JHE SILENCES is the worst. Every quarter of an hour, bulldozers and cranes digging up mounds of debris stop working, hoping to hear the cries of the people trapped below. There are not any. Instead, there are the sobs and prayers of relatives, friends and fellow onlookers gathered below. The rubble is all that remains of a 14-storey building in Adana, a city of 1.8 million people in southern Turkey. A few hundred meters further on, the scene repeats itself. Another crowd, another building reduced to a mound of concrete pancakes.
The extent of the devastation caused by the twin 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 remains unknown. By February 7, the death toll had reached 4,500 in Turkey alone. In Syria, by late afternoon, it had exceeded 1,700. These numbers are set to increase further, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Some 6,000 buildings, including apartment blocks like those in Adana, collapsed as a result of the quake, Turkish officials say. Ovgun Ahmet Ercan, an earthquake expert, estimates that 180,000 or more people could be trapped under the rubble, almost all dead. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared a state of emergency in the ten earthquake-hit provinces, home to 13 million people.
A hundred kilometers southeast of Adana, the scenes are even more apocalyptic. A fire ravages the port of Iskenderun, a city on the Mediterranean coast, swallowing up shipping containers one after another and bathing the surrounding mountains in black smoke. The firefighters are nowhere to be found. A gas station fell off the edge of a cliff. White tents housing those displaced by the earthquake sprout on the outskirts of towns.
Further south, Antakya, a city of 400,000 inhabitants which succeeds ancient Antioch, looks like a city ravaged by years of war. In the city center, virtually all other buildings were destroyed. Bent over and covered in deep cracks, dozens of other houses appear to be on the verge of collapse. Corpses pulled from the rubble, wrapped in rugs or blankets, line the main artery, alongside the wounded, waiting for ambulances. Volunteers and municipal employees distribute meals to hundreds of residents. A corpulent man, seriously injured and lying on the sidewalk, struggles to remain conscious. “Stay with me,” yells his brother. “We still have so much to do together.” Military helicopters fly overhead.
Rescue teams seem overwhelmed. Outside a collapsed house, an elderly woman begs the soldiers to use a bulldozer to find her son, trapped inside. Troops attempt to remove debris with their hands, explaining that their heavy equipment is being used to search for survivors. “Auntie, we have to make some tough choices,” said one. “There are people screaming for help under the building across the street, and your son is probably dead.” At the end of the street, a bulldozer clears the rubble of another destroyed house. A pair of gray feet protrude from below.
In Syria, the 1,700 deaths reported so far are roughly split between Idlib, a rebel-held province in the northwest, and areas controlled by Bashar al-Assad’s regime. In the northwest, according to the United Nations, at least 224 buildings were destroyed and 325 damaged. The final tally will likely be much higher. Most people in Idlib are displaced from other parts of Syria and live in tents or makeshift houses. Eyewitnesses say the earthquake devastated entire villages.
The White Helmets, a civil defense group working in the province, were unfortunately well prepared to respond: they spent years pulling people out of the ruins after Syrian and Russian airstrikes. But they are stretched, with perhaps 3,000 volunteers in a region of more than 4 million people. Even when they reach the injured, a spokesperson for the group says they struggle to provide care. In Idlib, Russia and Syria have a history of bombing hospitals (a war crime), leaving the province with little medical infrastructure.
The Turkish army, which has small bases across Idlib, sent rescue teams. Outside support is likely to be slow to arrive, both because the area is controlled by rebel groups and because it is hard to reach. Turkey is the lifeline of Idlib. Some 2.7 million people in the province depend on international aid trucked in across the border. The deliveries are taking place without the consent of the Assad regime, under a UN Security Council resolution first passed in 2014. Since 2020, however, the resolution only allows shipments via a only border crossing, called Bab al-Hawa. The earthquake made it unusable. The airport near Antakya, the nearest town to Bab al-Hawa, is closed due to runway damage. The roads leading to the border are also impassable, as are those between Antakya and Gaziantep, the nearest airport.
February 7e the UN announced that cross-border aid had been halted. Madevi Sun-Suon, spokeswoman for the UN humanitarian aid agency, said it was unclear when it might resume. This will slow down any earthquake relief efforts. It also portends shortages of food, medicine and other basics for millions of people.
The situation is no better in territory held by the regime. The toll seems worse in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, but there is also considerable damage in Hama, a province to the south, and in Latakia, on the coast. The latter is particularly sensitive for the regime: it is the historic home of the Assad family and it remained largely loyal throughout the civil war.
The regime has not weathered previous crises well. When wildfires swept through western Syria in 2020 and burned more than 30,000 hectares of land, the state struggled to extinguish them. During the pandemic, it released wildly inaccurate case counts. It will struggle to send supplies to hard-hit areas: fuel is already scarce across Syria, due to a shortage of hard currency.
Mr. Assad, whose regime is under international sanctions, has few friends. He also has a habit of rejecting offers of help or stealing foreign aid. A few countries offered their support. Russia, which has a military presence in Syria, said its soldiers would help clean up the rubble. The United Arab Emirates sent humanitarian aid by cargo plane. Algeria, Egypt and Iran have also promised to help. But few of these countries are willing and able to send much aid. The damage caused by the earthquake will mean more misery in a country already scarred by a decade of war.
In Turkey, frustration is setting in, as is the feeling that parts of the country have been abandoned. The government claims to have deployed 18,000 gendarmes and 10,000 police officers in the disaster areas. Hundreds of ambulances, police and army trucks invade the road to Antakya. Some soldiers have been redeployed from Turkish-occupied areas in Syria. But the rescue effort appears to rely mostly on volunteers, who flocked to the quake zone from all over Turkey. “They don’t have enough equipment,” said a man sitting outside the rubble of his mother’s house in Antakya, referring to Turkey’s disaster management agency. “They can’t deal with this.” ■
