Rescue efforts wind down in Turkey, many left to mourn without a funeral

Rescue efforts in earthquake-hit Turkey ground to a halt on Sunday, nearly two weeks after the country’s worst disaster in modern times, with many turning to prayer only to cry.

“Do you pray to find the body? We do … to send the body to the family,” said bulldozer operator Akin Bozkurt as the machine clawed at the ruins of the destroyed building in the city of Kahramanmaras.

“You recovered a body from a ton of rubble. The family is waiting with hope,” Bozkurt said. “They want to hold a funeral. They want a grave.”

According to Islamic tradition, the dead should be buried as soon as possible.

The head of Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), Yunus Sezer, said the search and rescue efforts would be completed by Sunday.

More than 46,000 people have died after earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria on February 6. The death toll is expected to rise, with some 345,000 apartments in Turkey now destroyed and many people still missing.

Neither Turkey nor Syria said how many people were still unaccounted for in the quake.

Orhan Tatar, General Director of Earthquake and Risk Reduction in Turkey’s Disaster Management at AFAD, stated on Sunday that the East Anatolia Fault broke in five different branches, with a 25-kilometer fracture measured in Malatya province alone.

About 400 kilometers of surface fractures and deformations in the Earth’s crust caused major changes, with the largest measuring 7.3 meters and eight to nine kilometers wide.

In one of the last attempts to pull people out of the rubble 12 days after the earthquake, emergency teams on Saturday night began clearing the debris by hand at the rescue site in Antakya.

Search dogs and thermal cameras had detected signs of life from the two men, rescuers said, but after midnight, eight hours after the operation, the team rescued them.

“No one is alive,” said Mujdat Erdogan, a member of AFAD, his face and uniform covered in dust. “I don’t think we can rescue anyone anymore.”

Workers from Kyrgyzstan try to rescue a Syrian family of five from the rubble of a building in Antakya in southern Turkey.

Three people, including a child, were rescued alive. The mother and father survived, but the boy died of dehydration, rescuers said. My sister and twins did not come.

“We heard screams when we were digging today an hour ago. When we find someone alive, we are always happy,” Atay Osmanov, a member of the rescue team, told Reuters.

Ten ambulances were waiting on a nearby road that was blocked to traffic to rescue them.

The workers asked for complete silence and for everyone to crouch or sit while the team climbed to the top of the rubble of the building where the family met to listen for other sounds using electronic detectors.

As rescue efforts continued, one worker yelled into the rubble: “Take a deep breath if you hear my voice.”

The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 26 million people in Turkey and Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive in Turkey on Sunday to discuss how Washington can help Ankara as it faces its worst natural disaster in modern times.

In Syria, which has reported more than 5,800 deaths, the World Food Program (WFP) said authorities in the north-west of the country were blocking access to the area.

“This is bottlenecking our operations. That needs to be fixed immediately,” WFP Director David Beasley told Reuters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Most of the casualties in Syria are in the northwest, an area controlled by rebels in a battle with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

“Time is running out and we are running out of money. Our operation is about $50 million per month for our earthquake response alone, so unless Europe wants a new wave of refugees, we have to get the support we need,” added Beasley.

Thousands of Syrians who have fled Turkey from the civil war have returned to their homes in the war zone – at least for now.