Turkey-Syria earthquake live: UN launches $1 bn victims appeal

Last week’s earthquakes that hit southern Turkey and northwest Syria have killed at least 36,187 people in southern Turkey, according to the country’s disaster management agency.

Authorities in neighbouring Syria have reported 5,800 deaths – a figure that has changed little in days.

Residents across northwestern Syria have reported a new tremor that lasted about 15 seconds.

The 5.1-magnitude earthquake, reportedly centred in Antakya, in southern Turkey, pushed people back onto the streets as they feared the collapse of their homes.

Reporting by Ali Haj Suleiman in northwest Syria. 

Dozens of arms frantically reach for heaters and blankets handed out by a private donor, illustrating the desperation and rage gripping swathes of Turkey 11 days after its disastrous earthquake.

Many in the Syrian border region town of Samandag listened to their relatives and friends slowly die under the rubble as they waited for rescuers who came too late.

And those who survived the February 6 disaster have been living on the streets, freezing when the winter temperatures plunge after dark.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the scale of last week’s deadly earthquake demanded more resources than what the Syrian state had available to it and thanked states that had provided aid in its aftermath, including “Arab brothers and friends”.

“The scale of the disaster and the duties we must undertake are much greater than available resources,” al-Assad said, in his first televised address since the earthquake in the dead of night on Monday.

Seren Ay Cetin, a Turkish female boxer who won the 2022 World Boxing Council (WBC) title, is auctioning her championship belt to help earthquake victims in Turkey.

In a tweet, Seren Ay Cetin, 26, said she would put her WBC Silver Bantamweight title belt on auction, hoping to sell it for at least one million Turkish liras or $53,000. She promised to give all the proceeds to Ahbap, a Turkish non-governmental organisation helping the victims.

Cetin was the first female Turkish boxer to win a WBC title after defeating Austria’s Eva Voraberger, a two-time WBC world champion, in a fight held last May in Istanbul.

With whiskers and colourful cat ears painted on their faces, young survivors of last week’s earthquake at a humanitarian camp in Osmaniye, Turkey, enjoyed a moment of childhood normality.

Chattering excitedly, the children lined up to have their faces painted by social workers and volunteers at the camp, and to take part in sport.

“We have been here for a week and all camps have this kind of psycho-social support. We may continue this for up to a year,” said Ahmet Hasim Atalay, a social worker who has been helping at the camp.

Many children were left homeless by the massive tremor that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6. They have been learning to cope with what happened and with their continuing anxiety.

Sevil Karaabdüloğlu, whose two daughters died when a high-end block of flats collapsed in the southern city of Antakya, has voiced her anger about what she believes was shoddy construction.

“We rented this place as an elite place, a safe place. How do I know that the contractor built it this way? … Everyone is looking to make a profit. They’re all guilty,” she said.

There was grief and anger at the funeral of a young family of four – Ismail and Selin Yavuzatmaca and their two children – who died in the same building as Karaabdüloğlu’s daughters.

“This should have been the fate of the constructor, not of Ismail!” his sister-in-law yelled.

The United Nations has launched an appeal for $1bn in aid to help victims in Turkey of last week’s catastrophic earthquake that killed thousands of people.

The world body said in a statement that the funds would provide humanitarian relief for three months to 5.2 million people, allowing aid organisations to “rapidly scale up vital support”.

The Red Cross has more than tripled its emergency funding appeal to over $700m for aid to victims of the catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria last week.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it now estimated it would need 650 million Swiss francs ($702m) to help respond to the soaring humanitarian needs in both countries.

Just over a week ago, the organisation had estimated its funding needs at 200 million francs ($216m).

There have been reports of soaring tensions between some Turks and Syrians in quake-hit communities in recent days.

The earthquakes appear to have inflamed anger against foreigners in Turkey, home to the world’s largest population of people fleeing conflict zones.

In Antakya, one of the cities flattened by last week’s quakes, a Turkish search and rescue volunteer dragged a Syrian man with a bloodied face down a pile of rubble and accused him of looting, the AFP news agency reported.

Soon afterwards, a man in a first-aid jacket accosted another refugee who was holding a half-filled plastic bag.

As an angry crowd rushed gathered around alleged looter, a young Turkish woman stepped in to defend the Syrian and defuse the situation.

In the city of Islahiye, Ahmad Dervis, a 28-year-old Syrian father with two daughters in a stroller and a 19-year-old wife, told AFP he struggled to understand the resentment.

“The earthquake hit all of us. We are all suffering,” said Dervis, who left Syria’s Idlib province in 2011 and now lives in a tent city.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed sweeping powers in 2018, he swore the state would deliver more under a centralised system that his critics compare to one-man rule.

