Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey. It is night, but the cranes continue to remove rubble from collapsed buildings, hoping, increasingly fragile, to find someone alive. The barrier of 15,000 deaths from Monday’s earthquake, which also sowed death in Syria, has already been exceeded. The UN fears that the final figure will exceed 20,000.
In Nurdagi, a devastated town just ten kilometers from the epicenter, families are beginning to accept the unacceptable, that their loved ones are most likely no longer alive.
Serhan has reached the place where his grandparents and cousins lived. “Everyone is still under the ruins. We only wait for their bodies, their corpses”he says sadly.
“My aunt and cousin are still somewhere under the buildings -says Samet, another neighbor of Nurdagi-. We have no hope. If we had found them last night, there would have been a chance. But now it’s too cold.”
The movement of excavators and heavy vehicles is constant.
A group of women and children are by a bonfire. They’ve been on the street since Monday. They have nothing left.
The WHO has called for essential services to be restored as soon as possible in Turkey and Syria to avoid a health crisis that could have more serious consequences than the earthquake itself.