Rescuers yesterday pulled a seven-month-old baby and a teenage girl from the rubble nearly a week after a powerful earthquake devastated huge areas of Turkey and Syria, killing more than 28,000 people.
UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said that the death toll was likely to at least double, while denouncing a failure to provide sufficient aid for victims in war-torn northwestern Syria.
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Griffiths wrote on Twitter.
Photo: AFP
“My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can,” he added.
Griffiths arrived in southern Turkey on Saturday to assess the quake’s damage, telling Sky News he expected the death toll to “double or more” as the chances of finding survivors dim with each passing day.
Tens of thousands of rescue workers continued to scour flattened neighborhoods in freezing weather that has deepened the misery of millions in desperate need of aid.
Photo: CNA
Security concerns led some aid operations to be suspended, and dozens of people have been arrested for looting or trying to defraud victims in the aftermath of the quake in Turkey, state media reported.
However, miraculous tales of survival still emerged.
“Is the world there?” asked 70-year-old Menekse Tabak as she was pulled out from the concrete in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the magnitude 7.8 tremor, to applause and cries praising God, a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber showed.
A seven-month-old baby named Hamza was rescued in southern Hatay Province more than 140 hours after the quake, while Esma Sultan, 13, was also saved in Gaziantep, state media reported.
Families were racing against time to find their missing relatives’ bodies in southern Turkey.
“We hear [the authorities] will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain period of time, they say they will take them and bury them,” Tuba Yolcu said in Kahramanmaras.
Another family clutched each other in grief at a cotton field transformed into a cemetery, where a seemingly endless stream of bodies arrived for swift burials.
Officials and medics said that 24,617 people had died in Turkey and 3,574 in Syria. The confirmed total was 28,191.
Taiwan’s search-and-rescue team is to return on Wednesday, Minister of the Interior Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said on Saturday.
With the hope of finding survivors waning after more than 120 hours since the earthquake on Monday last week, the Turkish government has begun to send heavy equipment into the worst-hit areas, which makes further rescue efforts unlikely, Lin said in a statement.
After careful consideration, the team has decided to wrap up its mission and return home, he said.
The Taiwanese rescue workers were to withdraw from Adiyaman Province yesterday morning and arrive in Istanbul tomorrow before boarding an EVA Airways charter flight home.
Shortly after the earthquake, Taiwan sent a 130-member rescue team and five search dogs to join international efforts to find survivors in Adiyaman.
The efforts of the Taiwanese team have been recognized internationally and helped Taipei forge closer friendships with Ankara, Lin said.
On Thursday, about 89 hours after the quake, members of the Taiwanese team pulled a 35-year-old woman from a collapsed residential building.
She was the second person rescued by the team.
They rescued another woman from a collapsed building in Adiyaman on Wednesday night. She died shortly afterward at a local hospital.
Additional reporting by staff writer, with CNA
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
RSS