Toll approaches 40,000
ANTAKYA, TURKEY>> The number of people killed in the Feb. 6 earthquakes that devastated parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria continues to rise. As chances of finding more survivors dwindled, some foreign search teams that rushed in to help have started leaving.
Turkey’s disaster management agency, AFAD, revised the country’s death toll to 36,187. That pushed the combined reported death toll for Turkey and Syria to 39,875.
More than 108,000 people were injured in Turkey in the 7.8 magnitude quake that struck at 4:17 a.m. local time and a magnitude 7.5 quake the first temblor likely triggered nine hours hours later.
A 17-year- old girl was rescued Thursday morning, 248 hours after the original quake, from the debris of a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, a city near the epicenter, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
The girl, Aleyna Olmez, told reporters from her hospital bed that she was well and tried to pass the time by distracting herself. “I had nothing with me,” she said.
Hacer Atlas, a rescuer who was involved in reaching Olmez, told Anadolu: “First we held her hand, then we took her out. She is in a very good condition. She can communicate. I hope we will continue to receive good news about her.”
The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Syria said the country’s death toll 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 U. N.’s response to the disaster, which many in Syria have criticized as slow and inadequate. Hadi said the U.N. urged “everybody to depoliticize the humanitarian situation and focus on supporting us to reach the people.”
The U. N. has reported a death toll of about 6,000 for all of Syria, including 4,400 in the country’s rebel-held northwest. That figure is higher than those reported by government authorities in Damascus and civil defense officials in the northwest, who have reported 1,414 and 2,274 deaths respectively.
If accurate, it would push the combined deaths in Syria and Turkey to well above 42,000.
“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.”
The global chief of the Red Cross said after a visit to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, that the impact on access to housing, water, fuel and other basic necessities could make another cholera outbreak there “possible.”
Aleppo witnessed some of the worst fighting of the country’s ongoing civil war and experienced a cholera outbreak in late 2022. 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.