Turkey-Syria quake death toll surpasses 22,000 amid struggle to get aid to Syria

Residents retrieve an injured man from the rubble of a collapsed building following an earthquake in the town of Jindayris, in the countryside of Syria's northwestern city of Afrin in the rebel-held part of Aleppo province, on February 6, 2023. Hundreds have been reportedly killed in north Syria after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that originated in Turkey and was felt across neighbouring countries. Rami al SAYED / AFP

The death toll in Turkey and Syria from this week’s catastrophic earthquake surpassed 22,000 on Friday as relief organizations struggled to overcome a host of political obstacles and deliver aid to hard-hit northwestern Syria.

The second aid convoy in two days reached an enclave of opposition-held territory in Syria on Friday, loaded with food, clothes and blankets as the leaders of both Turkey and Syria visited the earthquake zones in their countries to console survivors.

The effort to provide aid to millions of people across both countries has been strained by bitter cold, power outages and shortages of fuel, trucks and other essential supplies and by the many constraints posed by a continuing state of war and territorial division inside Syria.

The problem of delivering aid is much more acute in Syria than Turkey because 12 years of civil war have left the country carved up into several zones under the control of different authorities. The earthquake hit hardest in two of those zones, one controlled by the government of the authoritarian president, Bashar Assad, and the other controlled by opposition forces.

Syria has received far less aid than Turkey since the earthquake hit, in part because the border crossing used Thursday, known as Bab al-Hawa, is the only one to allow United Nations aid to reach the opposition-held region in northwestern Syria. Millions have also been displaced by the yearslong civil war, and the humanitarian challenges were enormous even before this earthquake.

On Thursday, the first significant delivery of aid crossed into the opposition-held region — six trucks carrying shelter material and nonfood items. The International Organization for Migration said the initial shipment could meet the needs of “at least 5,000 people.”

Fourteen more trucks, laden with food and shelter materials, entered the same area Friday. But it was a small consolation to the war-ravaged enclave, home to millions of Syrians who have been displaced by more than a decade of fighting. Hundreds of thousands have already watched homes or family members vanish beneath the rubble in a matter of days.

On the government-controlled side of the earthquake zone, Assad made his first visit to survivors in the city of Aleppo, which has been devastated by the quake.

And in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the hard-hit province of Adiyaman and tried to console victims.

“I know very well that words are meaningless to describe our pain,” he said. “Sadly, the death toll increased to 18,991,” he added. In Syria, the death toll neared 3,400, and in both countries, those numbers have been steadily climbing since the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck early Monday morning.

This has now become Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939 and one of the deadliest worldwide in decades.

In many of the hardest-hit areas in the quake zone, a chaotic atmosphere prevailed. Turkey has imposed a three-month state of emergency in 10 provinces affected.

In the city of Antakya in western Turkey’s hard-hit Hatay province, the ancient old town has entirely collapsed, traffic has been bumper-to-bumper for days now, and the air is acrid from the smoke of bonfires from the many people who have been sleeping and living for days out in the open or in their cars trying to stay warm. Thousands more are sheltering in white tents in the shadow of a soccer stadium.

Ambulances and trucks bringing aid were arriving nonstop in the city.

The U.N. humanitarian chief said Friday that he was on his way to visit parts of Turkey and Syria most devastated by the quake. The official, Martin Griffiths, will visit the cities of Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, along with Gaziantep in Turkey, over the weekend, according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

“More help is on the way, but much more, much more is needed,” Guterres told reporters Thursday.

He said the greatest obstacle for delivering aid to Syria was access.

Relief organizations say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are crucial for finding survivors. Once that window closes, as it already has in Turkey and Syria, the medical burden typically shifts from disaster sites to medical facilities, said Yasushi Nakajima, an expert on disaster risk management at Tokyo Metropolitan Hiroo Hospital in Japan.

The United Nations will ask the Security Council for authorization to expand aid to Syria, a U.N. spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said, adding that the U.N. was also negotiating with Syria’s government to deliver more humanitarian aid to opposition-held areas in the northwest.

Syria’s government has said that U.S. sanctions against the country have exacerbated the humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquake. Those sanctions do not target humanitarian aid.

On Thursday, the State Department doubled down on its refusal to lift sanctions on Syria, saying that humanitarian aid efforts were not impeded by the policy. It also repeated a demand that Assad’s authoritarian government open more border crossings for aid delivery.

As the humanitarian crisis builds, the possibility of further seismic activity hangs over the region. Dozens of earthquakes have been recorded in Turkey this week, including a few Friday morning. Experts say that large aftershocks pose potential risks to the structural integrity of partly collapsed structures in the earthquake zone.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Cora Engelbrecht and Mike Ives