A series of earthquakes has shaken southeastern Turkey and northern Syria this morning, claiming the lives of more than five hundred people, according to a first balance. Only in Turkey there are 284 deaths and 2,323 injuries, according to Vice President Fuat Oktay, who estimates the number of buildings that have collapsed at 1,710. There would therefore be thousands of victims trapped under the rubble, which the rescue teams are trying to access. Meanwhile, in Syria, the death toll would be at least 427, as of early morning, the majority in northwestern provinces such as Aleppo, Hama and Latakia.
Salvage efforts are in full swing in ten Turkish provinces and the scope of destruction is feared to be much greater. The first images of collapsed buildings in cities like Diyarbakir raise fears of a much more terrible balance. The earthquake measuring between 7.4 and 7.9 degrees on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in southeastern Turkey, has also been felt in Lebanon, Cyprus or Cairo. In Damascus, many people took to the streets at 4:17 in the morning, terrified by the tremors.
In the Turkish province of Urfa, the collapse of 19 buildings has been reported, with a preliminary balance of 18 deaths. In Osmaniye there is talk of 34 collapsed buildings and 7 deaths. In Malatya, some 130 buildings were destroyed, leaving a hundred injured and 23 dead, in Adiyaman 28 deaths have been recorded so far, to which six deaths are added in Diyarbakir, 250 kilometers east of the epicenter.
From this city with a Kurdish population, Erhan tells La Vanguardia his abrupt awakening: "Almost at the same time I noticed the tremors and the screams of a man from the street. Many people from my building and from nearby buildings have run down the stairs Then I learned that a building near the school where I work in Baglar has collapsed."
However, data on the two most affected provinces, Kahramanmaras (the epicenter of the earthquake) and Gaziantep, are still scarce, which raises fears that we are facing the worst earthquake in Turkey since at least Izmit in 1999, which left thousands of dead. From Gaziantep, a photographer contacted by LaVanguardia, Samer, confesses to being "in the street in his pajamas", at three degrees of temperature, unable to return to his house, since the building has partially collapsed.
The Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, has issued the grade 4 state of alarm, which includes the request for international aid. An additional difficulty for the rescue operations is that the authorities have been forced to close the airports in the most affected areas, in Kahramanmaras, Gaziantep and Hatay. In any case, Russia says it has two planes with a hundred rescuers ready for takeoff, while Azerbaijan has already sent a team of more than two hundred.
From Turkey itself, 950 volunteers have concentrated in the airports of Istanbul and 450 in Antalya, to be sent to the emergency zone, registering appreciable although lower numbers in other cities. More worrisome is the situation in Syria, due to the weakness of the state, after twelve years of war and sanctions. In cities like Aleppo, only partially rebuilt, new buildings kept crumbling by mid-morning.
The affected area extends over more than 500 kilometers in southern Anatolia, where temperatures below zero and snowfall were recorded last night.
Italy, for its part, has activated the tsunami alert.