Five years on, an agonisingly slow response to a catastrophic quake has undermined that idea, boosting the opposition’s case in polls planned for May, experts say.

Erdogan has acknowledged “shortcomings” in the government’s handling of Turkey’s deadliest disaster of its post-Ottoman history.

The opposition says the February 6 quake underlines why Turkey must switch back to a parliamentary system under which agencies have more freedom to act on their own.

“You have centralisation in all Turkish institutions, which is reflected in institutions that specifically should not have it,” such as the disaster agency, said Hetav Rojan, a disaster management expert who follows Turkey closely.

Turkey’s central bank bought 1.8 billion lira ($95.51m) worth of government bonds and sukuk via the quotation method, central bank data from Refinitiv Eikon has shown.

It follows the central bank’s buying of 4.1 billion lira ($217.5m) worth of government bonds and sukuk via the quotation method on Wednesday.

The central bank earlier said it would buy up to eight billion lira ($424.5m) in government bonds and sukuk, a move bankers said was aimed at balancing government bond sales by pension funds who must meet new regulations on the allocation of stocks in the government-sponsored part of the funds.

More than 100 trucks with United Nations aid, including tents, heaters and cholera testing kits, have crossed into northwest Syria since the earthquakes struck.

“The UN is continuing to scale up its operation with the plan to utilize all three Turkish-Syrian border crossings, Bab Al-Hawa, Bab Al-Salam and Al Ra’ee, to ensure a constant reach of aid to different districts of north-west Syria,” read a UN statement.

Shelter needs were identified as the top priority among displaced populations in the opposition-controlled area, it added.

The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Syria has said that the country’s death toll from last week’s deadly earthquakes is likely to rise further as teams scramble to remove rubble in hard-hit areas.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Muhannad Hadi defended the UN’s response to the disaster, which many in Syria have criticised as slow and inadequate. The UN has reported a death toll of about 5,800 for all of Syria, including 4,400 in the rebel-held northwest.

“We’re hoping that this number will not increase by much,” Hadi said. “But from what we are seeing … the devastation of this earthquake is really not giving us a lot of hope that this will be the end of it.”

Hospitals in Syria are struggling to cope with the influx of patients after last week’s devastating earthquakes. Doctors are calling on the international community to help provide them with medical supplies and assistance.

The Turkish central bank’s net international reserves fell some $2.65bn to $24.44bn in the week to February 10, data from the bank showed on Thursday.

The Turkish lira lost around 30 percent of its value against the dollar last year and 44 percent in 2021.

Syria could face dangerous outbreaks of disease in the wake of last week’s devastating earthquake if hundreds of thousands of displaced people do not get permanent housing soon, the Red Cross global chief said Friday, as Syrians struggle to receive humanitarian aid amid the mounting crisis.

Jagan Chapagain, who is secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said families staying in makeshift shelters without adequate heating urgently need permanent housing.

“They are still living in very basic conditions in very, very cold school rooms,” he told The Associated Press. “If this continues for a long period of time, then there will be health consequences.”

He spoke after returning from Aleppo, Syria’s largest city that for years witnessed some of the worst fighting of the country’s continuing war. Aleppo was hit with a cholera outbreak in late 2022. The earthquake’s impact on access to housing, water, fuel, and other infrastructure could make another outbreak “possible,” he said, adding that the disaster also has been ruinous for Syrians’ mental health.

“If the conflict had broken their backs, I think this earthquake is breaking their spirit now,” Chapagain said.

Direct costs from the destruction of physical structures in Turkey from the devastating earthquakes on February 6 could amount to 2.5 percent of growth domestic product or $25bn, JPMorgan said on Thursday.

The combined death toll from the quakes in Turkey and Syria has climbed to more than 41,000, and millions need humanitarian aid, with many survivors left homeless in near-freezing winter temperatures.

“The earthquake in Turkey has led to a tragic loss of life and carries meaningful economic implications,” economist Fatih Akcelik wrote in a note to clients.

In Turkey’s Pazarcık, a city with more than 450 deaths, a local newspaper’s last edition bears testimony to life before it was forever upended.

Journalist Suat Yenipınar used to publish Aksu Haber Gazetesi from a building which is now badly damaged.

Read the full story here.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder spoke to Al Jazeera, outlining the grave risks faced by children in quake-hit areas of northwestern Syria.

“Right now, they need the full gamut of support,” he said, listing clean water, food, blankets and psychological support as some of the most pressing requirements.

“It’s literally everything for children who 10 days ago escaped crumbling concrete in their pyjamas into the freezing cold,” he added, noting the already dire situation in the war-hit region.

“This is trauma on top of trauma for these children; every little boy or girl who is 12 or under, their whole life has been conflict.”