A week after catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, the focus is shifting to misery — and anger among survivors.
As time goes on and the death toll steadily rises in Turkey and Syria from the massive earthquakes a week ago — and with hopes of finding people alive amid the rubble all but gone — homeless, grief-stricken and, in many instances, injured survivors struggle mightily in frigid temperatures amid theThe combined death toll was nearing 36,000 in Turkey and government- and rebel-held parts of Syria, authorities said.
During a visit to Aleppo in northern Syria Monday, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffith said the rescue phase is"coming to a close" and attention is now turning to providing food, shelter, food, schooling and psychosocial care, according to the Reuters news service.in southeastern Turkey and neighboring northern Syria, Zafer Mahmut Boncuk's apartment building collapsed. He discovered his 75-year-old mother was still alive - but pinned under the wreckage.
"What would happen if it was your own mother, dear Recep Tayyip Erdogan? What happened to being a world leader? Where are you? Where?" he screamed. Others, particularly in southern Hatay province near the Syrian border, say Erdogan's government was late in delivering assistance to the hardest-hit region for what they suspect are both political and religious reasons.
Over 1,000 residents had been in the 12-story building when the quake struck, according to relatives watching the recovery effort. They said hundreds were still inside but complained the effort to free them had been slow and not serious. When Zafer Mahmut Boncuk's apartment building collapsed, she and others in Antakya expressed the belief that the presence of a large minority of Alevis - an Anatolian Islamic community that differs from Sunni and Shia Islam and Alawites in Syria - had made them a low priority for the government. Traditionally, few Alevis vote for Erdogan's ruling party. There was no evidence, however, that the region was overlooked for sectarian reasons.
In multiethnic southern Turkey, other tensions are rising. Some expressed frustration that Syrian refugees who fled to the region from their devastating civil war are burdening the sparse welfare system and competing for resources with Turkish people.Two German aid groups and the Austrian Armed Forces temporarily interrupted their rescue work in the Hatay region citing fears for the safety of their staff.
In Atareb, a town that Syrian rebels still hold after years of fighting government troops, survivors dug through the debris of their homes Sunday, picking up the remnants of their shattered lives and looking for ways to heal after the latest in a series of humanitarian disasters to hit the war-battered area.
"We are licking our own wounds," said Hekmat Hamoud, who had been displaced twice by Syria's ongoing conflict before finding himself trapped for hours beneath rubble. "We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria. They rightly feel abandoned," he said."My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can."
Critics of the government of President Bashar Assad say aid funneled through government-held areas in Syria faces bureaucracy and the risk that authorities will misappropriate or divert the aid to support people close to the government.
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