers are also collaborating in this effort.
Meanwhile, dogs and thermal cameras still comb the burial mounds, around which a deathly silence falls every time the specialists who listen to them request it. Although the night temperatures are no longer so frigid, the stench of death has also made an appearance.
Over the past night, seven people were rescued alive, including a three-year-old boy in Maras (officially Kahramanmaras), a forty-year-old woman in Antep (officially Gaziantep) and a sixty-year-old woman in Besni.
In total, more than 34,000 people are currently engaged in rescue efforts, according to Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay. Simultaneously, a great exodus has begun to take shape, much as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promises to rebuild within a year. At the moment, there would be 400,000 displaced persons. Serious cases are evacuated by helicopter to hospitals such as Adana, and very serious cases are evacuated by plane to the three major Turkish cities.
Meanwhile, the highway that connects Antioch with Alejandreta and Adana is crowded in both directions, both by those who flee and by those who come to collaborate, turning into an odyssey of up to ten hours a journey that used to be covered in less than three . In the background, the constant hooting of ambulances making their way at full speed through the center lane or between collapsed lanes.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been rehoused in student residences throughout Turkey, where classes have been suspended. Although the most dramatic migration is that of the more than 1,300 corpses of Syrian refugees in Turkey, who have crossed the border for the last time in a plastic bag to be buried in Syria.
Meanwhile, in ground zero, tents have been erected on many soccer fields, where there are beginning to be rudimentary toilets, without water. In patriarchal Antioquia, there is no electricity either, beyond generators. But the telephone signal is being restored in more and more neighborhoods.
On the positive side, humanitarian aid, which was conspicuously absent for the first two or three days, is now abundant in the hardest-hit cities and beginning to reach villages. It should arrive even more smoothly from today, after the entry into service of the Hatay-Antioquia airport, unusable since the earthquake.
Likewise, the government has authorized a greater participation of the army, which is setting up a few dozen reception camps. Not surprisingly, many people continue to warm themselves with bonfires in the street or sleeping in the car, in case they have escaped unscathed.
In moderately affected towns, such as Urfa (officially Sanliurfa), Kilis, Osmaniye and Adana, rescue operations have been suspended on Monday. In contrast to the hardest hit, where the number of burial mounds still to be cleared is discouraging. In Maras alone, the search continues in 308 collapsed buildings or groups of buildings.
Ankara has revealed that 99 countries have offered assistance and that 68 are on the ground. However, some of them suspended their activity on Saturday, temporarily, alleging a deterioration in security and, definitively, this Monday. Some, including various teams from the Spanish Armed Forces, UME and marine infantry, as well as some NGOs, have begun their withdrawal today.
The United Nations itself already speaks of the proper reorientation of the missions, towards accommodation, maintenance or schooling.
In reverse order, this Monday the field hospital of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation began to operate in Alejandreta (Iskenderun, in Turkish). His first patient has been a school director, injured in a foot.
