Volunteers digging with their bare hands as shouts heard amid the rubble

Feb 07, 2023

When we arrived in Antakya near the Syrian border, we were met with a pretty grim scene.

We’ve driven maybe 50 or 60 kilometres all the way along that road from Adana airport.

Virtually every building here has been affected in some way. There are damaged buildings all around me.

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In the wreckage of an eight-storey residential building, a few volunteers are trying to use pickaxes and their bare hands to take out rubble.

In another building they are hearing voices. Every now and again they tell us to be quiet so they can use their small drills – that’s all they’ve got – to try and drill down.

They’ve already taken out at least four corpses this morning and they’re shouting now saying that they’ve heard people beneath.

A lot of people in this province feel that they have been forgotten, that they haven’t received help, that they’re still not getting help.

We saw crowds of people looting one of the supermarkets saying that they’re hungry, they had nowhere to stay, no homes, no food and crucially no help at the moment.

When we were at Adana airport it was awash with personnel – many of them volunteers – who’ve travelled from all over the country to try to help in what’s fast turning into Turkey’s worst natural disaster in nearly a century.

Many have relatives or friends they’re still trying to reach in the multiple towns and villages affected.

I was with an Istanbul-based doctor earlier as she frantically tried to telephone colleagues in Hatay, believed to be one of the worst-affected areas and near the Syrian border.

“We can’t reach them,” she said, “we are really concerned”.

At least two hospitals are thought to have crumbled in Hatay as the earthquakes ripped through this area.

Worried people have been glued to television and radio reports and watched in horror as the number of fatalities rose with every hour. Forty-five nations have already offered help.

Turkey is going to need every last one of them.

Reaching those affected over the border in Syria is going to be exceedingly complicated.

Many living along the Turkish border have already been displaced multiple times already.

In a region so badly hit by war and poverty for more than a decade, this area is uniquely vulnerable and unable to cope with a disaster of this magnitude.

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