The World Health Organization fears the total number of dead could exceed 20,000. e_h_obrien meets one family desperately waiting for the rescue of their relative
n Monday morning, two hours after an immense earthquake shook Antakya, a city in south-east Turkey, Ayhan Mansuroglu ran towards the flat of his 42-year-old younger brother, Sedat. He’d heard from his mother and sister, and was relieved that they were alive, but it was impossible to get through to Sedat. Something, he felt, was wrong.
Mansuroglu kept digging. Then, to the right of the carpet, squeezed between a mattress and a collapsed ceiling, he saw a foot. Hamide let out a cry. She called out to her son, but he didn’t answer. She pleaded with Sedat to move his foot if he was alive. According to her recollection, he wiggled his toes.
The scale of the damage was evident as I drove towards Antakya a day after the earthquake. The industrial port of Iskenderun, 40km north of Antakya, was ablaze. Shipping containers had caught fire and thick billows of smoke turned the cloudless sky dark grey. The air at the centre of the city was so thick with dust and smoke that it coated my hands and the inside of my nose, and filled my throat. Mannequins still dressed in wedding gowns leaned, head-first, out of broken windows. The hospital was damaged beyond repair. The police station is a pile of sand-coloured rubble with a sign on top. There is nowhere for people to seek shelter as the places in which they might have sought refuge have also crumbled.
Mahmut Togrul, the representative for nearby Gaziantep for the People’s Democratic Party, an opposition party, accused the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of failing to plan for the disaster. He spent Monday and Tuesday travelling between villages on the outskirts of Gaziantep, which was also hard hit, and says many rural areas have seen no search-and-rescue efforts at all.
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