Bodies pile up on cold asphalt of parking lot

Antakya – Rania Zaboubi scours body bags laid out in the car park of a hospital in southern Türkiye in search of her uncle who went missing after Monday’s massive earthquake.

“We found my aunt, but not my uncle,” she says.

The Syrian refugee says she lost eight members of her family in the tragedy that has so far claimed the lives of at least 21 000 people in Turkey and neighbouring Syria.

In the parking lot of the main hospital in Antakya, a large city in Turkey’s Hatay province, other survivors were also going from corpse to corpse looking for people they knew.

AFP journalists counted nearly 200 bodies, arranged on either side of tents.

Faced with the magnitude of the disaster, there is not enough space in the vast parking lot. With nowhere else to put them, seven bodies were laid at the foot of a container overflowing with waste.

The hospital has huge cracks along one side. It is still standing, but authorities have decided to evacuate it.

The interior of the building has also been damaged, making it impossible to receive patients.

Patients are treated in red and white tents and are classified in three colours according to the severity of their injuries.

Many were transported by helicopter to hospitals that withstood the tremors, with many going to Adana.

The dead, however, are stranded on the cold asphalt.

How many have been brought there since Monday? “Too many,” says Yigitcan Kayserili, a volunteer from Ankara.

Kayserili helps families find their dead while also providing psychological support. He has not slept for two days.

“About 70% of the bodies here are anonymous,” he says.

Those not recovered after 24 hours are loaded into the truck to end up in mass graves. –