Turkey Earthquake Scale Of Disaster

Rescue workers in Turkey and Syria are battling inclement weather and logistical hurdles in a race to find survivors buried under the rubble. The combined death toll from Monday’s earthquakes has surpassed 21,000, and the disaster has left thousands of people homeless and in need of urgent shelter and aid.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has described the quakes as the “disaster of the century.” In Turkey, more than 100,000 people — including soldiers, police officers, firefighters and NGO workers — have been called into action…

Here’s the latest on the aftermath of the earthquakes:

1. Key developments

• The death toll in Turkey and Syria has crossed 21,000. In Turkey, there were at least 18,342 dead and more than 74,242 injured, the country’s disaster management authority said Friday. In government-controlled Syria, state media reported 1,347 deaths and 2,295 injured. In rebel-held northwest Syria, rescue workers said more than 2,037 people had been killed and 2,950 were injured. The toll is still expected to rise.
  
• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited Aleppo in his first public visit to the disaster zone since the quakes, according to his office. Photos showed the Syrian leader and his wife, Asma al-Assad, meeting with patients at a hospital in the city, where rescue operations are ongoing.
  
• The first U.N. aid convoy since the quakes entered northwest Syria from Turkeyon Thursday, crossing into a rebel-held enclave that was already facing a humanitarian crisis. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said damaged roads were complicating relief distribution there. Aid efforts in the region have been hampered by the effects of the war that divided the country into government and opposition control.
  
• Satellite images from Maxar Technologies showed extensive damage to infrastructure in southern Turkey and northwest Syria. The quakes destroyed grain silos, cracked an airport runway, and collapsed roads and highways, images from the U.S.-based firm show.

2. Aid efforts

• Countries from around the world are ramping up efforts to deliver aid to Syria, where the government is under Western sanctions and access to the rebel-held region is restricted. France on Thursday announced more than $12.9 million in emergency aid to Syria, which will be distributed to NGOs working with the United Nations.
  
• The United States announced $85 million in urgent humanitarian assistance for the two countries. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday that teams from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were working on the ground in Turkey.
  
• Britain is supporting Syrian civil defense workers known as the White Helmets, which operate outside government control in northwest Syria, and announced an additional $3.6 million in aid to the group Friday. Germany said it would provide some $26.9 million in funding to the U.N. Humanitarian Affairs agency to help people in Syria.
  
• The U.S. Treasury granted a license to all transactions related to earthquake relief in Syria, which would otherwise have run afoul of existing sanctions against the government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, it said Thursday.

3. Rescue operations

• After a 20-hour operation, rescuers pulled a woman and her 6-year-old daughter alive from under a collapsed house in Kahramanmaras, Turkey. German and British aid agencies said the mother and child were in danger of freezing to death. The groups used heavy equipment and manually moved rubble to create a tunnel for the rescue, which ended after midnight Thursday.
  
• A 6-month-old baby in the city of Adiyaman was saved by Turkish volunteers about 93 miles from the epicenter near Gaziantep in the country’s southeast, the regional governor, Tuncay Sonel, shared on Twitter.
  
• Here’s how to help. The Post has compiled a list of international groups with on-the-ground response teams, plus tips on donating to those in need.
  

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